Writing to Transform the World at Its Root
Children’s books are literary texts and, as such, they are “expressions of the values and assumptions of a culture and a significant way of embedding readers in those values and assumptions—persuading them that they are in fact the readers that the texts imply.”2 The impact of living under the pressure of what bell hooks calls “an imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal culture”3 has nefarious consequences for black people. Surrounded by messages which depict blackness as negative, African Americans are victims of processes of shaming. At the crucial time of their early years, when human beings develop a sense of identity, literature can be used as “one of the tools to build images and concepts in the mind of children.”4 Consequently, African American children’s literature is instrumental in the process of encouraging “the African American child to feel a sense of value and self-pride.”5
bell hooks’s children’s books are blueprints for a happy life in blackness. If her intellectual contributions have blazed innovative trails in the history of African American letters, her children’s stories are even more significant since they are positive interventions aimed at delivering optimistic, hopeful, and reassuring countermessages and counternarratives to very young blacks. Happy to Be Nappy (1999), Be Boy Buzz (2002), Homemade Love (2002), and Skin Again (2004) nurture the soul of black children so that they can struggle against external and internal racism and the powerful machinery of black shaming.6
According to Chanta M. Haywood’s research, the origins of African American children’s literature date back as far as 1854, though much of its first samples have been overlooked by the critics since they were published in black periodicals and newspapers, such as the Christian Recorder. Among the early practitioners around the turn of the twentieth-century, mention must be made of Mrs. A. E. Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. DuBois.7 bell hooks’s career mirrors that of DuBois in that not only is she a writer of powerful essays and books but she too has shown her fierce interest in children. DuBois, as director of The Brownies’ Book, and Jessie R. Fauset, as its literary editor, had a program in mind which underpinned their publication: “To inform, educate, and politicize children and their parents and to showcase the achievements of people of color.”8 As Violet J. Harris explains, DuBois firmly believed that the achievement of these aims would result in “the creation of a personality…refined colored youth—young African American counterparts of the ‘race men’ and ‘race women’ of the early years of the twentieth century. Such youngsters revered education, exhibited personal and racial pride, and were committed to racial solidarity and uplift.”9 Similarly to DuBois’s periodical for children, hooks’s children’s books are profoundly political and are inspired by the urgency of her “militant spirit of racial uplift.”10
Harris provides a list of writers who have created culturally conscious literature: Lucille Clifton, Tom Feelings, Eloise Greenfield, Rosa Guy, Virginia Hamilton, Sharon Bell Mathis, Walter Dean Myers, the late John Steptoe, Mildred Taylor, Brenda Wilkinson, Angela Johnson, Patricia McKissack, Emily Moore, Joyce Carol Thomas, and Camille Yarbrough.11 To this list, however, the name of bell hooks must be added by its own right. In fact, the work done by hooks prior to her writing children’s literature must be considered as a manifesto which explains, interprets, and underpins her involvement in a seemingly minor genre. Her children’s stories comply with the requisites of culturally conscious literature, but what makes them outstanding is the fact that they are firmly anchored in her progressive and holistic educational and political theories. Far from being an innocent playful appendix to her main body of work, her children’s books are part and parcel of those reflections about what it means to be an African American in contemporary United States.
hooks’s corpus has traced the development of black nationalism, the drawbacks of racial integrationist policies, and the lack of motivation to continue militant antiracist resistance since the 1980s. She laments that “there are no critical avenues where any body of critically conscious antiracist readers review and critique this literature to see whether or not it undermines the self-esteem of black children. And there is so little literature aimed at black teen readers that almost any material is deemed acceptable by publishers.”12 Spurred by her profound sense of social and political commitment to education and the construction of a healthy concept of black self, hooks’s children’s books are literary counterattacks against the texts that are “antiblack or aggressively promoting dysfunction.”13 In fact, hooks’s point of departure in composing her children’s stories can be best understood if they are thought of as therapeutic devices. Hugh Crago’s article “Can Stories Heal?” is useful reading because it helps us grasp hooks’s personal concept of children’s literature, her attitude toward it, and the philosophical, social, and cultural foundations which buttress it. Thus, her children’s books fall under the vast umbrella of bibliotherapeutic texts or “therapeutic story-telling” as intervention devices into the contemporary African American reality of the United States.
