Even Katie Leung of Harry Potter fame, arguably the most famous British Chinese actor we have, recently expressed frustration at how limiting her roles are. ‘More and more when I see a script that requires a Chinese accent of any kind, I flinch a little bit,’ she said, in an interview with the Herald on Sunday.
News coverage, rare though it is, is hardly better, going between the extremes of criminality or some comment on the model minority story, usually to do with education.
We’re not seen as human, because we never get to be complex individuals. Our defining characteristic is generally our foreignness. Even news reports about education carry an undertone of fear of a culturally alien other and of being usurped, both here and internationally. Being a model minority is code for being on perpetual probation. Hostility towards the ‘yellow peril’ is never far from the surface.
It’s easy to cling to a position of privilege when it acts as protection from the ever-present danger of being seen as outsiders, but playing to the myth of the ‘good immigrant’ does not lead to real equality, or even acceptance. Breaking out of the ‘model minority’ box and looking beyond that status towards humanity and freedom is the long game.
15 ‘Chinese diaspora: Britain’, BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4304845.stm
16 ‘Are strict Chinese mothers the best?’ BBC News. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12249215
17 Louise Archer and Becky Francis, Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement in Schools: Race, gender, class and ‘success’, (Routledge, 2006), 44.
18 All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Chinese in Britain, Chinese Community and Policing Report 2013, (British China Project), 16.
19 Chinese Community and Policing Report 2013.
20 ‘Girlfriend blames police as ‘racist killers jailed’, The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/dec/17/ukcrime.race
21 ‘Takeaway murder teenagers named’, BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/4424766.stm
22 Sue Adamson et al, Hidden from public view? Racism against the UK Chinese population, Min Quan report, (The Monitoring Group, 2009).
23 Sue Adamson et al, Hidden from public view?
24 Lucinda Platt, ‘Inequality within Ethnic Groups’, JRF Programme: Poverty and Ethnicity, (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2011), 14.
25 ‘Britain has major problems – racism isn’t one of them’, The Spectator. http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/02/how-racist-is-britain/
26 Yaojun Li, Fiona Devine, Anthony Heath, ‘Equality Group Inequalities in Education, Earnings and Employment’, (Equality and Human Rights Commission, (2008), Executive summary, iii.
‘You Can’t Say That! Stories Have To Be About White People’
Darren Chetty
A few years ago, I taught a Year 2 class in east London. I had built up a good bank of multicultural picture books and resources and shared these with the class whenever seemed appropriate. When it came time for the class to write their own stories, I suggested that they used the name of someone in their family for their protagonist. I wanted them to draw on their own backgrounds, but was worried about ‘making an issue of race’. When it came to sharing their stories, I noticed only one boy had acted upon my suggestion, naming his main character after his uncle. He had recently arrived from Nigeria and was eager to read his story to the class. However, when he read out the protagonist’s name another boy, who was born in Britain and identified as Congolese, interrupted him. ‘You can’t do that!’ he said. ‘Stories have to be about white people.’
Let me back up for a second.
I’ve spent almost two decades teaching children aged between four and 11, in English primary schools that serve multiracial, multicultural, multifaith communities. Over that time, I have come to notice that whenever children are asked to write a story in school, children of colour27 will write a story featuring characters with ‘traditional’ English names who speak English as a first language. This has been the case across the schools I have taught in with barely an exception. Yet, I don’t recall it ever being discussed by teachers in these schools or on any of the courses on writing that I attended over the years.
My own attempts to open up conversations about what I have noticed have had some success but have also been met with angry responses from a loud minority of teachers. In one case, I recall being asked, ‘Why are you making an issue of race when children are colour-blind?’
The question contains an assumption, namely that children are ‘colour-blind’. I think this might stem from a belief that children do not attach any significance to racialised identities, particularly in twenty-first-century multi-ethnic urban classrooms, because we inhabit a post-racial world. If children were writing stories where the race28 of characters was varied and random, there might be some merit in claiming that children are colour-blind. However, even the strongest advocates of racial colour-blindness do not argue that all people are white … and English. They argue that race no longer matters. If that’s true, why are young children of colour and young white children writing exclusively about white characters?
I’m confident the boy who said that stories had to be about white people was being sincere and indeed, in the ensuing class discussion there was a fair bit of uncertainty about who could and couldn’t be in stories. I was surprised and confused by this. Why did my students without fail write stories about children from very different backgrounds to themselves? And why were these characters always white? Why hadn’t my efforts to offer a culturally diverse reading diet made clear to them that stories could be about absolutely anyone?
At the time, I don’t think I realised what I was up against.
If you are a teacher, try this with your class. Ask them to write down their favourite 25 children’s book characters. Then ask them to count how many of those characters are white (and look for other patterns too, such as gender and disability). If you’re not a teacher, ask any child you know. Or maybe ask the staff in a bookshop to show you the picture-books with a black boy, or a mixed-race girl or a Muslim child as the protagonist. I tried this once and received a lot of help in searching from a clearly panicked shopkeeper – but very few books.
