Illustrators of a Culturally Diverse Group

Multiculturalism

There are many ways to define "multiculturalism." When I use the term, I'm thinking of three distinct aspects:

1. Multiculturalism is a systematic critique of the idea of Western-ness.

   Much of the time the dominant culture is invisible to us. We are unaware of the social mores, shared meanings, and practices that shape how we live. In the United States, dominant culture is Western in its makeup, shaped by centuries of Western European and North American sensibilities.

   For example, in the West, a woman wearing a red dress, especially if it is in the evening, suggests a certain provocative, sexual energy. You may recall late in the movie Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler is very upset with his wife Scarlett and her obsession with another man. They are to go to a party and Rhett angrily demands Scarlet wear a red dress to signal to the community what kind of woman Rhett thinks Scarlet is -- promiscuous. However, in some non-Western cultures, a woman wearing red means something very different. In West Africa, red is a color of strength and is often worn by adult women who manage the stalls in the market. In some parts of East Asia, red is considered a sign of "good luck" and is the color of the traditional wedding dress -- again, a very different meaning from the West.

   For picturebooks this can play out in many different ways. One way is the use of color. Picturebooks drawn by artists from other parts of the world may not look "right" to us. Depending upon your background, Susan Guevara's illustrations for Chato and the Party Animals may appear shocking or if you are accustomed to a color scheme similar to Guevara's, you may find The True Story of the Three Little Pigs rather bland with its emphasis on muted browns and other earth tones.

2. Multiculturalism is the challenge of living peacefully with each other in a world of difference.

   The first point suggests that there are many ways to live a good human life. The second point is about living that good human life without oppressing those who live differently. We'll look more closely at this point in the next lesson when we consider how different human races and ethnic groups can come to hold artistic symbolism. This point usually is most significant for the content of the picturebook. Books such as Daddy's Roommate (about a boy whose father is gay), Nappy Hair (an African American girl's celebration of her hair), The Middle Passage (a powerful, wordless picturebook that graphically tells the story of the slave trade), The House that Crack Built (a play based on "The House that Jack Built," but describes a crack house in an urban neighborhood), and Flossie and the Fox (a kind of Red Riding Hood story with a big twist that is told in a rural Tennessee, African American dialect) may challenge our sensibilities as to what is "normal" or "good" or "right" or "proper."

3. Multiculturalism is a reform movement based upon equity and justice for all.

   This point takes multiculturalism out into the world and challenges each of us to consider how our lives and the lives of others compare to the promise of justice for all people.

   It's something of a cliché to explain multicultural issues in children's literature as"mirrors" and "windows." Even so, there is something to this metaphor worth exploring.

   "Mirrors" means that all children want to see themselves in books. All children want to know that the experiences they have are worthy of being in books, and that books can be about children who are like them. And all children want these portrayals to be done with respect.

   This plays out in two ways with children's books. One is the building of a canon of books that spans the range of cultures from which children come. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to find children's books in the United States that were about children who weren't white. Even after the 1960s, the numbers of books about Hispanic Americans, Black Americans, or any other cultural minority was not close to representative of the number of children who came from cultural minority groups.

   The other way is through image building. If girls never see active female characters in books, if female characters are always deferring to males, it transmits an image, an idea of what it means to be female. There's a reason the Barbie doll looks the way it does (and the way Barbie looks resembles no actual living female across the whole history of humanity!).  This connects with the earlier statement about how portrayals must be done with respect.