According to Crago, “bibliotherapy is one of an enormous range of methods for helping human beings in distress.”14 He explains how preliterate children spontaneously compose songs, chants, monologues, and other forms of phatic expression, in imitation of adult talk, song, and story. In addition to this, when preferred texts are read again and again, they become, according to Crago, “potent shaping influences over the reader’s future self concept and life path.”15 This is what hooks’s children’s books are intended to become: potentiating devices.
Yet, because of the early age of the target readers of hooks’s books (from 5 to 8 years old), the presence of an adult reader/parents/surrogate parental figure is highly important, as he or she will become the mediator between the text and the child and the helper in the eliciting constructive self-help. Children will read these texts but the books will most probably be read to them. Then it stands to reason that adult readers (whether they are parents or surrogate parental figures) improve not only their literacy skills but also their critical consciousness skills so that they can become efficient readers to their children.16 Parents/adult readers become, then, mediators of meaning, decoders of the cultural and ideological content of a seemingly innocent neutral text. D. L. Chapman underlines the fact that parents must learn the importance of involving their children in book-reading interactions and recognize that “the parent holds the key to unlocking the meaning represented by the text.”17 Such as it is, reading these books aloud to children can become what Carol D. Lee calls a “routine practice…within the cultural life of communities that schools can draw upon to assist students in constructing concepts in a given domain the schools seek to teach.” According to Lee, “the challenge is to find that powerful match between the contours of the knowledge that is socially constructed in the community as well as the family context and those constructs introduced in the context of the classroom.”18 Because of the interactive nature of knowledge, parents/ adult readers can actually help bridge the gap between the knowledge structures taught in school and the knowledge structures constructed within nonschool social settings in a process which Lee describes as a “cross-fertilization of concepts and knowledge.”19 In this same line, Daniel D. Hade explains, “accounting for how race, class, and gender mean in children’s stories cannot be a task just for the critic.”20 Sharing Peter Hollindale’s opinion in his “Ideology and the Children’s Book,” Hade states that “the task of adults is to teach children how to read, so that to the limits of each child’s capacity, children will not be at the mercy of what they read. Perhaps if children can read the ideology in their books, they will be able to read it in other areas of their lives.”21 Adult readers must then teach black children how to read children’s stories, to become critical readers and thus critical thinkers. This is the reason why hooks’s children’s books call for adult critical readers sensitive to the author’s lifelong racial concerns and her will to promote healthy self-esteem and a firm sense of self. Naturally, her children’s volumes revolve around four main themes which hooks has critically and insightfully debated in her theoretical essays: standards of beauty, black masculinity, power of love, and meaning of skin color.
In hooks’s first title, Happy to Be Nappy (illustrator, Chris Raschka, 1999), she talks about hair and the multiplicity of its styles (nappy, plaited, long, short, natural, twisted, etc.). In Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (chapter 31), she talks about hair and explains its ritual in the kitchen: “For each of us getting our hair pressed is an important ritual. It is not a sign of our longing to be white. It is not a sign of our quest to be beautiful. We are girls. It is a sign of our desire to be women. It is a gesture that says we are approaching womanhood—a rite of passage.”22
In Happy to Be Nappy hair becomes here a celebration of African American identity. The ritual of combing goes back to hooks’s own childhood and to beauty traditions in African American cultures. “Doing Hair” is recreated as a communal female ritual to exchange life stories and build up a sense of bonding sisterhood. The book is a direct message to black girls to transcend mainstream standards of beauty and accept themselves as they are. In other words, it is hooks’s attempt to reinforce self-esteem with poetic words. As she explains throughout her texts, she bases her thoughts on love on Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Fromm defines love “as an action informed by care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility,”23 and she believes that “female self-love begins with self-acceptance.”24 Yet, this self-acceptance is daily undermined by the society African Americans live in where they confront “negative images of blackness.” This is the main reason why “it takes courage and vigilance to create a context where self-love can emerge.”25 For hooks, “to create an environment that is permeated by a love ethic”26 is to engage in a process of “loving blackness” which becomes a form of “political resistance which transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.”27