Booksellers like Letterbox Library provide a service valued by many parents and teachers in going the extra mile to locate books featuring people traditionally under-represented in children’s literature. Of course, booksellers can only sell books that get published. And the stories I hear from people in publishing and from authors leads me to wonder if some UK publishers share the same confusion I observed in that Year 2 class. Namely, an uncertainty about the place of stories featuring people of colour and the place of people of colour in stories.
A South Asian author told me that she was advised to change her name for a book cover in order to broaden its appeal, and another writer was advised that unless they were writing an ‘issue’ book, their book-cover protagonist should not be black, as this would result in fewer copies being purchased. Whether or not such advice is based on evidence – do white book buyers really shy away from buying books because they feature black characters? – it seems that this concern with race and commercial viability certainly troubles this idea of ‘colour-blindness’ or ‘post-raciality’ in the UK.
Not only that, it means that, as a teacher, I have fewer books at my disposal to demonstrate to BAME children that stories can be about people like them.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls that the stories she wrote as a seven-year-old in Nigeria were based on the kinds of stories she read, featuring characters who were ‘white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples’. According to Adichie, this wasn’t just about experimentation or an active imagination, ‘because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.’29 We learn so many things from reading stories, including the conventions of stories suc
h as good versus evil, confronting our fears and that danger often lurks in the woods. The problem is that, when one of these conventions is that children in stories are white, English and middle-class, than you may come to learn that your own life does not qualify as subject material. Adichie describes this as ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ – a danger that extends to stories which, whilst appearing to be ‘diverse’, rely on stereotypes and thus limit the imagination.
Children’s literature professor Rudine Sims Bishop offers a useful metaphor for helping us think about what is at stake here. Whilst acknowledging that ‘good literature reaches across cultural and ethnic borders to touch us all as human’,30 she argues that books can act as both mirrors and windows for children. ‘Windows’ offer us a chance to look closely at a view of the world we may not have previously seen. Those windows might take us out to escapist fantasy or provide a view of lives we have not previously seen. These are notions familiar and vital to writers, teachers and those of us who care about stories. But Sims Bishop adds that books might also mirror our lives in some aspects and that children from the dominant culture tend to have books as mirrors whilst children who have been historically ‘ignored – or worse ridiculed’ do not, and that this communicates important messages about the extent to which ‘they are valued in the social context in which they are growing up’. Recognising that a window can be a barrier, Sims Bishop later added the idea of the sliding glass door as ‘a way to suggest that a book can offer … a lived experience for a reader’.31
It was a concern over the lack of stories that allow all children to see themselves in the fiction they read – books as mirrors – that motivated Verna Wilkins to establish Tamarind Books, first as an author and then also as a publisher. Wilkins recalls her son coming home with a self-portrait in which he had painted his face ‘bright pink’. She recalls the conversation:
‘Is this you?’ I asked feebly.
‘Yes,’ came the confident reply.
‘Are you that colour?’
‘No. The teacher gave out flesh colour to everyone!’
‘Oh. Fine. I have a lovely brown crayon and we can fix that right now.’
‘No!’ he said. ‘It has to be that colour. It’s for a book!’ 32
My classroom story is remarkably similar to Wilkins’s story of this conversation but took place over 20 years later. I certainly don’t want to diminish the huge impact that Tamarind has had on children’s publishing but I’m confident Wilkins would agree with me that there’s a need for more like her in children’s publishing, as campaigns like #WeNeedDiverseBooks are arguing. Wilkins made the decision to focus on books with everyday representations of black children rather than what she terms book about ‘issues’. Wilkins has good reasons for doing this but it does mean that stories like hers with her son, and mine with my class, which invite us to explore ideas around childhood, racism and the arts would probably not be published by Tamarind, however well-written.
I’ve written elsewhere about how the books that often are recommended as dealing in some way with racism do so through metaphor and animal allegories.33 There may well be benefits to this – not least the avoidance of further portrayals of children of colour as victims – but this also means its hard to find portrayals of children of colour thriving in a world where racism exists. A much-discussed example is J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series. The books are seen by many as arguing for inclusivity and tolerance, tackling challenging themes such as racial purity and oppression. These themes are explored through fantasy figures such as wizards, giants and elves. At the same time, amongst the teachers and pupils at Hogwarts, there are very few people of colour and no clear explanation of why that might be. So a story that has so much to say about racism on an allegorical level at the same time depicts people of colour as marginal without exploring their marginalisation.
