I had a very different blog post in mind for this episode of Words on Wednesdays. Media Literacy Week begins on October 26th. We need time to stop and consider all of the mediated forms through which we and our students take in information. We briefly touched on online reading last week with the Wikipedia and lateral reading post. Questioning who is behind the information and what is their perspective or purpose is not something to be glossed over. We send our students out to the internet to gather information and synthesize, sometimes confirm ideas. We must equip them with the tools to be intentional as they decide the value of the information in a source. Media Literacy Week causes us to consider sources beyond the written word and includes images, videos, podcasts, and more.
These mediated forms can be a quick and vital source of information and ideas. They can be just as easily altered bringing us back to tracing the podcast clip to the original source learning its original intent. I will talk about all of that in more depth in a future post, I mean consider the War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1939. We shake our heads in wonder as we learn that most of the eastern seaboard was prepared for a Martian invasion. How were they taken in so easily by a broadcast which self-identified as a dramatic reading? I'm not so certain we can sit in judgment as we are taken in by media edited for the purposes of evoking emotion and confirming bias daily. Let's leave that discussion for another day. While these ideas of media literacy and racism in Children's classics seem unrelated, in fact, both play a role as contributors to implicit bias.
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee are some of the most familiar, beloved, and problematic books with racial stereotypes found in their pages.
All media messages that show stereotypical and racist behaviors build an implicit response in the unconscious mind. Developed over a lifetime, the subtle message is equally as toxic as those that are more obvious. Unflattering, inaccurate, and stereotypical depictions of race, gender, age, and ability in children's books can be almost more damaging than other forms of media. My inspiration for writing this week came across my desk (or should I say email) earlier this week relative to an online opportunity to learn about and discuss problematic children's classics. Among these are well-loved series like Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and for older readers To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. These are some of the most familiar, beloved, and problematic books with racial stereotypes found in their pages. Words like savages and Injuns are peppered throughout Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. In fact, when the Association of Library Service to Children named a legacy award in her honor in 1953, they first had to contend with a complaint about the line in her book that said the move west was to find a land where “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” Harper, the publisher, changed the word people to settlers and the award was named for Wilder. That is until recently when her name was removed by ALSC and the honor is now called the Children's Literature Legacy Award. But for nearly sixty years, her name and the award were part of the ALA landscape and the decision-makers of the organization did not seem to find the Wilder books problematic until recently.
As many of you know, about twenty years ago I was a librarian at the then newly opened Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. The museum housed a research library for scholars, tribal members, and museum staff. I started my tenure at the museum in the Children's Library. Defining the mission and purpose of this collection was challenging from the very beginning as you can imagine and as eye-opening as any work in collection development had ever been for me. I arrived at the museum from a school in New Jersey with a diverse population of 700 students, yet this was the first time I had to consider, in a meaningful way, the harm books with stereotypes and racist language could do. And I learned very quickly that I must not speak for the Mashantucket Pequot people in terms of the mission of the library and the decision to collect children's literature with images and ideas that perpetuated stereotypes.
All media messages that show stereotypical and racist behaviors build an implicit response in the unconscious mind.
Books like the Little House series were shelved in the "Historic Collection" reserved for children's literature scholars who wanted to study the evolution of imagery and stories relative to Indigenous people. The collection to which we directed educators and other visitors to the museum was comprised of books written by Indigenous People and were recommended by the American Indian Library Association, Oyate, Debbie Reese, and more contemporary Indigenous publishers and reviewers. Still, I felt a bit like an imposter as I tried to explain to people why we were collecting books that were harmful in their dominant culture perspective of Indigenous People. While we were adding books that had been written fifty or one hundred years prior, we were also collecting books like My Heart is on the Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl, Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania, 1880 by Ann Rinaldi. Written by a non-native author and glossing over the horrors of the Indian Boarding School experience where the mission was to "kill the Indian, save the child," this book was part of Scholastic's Dear America Series. We used this book as the basis for evaluation workshops we created and offered to teachers to help them consider and replace books that were as dangerous as this one.
So how does this walk down memory lane answer the question for us today about what to do with classic children's literature that by our anti-racist stance should not be in a collection of books for young people? There are those who argue that to weed these from the collection is a form of censorship, to label them in some way with a cautionary message or symbol could also be problematic and fall into the category of restricting access. As a department, we rarely take a book out of the hands of students but we do try to guide them in their choices to find a satisfying and developmentally manageable book. We also must acknowledge that as librarians, being neutral in our collection analysis may not always be possible. We must consider the developmental and emotional levels of the students and the faculty as our patron group along with the goals and mission of the school. When do we say that we no longer have a copy of Little House on the Prairie to loan out should a student ask for it because their parent or grandparent read it and loved it? Is it time to take Atticus Finch off the shelves of the Upper School Library or should we keep it hoping that the next young reader will be discerning enough to challenge the harmful stereotypical images in the book even as they embrace the character of Scout?
I don't have all of the answers to these questions but I would guess as part of our library mission statement that includes equity, access, literacy, and inclusion, maybe we should add "first do no harm."
Resources:
Little House, Big Problem: What To Do with “Classic” Books That Are Also Racist. SLJ.