Kobena Mercer has highlighted the fact that styling of hair is a universal cultural practice. The hair of one’s head, according to Mercer, “is never a straightforward biological ‘fact,’ since it is “almost always…worked upon by human hands.” These actions “socialize hair, making it the medium of significant ‘statements’ about self and society.”28 In Rock My Soul hooks talks about how “militant antiracist political struggles placed the issue of self-esteem for black folks on the agenda. And it took the form of primarily discussing the need for positive images. The slogan ‘black is beautiful’ was popularized in an effort to undo the negative racist iconography and representations of blackness that had been an accepted norm in visual culture.”29 Among the manifold ways in which blacks were depicted in terms of distorted representations, hairstyles were often the target of scorn and derision. “Natural hairstyles,” then, were offered “to counter the negative stereotype that one could be beautiful only if one’s hair was straight and not kinky. ‘Happy to be nappy’ was a popular slogan among militant black liberation groups. Even black folks whose hair was not naturally kinky found ways to make their hair look nappy to be part of the black-is-beautiful movement.”30
hooks has explained the genesis of her Happy to be Nappy in at least two of her works: Salvation (2000) and Rock My Soul (2003). In both books she stresses how the cultural thrust of Happy to be Nappy is different from that of other black children’s stories on hair, specifically from that of the celebrated Nappy Hair (Knopf, 1997) by African American writer Carolivia Herron, whose main purpose in writing the book was “to show the power and beauty of African American oral and epic poetry.”31 Nappy Hair is a celebration of black hair told in the traditional call and response design of African American storytelling. In November 1998 the book became the issue of hot controversy when Ruth Sherman, a Brooklyn, New York, white teacher, was denounced by members of the African American community for reading the book to her class of black and Hispanic children.
Yet, hooks’s perception of Herron and her work seems slightly different with the passage of time. In 2000, hooks qualifies the act of the “young white Brooklyn schoolteacher, seemingly well-meaning…a perfect example of misguided kindness.”32 In Rock My Soul, hooks retells this incident, but now, three years later, her reading of Herron’s book and her interpretation of the controversy generated from the critics of African American parents show acutely what Peter Nodelman in “Fear of Children’s Literature” (1997) explains as “repressive literature”: “We see literature, all literature, as a means of enmeshing children in repressive ideology… children’s literature is best understood as a means by which adults claim power over children and force them to accept our repressive versions of who they really are.”33 For hooks, Herron’s book embodies now what Nodelman calls “repressive ideologies in apparently harmless texts,”34 since “all children’s books always represent adult ideas of childhood—and inevitably, therefore, work to impose adult ideas about childhood on children.”35
Hook’s books—of which Happy to be Nappy is an excellent example—are acts of resistance against the assaults of patriarchal white culture. In fact, they are acts of decolonization. For her, low self-esteem may be conducive to self-sabotage: “To change the effects of low self-esteem related to body image, representations of blackness must change on all levels in our society. And in those instances where we cannot change representations, we need to be critically vigilant, exercising our right to boycott products, to turn off our television sets, to send magazines back to publishers.”36 Happy to be Nappy exemplifies hooks’s intent, “not to follow the usual routine of books marketed to black children and write the usual story that tells them how bad they are but that they should love themselves.”37
Her second title, Be Boy Buzz (illustrator, Chris Raschka, 2002), celebrates boy-hood by casting a look at a boy’s day with the tones of a be-bop jazz riff. This is also an affirming text which underscores the beauty and happiness of being a black boy. In We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (chapter 3 “Schooling Black Males”), hooks explains the genesis of this text: “Committed to creating books that represent young black males and place them at the center of universal stories, I wrote a children’s book called Be Boy Buzz, which is a positive representation of the holistic selfh ood of boys. The boys represented are black.”38
