The Just Like Me Project, in a few words, is a call for stories.
Beyond a few words, The Just Like Me Project aims to engage a significant moment in America's social history. My entry into this moment emerged most fully in 2007 at the intersection of two incredibly noteworthy and personally meaningful events. The first event was when my three-year-old nephew, Jordon, started to read and the second event was the media's legendary coverage of Barack Obama's run for and subsequent election as the President of the United States (2008). During Obama's first campaign, people of color and especially people of multiracial families, like Jordon's and like Obama's, came rushing anew into the general public's consciousness. The publications of Obama's best-selling books (Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, 1995, re-released in 2004; The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 2008; and later, Obama and Loren Long's collaborative children's book, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, 2010) further amplified the rich literary histories, the rigorous intellectual contributions, and the vivid creative works people of color have long-since made to our social enterprise.
Despite the Obama extended family's public status being largely influential in proliferating images of what American families actually look like in the 21st century, these images have not yet penetrated the children's book market in significant ways. With the Cooperative Children's Book Center Data indicating only 10% of children's books published between 2008 and 2012 are about people of color, it is guaranteed that even fewer children's books are about multiracial families like those from which Obama comes and Jordon comes.
Why is it important to have people of color represented in more than 10% of all new children's literature? One reason is the most obvious when any parent, guardian, teacher, friend, or aunt is looking for a multiracial children's book, and despite it being the 21st century, we discover children's books are still illustrated with stereotypical images of black and brown families and multiracial children and adults. So we want to disrupt and bring an end to the use of stereotypical images of multiracial people while increasing the number of books realistically representing brown and black people and families.
Many early childhood education scholars have argued for a stronger emphasis on multicultural literature in curriculum development and teacher education programming, though none speak about the importance of this issue quite as comprehensively as Dr. Beverly Tatum. In chapter 3, The Early Years: "Is my skin brown because I drink chocolate milk?", of her book "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", Dr. Tatum illustrates a number of conversations with her young son Jonathan (ages 3-4) as he came to know our racialized world. As the leading scholar in the land on the psychology of racism and child development, Dr. Tatum's descriptions are easily accessible to anyone interested in having conversations about race: "At the same time that preschoolers are identifying the colors in the crayon box, they are also beginning to figure out racial categorizations." (p. 38). At these early ages, kids' inevitable talk about differences in skin color, hair texture, clothing, and other "outward appearances" leads to speculation about the reasons why we are all different colors. Dr. Tatum gives the example of how this manifests in children's talk by sharing the story of her son being asked, by a 3-year-old classmate, if his skin was brown because he drank too much chocolate milk. As a renowned psychologist and expert in child development who is also a parent, to Dr. Tatum this question "did not reflect prejudice in an adult sense, but it did reveal confusion. His [the classmate's] theory was flawed, and he needed some help" (p. 35). The moment for engagement and to offer help, however, is often shushed!, ignored, or dealt with in private at home rather than in public spaces like school. Many people in the general population, including parents, guardians, teachers, coaches, mentors, and others in positions of influence in kids' evolving social worlds, avoid conversations about race because those conversations make many people uncomfortable. It's easier, in fact, for adults to promote and even celebrate colorblindness than to address the complex issues that characterize talk about race.
Consequently, by adopting and promoting avoidance and silencing questions that arise from a general curiosity, children of color and white children become vulnerable to systemic racism. By choosing not to talk about race, American schools fall back on normalizing "whiteness" and this could not be more strongly reinforced than in the books chosen (or not chosen) and used in ELA (English Language Arts) classrooms and more broadly in other aspects of mainstream education. Tatum argues, along with others, however, that at this crucial point (early childhood education) in cognitive and social development, we have an opportunity to use books, picture books and chapters books, to accomplish significant goals for anti-racist and inclusive education. To accomplish these goals can mean that: 1) we choose books for our libraries, classrooms, and homes that accurately represent people of color and white people (who are also a people of many...colors); 2) we, even in the context of recognizing that racism has a systemic past and present in our country, "choose literature that empowers children (and adults) with the vision that change is possible" (p. 42). This means recognizing white allies and resisters of racism, and black resisters of racism and resisters of victimization, and more broadly, to recognize all people who resist or move against prejudices, including gender, class, religion, sexual orientation, tribal affiliation, and physical and mental impairment prejudices. 3) We also choose to use picture books representative of people of color outside the contexts of Black History Month and outside the context of units on the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement and other times when it seems "acceptable" to recognize black resisters and white allies working together to establish a more inclusive equitable society. Because just as surely, for every positive image we create and share of people of color in our own time, the media in all of its permutations will offer hundreds more negative images of blackness for which we must struggle against.
