IBAR[nja]W -- Topsys and Turveys
Aug. 19th, 2007 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleThis is another post for International Blog About Racism [Not Just A] Week. Partly because I'm not very good at keeping to a rigid schedule these days, and partly because I think it's important all year. Even if we were all wise, all learned, all enlightened, and so forth, it would still be important to keep talking about this.
She can read a little, and likes the little-kid books she can read herself. Sometimes adults read harder books to her, and sometimes she stumbles along with books that are a little too hard for her, asking for help with the hard words. Recently, she was reading a book that is mostly a picture book. Not a book of pictures telling a story, like for very young children, but a book of clever drawings showing off how clever they could be. I know her parents are very cautious, much more cautious than I would be, about protecting her from scary books that might give her nightmares. I wasn't thinking in terms of reading ahead to watch for anything inappropriate and protect her from it. I was startled by something I didn't know how to handle, myself, much less know how to teach a child about.
One page of the picture book had a rather stylized drawing of rabbits, over the caption:
Why do these scurrying, frightened hares come coursing through the vale?
Then when you turn the book over, the drawing turns into a picture of dogs, over the caption:
Because they know three hunting-dogs are close upon their trail
She admired the drawings, which were cleverly done. And she asked my help with unfamiliar words like "scurrying" and "coursing." I was happy to help. And so on to pages like
A hunter wandered through the wood in search of lurking prey
[over] But in a tree the wildcat hides until he went away
(The hunter's hat turned into the wildcat when she turned the picture over.)
I thought it was way too visual to really appeal to me, but it was kind of neat that she was enjoying it. Then she asked me to read her a caption she couldn't even start. When I looked at it, I couldn't make sense of it either.
Dah's sunthin' curus in my hat, -- it's movin' I declah.
The flip side was: Fer massy sakes! a manst 'us fog! Young Sambo put dot duh.
I tend to have problems reading dialect. That’s why I saw those captions as "not recognizable words," rather than "offensive stereotype mocking." I know there are ways to write in dialect without being offensive. There may even be ways to write in THAT dialect without being offensive, but I doubt this author was trying to be inoffensive. If I had been at all uncertain about whether the dialect was written to be nasty, (and I wasn't. The intent seemed clear to me as soon as I could parse the text) the picture of a dark-skinned monster with googly eyes would have convinced me.
I don't think I handled the situation well. I stalled and blithered and distracted her. Upon calm reflection, I know she is old enough to understand people being mean and making fun of how others talk--that's kindergarten social dynamics. It's not really complicated to explain that the author might have been trying to make a joke, but it wasn't funny, it was just mean. I didn't know if I should try to explain the racial context. It's important to my thinking that the author was making a racist joke, rather than just mocking southern accents, for instance. But is it important to a child who knows nothing about the context? Should it be?
Looking up the book online, I see that Peter Newell wrote it in 1894. The edition I saw smelled like it was printed in the 1950s. It was probably bought for one of this child's parents or aunts, at a time when the ambient consciousness had not been raised very far. It keeps being passed down to younger children by people who think the drawings are neat. The drawings are pretty neat, if a person likes that sort of thing at all. And most of them are inoffensive. There's just an important difference between "most" and "all." It's so easy to forget a page or two in the years between one child learning to read and the next.
She can read a little, and likes the little-kid books she can read herself. Sometimes adults read harder books to her, and sometimes she stumbles along with books that are a little too hard for her, asking for help with the hard words. Recently, she was reading a book that is mostly a picture book. Not a book of pictures telling a story, like for very young children, but a book of clever drawings showing off how clever they could be. I know her parents are very cautious, much more cautious than I would be, about protecting her from scary books that might give her nightmares. I wasn't thinking in terms of reading ahead to watch for anything inappropriate and protect her from it. I was startled by something I didn't know how to handle, myself, much less know how to teach a child about.
One page of the picture book had a rather stylized drawing of rabbits, over the caption:
Why do these scurrying, frightened hares come coursing through the vale?
Then when you turn the book over, the drawing turns into a picture of dogs, over the caption:
Because they know three hunting-dogs are close upon their trail
She admired the drawings, which were cleverly done. And she asked my help with unfamiliar words like "scurrying" and "coursing." I was happy to help. And so on to pages like
A hunter wandered through the wood in search of lurking prey
[over] But in a tree the wildcat hides until he went away
(The hunter's hat turned into the wildcat when she turned the picture over.)
I thought it was way too visual to really appeal to me, but it was kind of neat that she was enjoying it. Then she asked me to read her a caption she couldn't even start. When I looked at it, I couldn't make sense of it either.
Dah's sunthin' curus in my hat, -- it's movin' I declah.
The flip side was: Fer massy sakes! a manst 'us fog! Young Sambo put dot duh.
I tend to have problems reading dialect. That’s why I saw those captions as "not recognizable words," rather than "offensive stereotype mocking." I know there are ways to write in dialect without being offensive. There may even be ways to write in THAT dialect without being offensive, but I doubt this author was trying to be inoffensive. If I had been at all uncertain about whether the dialect was written to be nasty, (and I wasn't. The intent seemed clear to me as soon as I could parse the text) the picture of a dark-skinned monster with googly eyes would have convinced me.
I don't think I handled the situation well. I stalled and blithered and distracted her. Upon calm reflection, I know she is old enough to understand people being mean and making fun of how others talk--that's kindergarten social dynamics. It's not really complicated to explain that the author might have been trying to make a joke, but it wasn't funny, it was just mean. I didn't know if I should try to explain the racial context. It's important to my thinking that the author was making a racist joke, rather than just mocking southern accents, for instance. But is it important to a child who knows nothing about the context? Should it be?
Looking up the book online, I see that Peter Newell wrote it in 1894. The edition I saw smelled like it was printed in the 1950s. It was probably bought for one of this child's parents or aunts, at a time when the ambient consciousness had not been raised very far. It keeps being passed down to younger children by people who think the drawings are neat. The drawings are pretty neat, if a person likes that sort of thing at all. And most of them are inoffensive. There's just an important difference between "most" and "all." It's so easy to forget a page or two in the years between one child learning to read and the next.