As in her previous text, hooks has firm theoretical foundations for her new title. In The Will to Change she declares her aim when creating male characters: “To counter patriarchal representations of men as being without feeling, in both the books I write for adults and those I write for children, I have endeavored to create images of men that demonstrate their beauty and integrity of spirit.”39 hooks defines patriarchy as “the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.”40 She, however, alerts against the essentialistic conflation of men with patriarchy since “women can be as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men.”41 Terrence Real uses the phrase “psychological patriarchy” to describe the patriarchal thinking common to females and males.42 It is for this reason that hooks’s book also addresses female headed households and is aimed at being read by mothers. And this is so because “mothers in patriarchal culture silence the wild spirit in their sons, the spirit of wonder and playful tenderness, for fear their sons will be weak, will not be prepared to be macho men, real men, men other men will envy and look up to.”43
She recognizes that the lack of a concentrated study of boyhood on the part of feminist theory and practice has been a “tremendous failing,” a study which might offer “guidelines and strategies for alternative masculinity and ways of thinking about maleness.”44 To make up for this “tremendous failing,” hooks offers her own contribution: Be Boy Buzz. As in the case of her previous children’s books, she explains how she was awakened to the need of writing a book for boys:
Shopping for books for my nephew first alerted me to the absence of progressive literature for boys. In my first children’s book with male characters, Be Boy Buzz, I wanted to celebrate boyhood without reinscribing patriarchal norms. I wanted to write a text that would just express love for boys. It is a book aimed at little boys. This book strives to honor the holistic well-being of boys and to express love of them whether they are laughing, acting out, or just sitting still.45
As a visionary feminist, hooks’s obligation and mission is undoubtedly to devote herself to “one of the first revolutionary acts of visionary feminism” which is “to restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model.”46 Patriarchal masculinity must be rejected and replaced by a model of “feminist masculinity” which means that maleness must be defined as “a state of being rather than as performance.”47 The way to protect the emotional lives of boys is to challenge patriarchal culture. hooks believes that, until that culture changes, it is urgent to create “the subcultures, the sanctuaries where boys can learn to be who they are uniquely, without being forced to conform to patriarchal masculine visions.”48 Be Boy Buzz becomes then a textual sanctuary against the “psychic slaughter”49 perpetrated by patriarchal assaults on the emotional life of boys. Hence, the book is a “work of love” which reclaims masculinity and does not allow it to “be held hostage to patriarchal domination.”50
Homemade Love (illustrator Shane W. Evans, 2002) is the girl’s version of Be Boy Buzz. Here love can overcome any problem, especially fear of darkness by young girls before going to sleep. Girlpie, already appearing in Happy to Be Nappy, reappears surrounded by her loving parents. The book turns out to be much more than a bedtime story. In fact, it aims to instill a sense of security that originates in familial love. Rooting her ideas of love in those of Martin Luther King, hooks believes that “love transforms with redemptive power. …Love is profoundly political,”51 and its transformative power is “the foundation of all meaningful social change.”52
hooks has repeatedly emphasized through her writings that she is witness to a profound spiritual crisis (dehumanization, diminished capacity to love, internalized racism, and self-hatred). Also, she believes that “to heal our wounded communities, which are diverse and multilayered, we must return to a love ethic.”53 This is so since “one measure of the crisis black people are experiencing is lovelessness.” Because of this, “it should be evident that we need a body of literature, both sociological and psychological work, addressing the issue of love among black people, its relevance to political struggle, its meaning in our private lives.”54 Moreover, she sees the necessity to build “an entire body of work, both serious scholarship and popular material, focusing on black self-love.”55
The fundamental space to build black love is, for hooks, the homeplace. She declares that “our struggles to end domination must begin where we live, in the communities we call home. It is there that we experience our power to create revolutions, to make life-transforming change.”56 Against all historical odds, African Americans have traditionally constructed the homeplace as “a site of resistance and liberation struggle” no matter how poor its physical realization was.57 Brutal oppression and racism were left dangling at a threshold which treasured strategies for existential confrontation. Against the disintegration of African American family life, patriarchal domination, hooks writes a book about a child who is raised in a loving home by both father and mother, revising the much publicized black “dysfunctional” family environment. “Black folks need love in the house. And the presence of love will serve to stabilize and sustain bonds.”58 In Homemade Love, hooks reimagines the family as a place of resistance and reconfigures the emotional site called “home and family.”