Malorie Blackman has shown that compelling stories that do not shy away from racism can be written for children with her ‘Noughts and Crosses’ series, whilst also demonstrating that there are so many stories beyond racism to be told about children of colour. In 2014, in her role as the presiding Children’s Laureate, Blackman spoke out about how diversifying the characters in children’s literature would benefit all readers. In a piece for Sky News, which itself became a news story after she was misquoted in the original title, Blackman is quoted as saying,
‘You want to escape into fiction as well and read about other people, other cultures, other lives, other planets and so on. But I think there is a very significant message that goes out when you cannot see yourself at all in the books you are reading. I think it is saying “well, you may be here, but do you really belong?’’34
Clearly, not everyone agreed. However, despite receiving racist abuse online Blackman vowed not to be silenced, and mainstream newspapers ran stories about children’s literature, diversity and marginalisation.35
I don’t think such marginalisation is limited to children’s books. As well as books, the children I taught were learning about stories from film and television. One popular show amongst pupils I’ve taught over the years is set in the very area of England where we live. When it was launched in 1985, EastEnders was lauded for its inner-city realism and diversity.
Creator/producer Julia Smith declared that ‘We don’t make life, we reflect it.’ She also said, ‘We decided to go for a realistic, fairly outspoken type of drama which could encompass stories about homosexuality, rape, unemployment, racial prejudice, etc., in a believable context. Above all, we wanted realism.’36
In 2009, the BBC compiled a list of the 100 EastEnders’ characters with the most ‘doof doof’37 cliffhangers – an indication, albeit an imprecise one, of who has the main storyline. As the BBC website says, ‘Impact after all is the bedrock of the perfect cliffhanger.’38
According to the 2011 Census, inner east London boroughs have populations that are somewhere between 45–71 per cent BAME. So, how many of the top 50 most impactful characters in this programme, set in the East End of London and aiming for realism, were BAME?
None.
Many of the children I was teaching watched EastEnders. Given the chance they’d talk about current storylines. Perhaps, as well as learning about dramatic plotting they were learning that people who looked like them and their parents were ‘supporting cast’ not ‘lead roles’. Perhaps this again comes down to questions of audience … for whom are these stories produced? What do the creators assume, rightly or wrongly, about their audience?
In her essay Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison argues that ‘the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white’.39 Karen Sands O’Connor, a professor specialising in Black British children’s literature, says of West Indian writers who came to Britain, ‘In order to be writers, they had to tell their own stories; in order to be published authors, they had to do it in a way acceptable to their mostly white British audience.’40
So who is the reader for children’s writing in a classroom? I think that’s probably a complicated question – but in a very literal sense it is the teacher. Teachers read their students’ writing and teach them about the kind of things they hope or expect to see whilst reading.
After reflecting on my experience with my Year 2 class, the following year – whilst teaching Year 5 – I was emboldened to experiment. What would happen if for just one lesson I insisted they write about a character from a similar ethnic, religious and linguistic background as themselves – just as I sometimes insist they try to include a fronted adverbial, a moral dilemma or a tricolon?
First we discussed ourselves in terms of, amongst other things, language, family migration, physical appearance including skin and hair, religion, hobbies and clothes. Then I asked the children to write a character who was similar in some but not necessarily all of these categories. As I modelled this process for them, I realised that previously I too often defaulted to ‘traditional’ English names and white characters when writing in class. N
ow, I tried to draw on my own experience, creating composite characters from family members and applying some of the writing techniques we’d noted in our class reading.
Then they wrote. Clearly, many of them enjoyed the lesson and many produced their best piece of writing. Here are a couple of examples:
Bang! As I stormed to head teacher Mrs Paula’s office my head filled with fear. Fear of exclusion!
Mrs Paula was a short, slim, young white woman with red ruddy cheeks. She was a stern woman who hated disobedience and inappropriateness. As I stroked my black hair, my smooth lips crumpled and my creamy brown face turned red with worry.
Michael
Maryam Patel was a twelve-year-old girl, whose parents were Indian, but she was born in Britain. She was a fairly religious person. However, Maryam thought one does not have to wear a headscarf to be religious. She loved her red straight hair. Her hair was as red as blood. She had decided to dye her hair as she hated her dark brown hair. She loved football and the club she supported was Liverpool. One day I will play for the Liverpool women, she thought.
Nabila
I want to avoid making huge claims here. However, I do sense a greater emotional engagement with the story from the children and the beginnings of an authorial voice in both Michael’s dramatic first-person opening and Nabila’s character description. Nabila is not writing the ‘single story’ stereotype of Muslim girls. She is writing something far more interesting. There is genuine characterisation in the paragraph not just a short list of features, which I often encounter. More than that, there is some insight in this nine-year-old’s writing – and I think that is precisely because she is using her own life as inspiration for her creativity whilst drawing on her reading of fiction. Her descriptive paragraph comes after a lesson looking closely at descriptions by a range of children’s authors, which is where the idea of including the protagonist’s thought or principle as well as a simple physical description emerged. As her teacher, I tried to get her to focus on a range of structures for describing a character and then give her clear encouragement to draw on her own experiences and those of the people she knew well.
The Good Immigrant Page 10