hooks’s latest book, Skin Again (illustrator, Chris Raschka, 2004), introduces children to the question of race as an idea created by society: “the skin I’m in will always be just a covering./It cannot tell my story./If you want to know who I am/you have got to come/inside.”59 The book tries to highlight the importance of abolishing all types of barriers to establish personal relationships. As such, Skin Again is an act of decolonizing the minds of African Americans so that “every black person would learn to stop judging others on the basis of skin color.”60 The reason why she addresses a book on this topic to children is because “tragically, in the midst of state-legitimized racial apartheid, in predominantly black communities everywhere, the intimate terrorism of the color caste is enacted. Children are its most vulnerable victims.”61
hooks explains how racialism (a practice which holds that the physical differences between races are signs of deeper, typically intellectual and moral differences) became the ideology that supported the brutal dehumanization of black folks on the basis of skin color. For hooks:
…the most obvious internalization of shame that impacted on the self-esteem of black folks historically and continues to the present day is the shame about appearance, skin color, body shape, and hair texture. Had white colonizers chosen to exploit and oppress black people without stigmatizing appearance, the psychological trauma, endured by slaves would not continue to reenact itself in similar forms today.62
Skin color itself became the mark of status. It is in Salvation where hooks specifically explores the negative impact of color caste systems on children and the depth of the psychological traumas caused at an early age: “Children degrade each other on the basis of skin color because they learn from adults that this is acceptable. Whether it be a light-skinned child lording it over a darker peer or a group of dark-skinned children mocking and ridiculing a fair-skinned peer, the intended outcome, to make that person ashamed of their physical features, is the same. It wounds the child’s spirit, no matter their skin color.”63 hooks testifies to the urgency to praise all kinds of skin color to fight against internalized self-hatred, a fact that affects African Americans more harshly now in a racially integrated society because the mass media still publicize openly the idea of blackness as equal to inferiority. hooks’s attitude is informed by her commitment to challenge and change “attitudes towards beauty in the consciousness of black folks that had been shaped by white supremacist thinking.”64 Skin Again celebrates precisely the beauty of blackness and calls for black self-acceptance.
Together with hooks’s texts, the illustrations of her four books must also be mentioned. Artists Chris Raschka, Caldecott winner, and Shane W. Evans provide images which go beyond the basic purpose of illustrating the writer’s words. They help visualize a political message in attractive forms. hooks has not only left vestiges of her children’s writing in her essays but also of her deep concern for the visual components of her books.
Perry Nodelman explains that because we assume that pictures are iconic signs, they “do in some significant way actually resemble what they depict, they invite us to see objects as the pictures depict them—to see the actual in terms of the fictional visualisation of it.”65 “Indeed, this dynamic is the essence of picture books. The pictures ‘illustrate’ the texts—that is, they purport to show us what is meant by the words, so that we come to understand the objects and actions the words refer to in terms of the qualities of the images that accompany them—the world outside the book in terms of the visual images within it.” In fact, “in persuading us that they do represent the actual world in a simple and obvious fashion, picture books are particularly powerful deceivers.” Furthermore, “the intended audience of picture books is by definition inexperienced—in need of learning how to think about their world, how to see and understand themselves and others. Consequently, picture books are a significant means by which we integrate young children into the ideology of our culture.”66 Nodelman declares that “picture books can and do often encourage children to take for granted views of reality that many adults find objectionable. It is for this reason above all that we need to make ourselves aware of the complex significations of the apparently simple and obvious words and pictures” of any book.67
Art in children’s books, then, should be viewed from a twofold perspective which includes the aesthetic and the ideological. Tom Feelings, as a writer and illustrator, also explains how “books are wonderful tools, and art for children can affect and has the ability to intensify children’s perceptions of reality and stimulate their imagination in a certain way. They can also teach racism and reinforce self-hatred and stereotypes…. Art, like literature, has the power to move beyond the limits of facts to a deeper understanding that is personal and emotional.”68 In the same vein, Joseph H. Schwarcz and Chave Schwarcz argue that “illustrations have a psychological effect upon children, that the illustrations which children encounter in literature teach them how to deal with problems in their lives, how to model their lives, how to become adults.”69
For hooks, the books’ representations—written during the 1980s and 1990s (in some cases by African Americans) and addressed to black children—share “the racist iconography of the nineteenth century” since “much of the children’s literature published since the seventies with black children as the perceived audience reinforces the racist assumption that black children are really mini adults” and “illustrations in books aimed at young black readers usually depict them looking like adults in children’s bodies or depict them without eyes or mouths, resembling cartoon characters rather than real people.”70
Jacque Roethler also attests to the importance of images and explains the effect of illustrations on black children in America.71 According to Roethler, the formation of identity is a crisis and for black children in the United States this becomes complicated as they must also define themselves in terms of their cultural heritage. “One of the ways in which black children in America create their schemata is through the illustrations they encounter in the literature to which they are exposed as children.”72 “The images these children soak up remain with them for the rest of their lives.”73 Roethler explains then how Joseph H. Schwarcz in his Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children’s Literature stresses the function of children’s books and their illustrations as forces for “humanization”: “Such is the nature of the superior aesthetic message that it influences the whole child…it develops [the child’s] self-perception and his comprehension of the world he lives in, his ability to understand his own intimate experience and to relate more meaningfully to others.”74 For Schwarcz, the children’s books and their illustrations have the power to influence the adult which the child will become.75 Schwarcz mentions two other phenomena: emotive response and cumulative effect. Concerning emotive response, Schwarcz says that “illustrated stories bring to the child’s subconsciousness ideas which would be difficult to represent at a conscious level.76 Concerning cumulative effect, he writes that: “being repeatedly exposed to images will create a lasting impression; negative or positive images will become part of the child’s schemata.”77 Roethler then goes on examining what happens to children of minority cultures reading illustrations in children’s books. She argues, “if negative images of black people appear in children’s literature, it is bound to do damage to children trying to understand their place in society.” In fact, “much of the work of African American parents is undoing damage wrought by these images.”78
Where I must part with Roethler, however, is when she argues for the necessity of having black artists to illustrate black children’s books. In fact, Chris Raschka’s illustrations for bell hooks’s volumes show that “creating positive images of black children for black (and all) children that produce strong, positive responses”79 is not necessarily linked to the illustrator’s ethnicity but to his or her sensitivity and skillful art. hooks explains her interaction with Raschka when giving images to her words in Be Boy Buzz and her demands on the illustrations based on the foundations of her racial philosophy:
The illustrator for the book is a white male. When the first illustrations were shown to me, I noticed that many of the images were of black boys in motion, running, jumping, playing; I requested images of black boys being still, enjoying solitude, reading. The image of a boy reading was particularly important to include because it is clear that this society sends black male children the message that they do not need to be readers. In some black families where reading is encouraged in girl children, a boy who likes to read is perceived as suspect, as on the road to being a “sissy”. Certainly as long as black people buy into the notion of patriarchal manhood, which says that real men are all body and no mind, black boys who are cerebral, who want to read, and who love books will risk being ridiculed as not manly.80
As on previous occasions, hooks also provides a rationale for the illustrations, as in the case of Homemade Love. In Rock My Soul, she tells about the genesis of the text showing the agency and control she exerts on her books as marketable products:
No matter how many two-parent black families abound, more than ever before in our nation’s history when the image of the black family is depicted it is almost always as a single-parent family. Recently, I worked with the publishers of one of my children’s books on the illustration for the cover. The book was about a two-parent family and the love they give their daughter. However, the cover image that they had chosen was of a mother hugging her daughter. When I inquired about the image, suggesting that it did not convey what this book was about, the group of liberal young white people who had made this decision could not give cogent reasons for their cover choice. They expressed fondness for the image.
As a cultural critic I write endlessly about the ways blackness is represented and the power representations have to shape our sense of our self. And to me this image, though beautiful, conveyed a different message from the book. Luckily, I was in the presence of a group of people who were willing to listen to my concerns. I suggested that it is important to have positive images of single parents but it is just as important to have positive images of two-parent black families. The latter are harder to find. And since that was what my book was about, together we chose a different image—a mother and a father holding the hands of their beloved daughter.81
To conclude, it seems clear that, similarly to the rest of her writing, hooks’s four children’s books display her political agenda and represent her new forward steps into political commitment and her active engagement in a heroic tradition born to erase the racist representations of the black Other. These are books written to empower young African Americans, to transform them into enlightened witnesses and critical vigilant watchers, to instill a sense of value and self-pride, and to reaffirm positive images of identity and community. hooks’s children’s literature is thoroughly political and, as such, emblematic of her definite attempt to change the world at its root.
1. The research leading to the publication of this essay was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the European Regional Development Fund (Project HUM2007/FILO).
2. Perry Nodelman, “Fear of Children’s Literature: What’s Left (or Right) After Theory?” in Reflections of Change: Children’s Literature Since 1945, ed. Sandra L. Beckett (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1997), 9.
3. hooks, Rock my Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003), 136.
4. Nancy Tolson, “Making Books Available: The Role of Early Libraries, Librarians, and Booksellers in the Promotion of African American Children’s Literature,” African American Review 32, no. 1 (1998), 9.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. hooks, Happy to be Nappy, illustrator Chris Raschka (New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children, 1999); hooks, Be Boy Buzz, illustrator Chris Raschka (New York: Jump at the Sun/ Hyperion Books for Children, 2002); hooks, Homemade Love, illustrator Shane W. Evans (New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children, 2002); hooks, Skin Again, illustrator Chris Raschka (New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children, 2004).
7. As far as children’s literature is concerned, DuBois’s most important contribution was the formation of the DuBois and Dill Publishing Company with Augustus G. Dill. DuBois and Dill engaged in the publication of The Brownies’ Book, and of two biographies, Elizabeth Ross Haynes’s Unsung Heroes (1921) and Julia Henderson’s A Child Story of Dunbar (1921).
8. Harris, “African American Children’s Literature,” 546.
9. Ibid.
10. hooks, Rock My Soul, 11.
11. Harris, “African American Children’s Literature,” 550.
12. hooks, Rock My Soul, 104.
13. Ibid.
14. Hugo Crago, “Can Stories Heal?” in Understanding Children’s Literature, ed. Peter Hunt (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), 168.
15. Ibid.
16. Many researchers and pedagogues have highlighted the significance of reading to black children. In “The Importance of Reading to Black Children,” the editors of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 3 (Spring 1994) explained that a study conducted in the early 1990s by the Center for Demography and Ecology and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, revealed “a startling statistic: In married couple families, approximately 31 percent of all white fathers of children under five years of age read to their children almost every day compared with only 5 percent of black fathers” (12). According to the survey, in families in which parents were living together, black and white mothers read to their children equally as often. The black reading deficit was entirely on the paternal side. African American educator, Dr. Henry Ponder, president of Fisk University in Nashville, pointed out that the study might ignore the fact that in a large number of nontraditional families in the black community there is a male figure, other than a father, who plays a surrogate role. And also the tradition of black oral storytelling has to be taken into account as an equivalent intellectual stimulation. African American Dorothy Strickland, the State of New Jersey Professor of Reading at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, believed that these results were “regrettable but not surprising” since they were “consistent with a large body of research supporting the positive relationship between storybook reading and children’s literary development. It also corresponds with research indicating that black children tend to do less well in literacy than do children of most other ethnic groups.” The benefits of parents reading aloud to their children are many. According to Strickland, this is a shared experience, which results in talking about text. This talk “evolves into some very natural and highly effective teaching and learning.” And most important, “parents are actually demonstrating, rather than simply stating, their interest in books and in the child.” For this researcher, “one of the best things we can do as individuals interested in the literary development of black children is to foster the value of reading aloud to them early and often.”
17. D. L. Chapman, “Let’s Read Another One,” in Roles in Literacy: A New Perspective, ed. D. R. Tovey and J. E. Kerber (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1986), 12.
18. Carol D. Lee, “Big Picture Talkers/Words Walking Without Masters: The Instructional Implications of Ethnic Voices for an Expanded Literacy,” The Journal of Negro Education 60, no. 2 (Summer 1991), 292.
19. Lee, “Big Picture Talkers/Words Walking Without Masters,” 293. Patricia A. Edwards in “Involving Parents in Building Reading Instruction for African American Children” also highlights the importance of parental involvement in the preparation of reading instruction in the early grades (Theory into Practice, 34, no. 4 [Autumn, 1992]: 21–34). Edwards explains how “a number of researchers have recognized that many children, especially low-income African-American children, have limited experience with books and they are divided as far as fundamental importance of parents involvement in reading aloud to them. Some question efforts to make up for this lack at school and still question whether classroom storybook reading experience substitutes for the more intimate one-to-one interactions at home” (351). Edwards, who developed the book-reading program called Parents as Partners in Reading, suggests that “low-income African-American parents not only have the right to know that sharing books with their children may be the most powerful and significant predictor of school achievement, they have the right to receive assistance in how to participate in book-reading interactions with their young children” (351). For more than thirty years, researchers have been trying to explain why African American children continue to lag behind white children in reading achievement. It is no secret that parents are their children’s first teachers, especially their children’s first teachers of reading. Edwards quotes Edgar G. Epps, Foreword, in R. M. Clark, Family Life and School Achievement: Why Poor Black Children Succeed or Fail (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), ix–xiii. Epps notes that “the family is the basic institution through which children learn who they are, where they fit into society, and what kinds of future they are likely to experience” (ix). And she also cites R. M. Clark who argues that: “It is not class position that determines a family’s ability to support their children learning, rather it is the quality of life within the home that makes the difference” (xiii). Diana T. Slaughter and Edgar G. Epps in “The Home Environment and Academic Achievement of Black American Children and Youth: An Overview” (The Journal of Negro Education, 56, no.1 [Winter, 1987]: 3–20) explain how decisive parental influences are on early learning and achievement and the importance of the home environment: “Even before nursery school, the family shapes the child through stimulation of his verbal, conversational skills and creation of affective bonds that may often be transformed into a press for evidence of independence and achievement as the child matures. Parents are, in effect, the child’s earliest teachers, not simply because they have the ‘right’ to be, but because they do, in their priorities, expectancies, and behaviors, influence the course of the child’s achievement development” (6). Diane Scott-Jones in “Mother-as-Teacher in the Families of High- and Low-Achieving Low-Income Black First-Graders” (The Journal of Negro Education, 56. no. 1 [Winter, 1987]: 21–34) argues that “young children’s experiences within their own families are important for their cognitive development and school achievement (22). “It is assumed that knowledge and understanding grow out of social interactions with others. Adult caregivers may function as ‘supportive others’, serving as regulators and interrogators of the young child’s behavior. From their social interactions with supportive, knowledgeable others, children gradually internalize the regulatory, interrogative role and are able to perform the supportive-other function for themselves” (22).
20. Daniel D. Hade, “Reading Children’s Literature Multiculturally,” in Reflections of Change: Children’s Literature Since 1945, ed. Sandra L. Beckett (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1997), 121.
21. Ibid.
22. hooks, Bone Black, 92.
23. hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (Perennial: New York, 2003), 85.
24. Ibid., 107.
25. hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (London: The Women’s Press, 2000), 65.
26. Ibid., 70.
27. hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 20.
28. Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trihn T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York; London, 1990), 248–49.
29. hooks, Rock My Soul, 2.
30. Ibid.
32. hooks, Salvation, 80.
33. Nodelman, “Fear of Children’s Literature,” 4.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 8.
36. hooks, Rock My Soul, 57.
37. Ibid., 54.
38. hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York; London: Routledge, 2004), 39.
39. hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 136.
40. Ibid., 17.
41. Ibid., 23.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 137.
44. Ibid., 38–39.
45. Ibid., 53–54.
46. Ibid., 114.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 54.
49. Ibid., 66.
50. Ibid., 115.
51. hooks, Salvation, 16.
52. Ibid., 17.
53. hooks, Salvation, 4.
54. Ibid., 5.
55. Ibid., 92.
56. hooks, The Will to Change, 172.
57. hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 43.
58. hooks, Rock My Soul, 134.
59. hooks, Skin Again. Illustrated by Chris Raschka (New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children, 2004), 12–13.
60. hooks, Salvation, 72.
61. hooks, Rock My Soul, 41.
62. Ibid., 37.
63. hooks, Salvation, 61.
64. hooks, Rock My Soul, 44.
65. Perry Nodelman, “Decoding the Images: Illustration and Picture Books” in Understanding Children’s Literature, ed. Peter Hunt (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 72.
66. Ibid., 73.
67. Ibid.
68. Tom Feelings, “Illustration is My Form, the Black Experience My Story and My Content,” The Advocate 4 (1985): 73.
69. Joseph H. Schwarcz and Chava Schwarcz, The Picture Book Comes of Age: Looking at Childhood through the Art of Illustration (Chicago: American Library Association, 1991). Cited in Jacque Roethler, “Reading in Color: Children’s Book Illustrations and Identity Formation for Black Children in the United States.” African American Review 32, no. 1 (1998): 95.
70. hooks, Rock My Soul, 103.
71. Roethler, “Reading in Color,” 95.
72. Ibid., 96.
73. Ibid.
74. Joseph H. Schwarcz, Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children’s Literature (Chicago: American Library Association, 1982), 195.
75. Roethler, “Reading in Color,” 97.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., 99.
80. hooks, We Real Cool, 40.
81. hooks, Rock My Soul, 119–20.