Necessarily, the Just Like Me Project takes up and responds to the story (re)started when Obama took the stage at the 2004 DNC in Boston, Massachusetts, and said, "My presence on this stage is pretty unlikely...I stand here knowing that in no other country on earth is my story even possible", referring proudly and defiantly to his own multiracial heritage. In another, more racially overt remark at the DNC and one this project especially responds to, Obama said, "we have to eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white," proclaiming that reading and stories don't just belong in the realm of white experience. By charging his listeners to act and implicating all of us in allowing overt racism to go unchecked, Obama opened dialogues and renewed dialogues that challenge societal stereotypes as well as the Western literary canon and what it represents and to whom, even as its "integrity" is fiercely protected by Harold Bloom and other like-minded literary critics and scholars. Literature is not made alone by white people for white people; literature rather is a collection of human experiences taken down in words. Literature is a place from which the collaborative conversation between writers and readers begins.
The Just Like Me Project aims to bring volume to the stories of multiracial families and to normalize the lives of 21st century multiracial families and people as they, too, reach for, claim, and choose their identities like Obama and like Jordon are doing in collaboration with the literatures they read, they write, and they gain access to. While Jordon at age 3 was the beneficiary of an unprecedented media phenomenon that brought the Obama family and their stories and the way they look brilliantly into our lives, not all children at that critical moment of learning to read can seek readily available positive public images of and positive words about people who look like them, especially people attaining the highest political office in the world. At this pivotal juncture in our social history, we have a chance to make a place for stories about black and brown people who have traditionally and purposefully been ignored. The urgency with which this call goes out is greater than ever amid growing projections that the US will soon have the largest multiracial population in history.
Book featured on this page: Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti, illustrated by Michele LeMieux.
Beyond a few words, The Just Like Me Project aims to engage a significant moment in America's social history. My entry into this moment emerged most fully in 2007 at the intersection of two incredibly noteworthy and personally meaningful events. The first event was when my three-year-old nephew, Jordon, started to read and the second event was the media's legendary coverage of Barack Obama's run for and subsequent election as the President of the United States (2008). During Obama's first campaign, people of color and especially people of multiracial families, like Jordon's and like Obama's, came rushing anew into the general public's consciousness. The publications of Obama's best-selling books (Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, 1995, re-released in 2004; The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 2008; and later, Obama and Loren Long's collaborative children's book, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, 2010) further amplified the rich literary histories, the rigorous intellectual contributions, and the vivid creative works people of color have long-since made to our social enterprise.
Despite the Obama extended family's public status being largely influential in proliferating images of what American families actually look like in the 21st century, these images have not yet penetrated the children's book market in significant ways. With the Cooperative Children's Book Center Data indicating only 10% of children's books published between 2008 and 2012 are about people of color, it is guaranteed that even fewer children's books are about multiracial families like those from which Obama comes and Jordon comes.
Why is it important to have people of color represented in more than 10% of all new children's literature? One reason is the most obvious when any parent, guardian, teacher, friend, or aunt is looking for a multiracial children's book, and despite it being the 21st century, we discover children's books are still illustrated with stereotypical images of black and brown families and multiracial children and adults. So we want to disrupt and bring an end to the use of stereotypical images of multiracial people while increasing the number of books realistically representing brown and black people and families.
Many early childhood education scholars have argued for a stronger emphasis on multicultural literature in curriculum development and teacher education programming, though none speak about the importance of this issue quite as comprehensively as Dr. Beverly Tatum. In chapter 3, The Early Years: "Is my skin brown because I drink chocolate milk?", of her book "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", Dr. Tatum illustrates a number of conversations with her young son Jonathan (ages 3-4) as he came to know our racialized world. As the leading scholar in the land on the psychology of racism and child development, Dr. Tatum's descriptions are easily accessible to anyone interested in having conversations about race: "At the same time that preschoolers are identifying the colors in the crayon box, they are also beginning to figure out racial categorizations." (p. 38). At these early ages, kids' inevitable talk about differences in skin color, hair texture, clothing, and other "outward appearances" leads to speculation about the reasons why we are all different colors. Dr. Tatum gives the example of how this manifests in children's talk by sharing the story of her son being asked, by a 3-year-old classmate, if his skin was brown because he drank too much chocolate milk. As a renowned psychologist and expert in child development who is also a parent, to Dr. Tatum this question "did not reflect prejudice in an adult sense, but it did reveal confusion. His [the classmate's] theory was flawed, and he needed some help" (p. 35). The moment for engagement and to offer help, however, is often shushed!, ignored, or dealt with in private at home rather than in public spaces like school. Many people in the general population, including parents, guardians, teachers, coaches, mentors, and others in positions of influence in kids' evolving social worlds, avoid conversations about race because those conversations make many people uncomfortable. It's easier, in fact, for adults to promote and even celebrate colorblindness than to address the complex issues that characterize talk about race.
Consequently, by adopting and promoting avoidance and silencing questions that arise from a general curiosity, children of color and white children become vulnerable to systemic racism. By choosing not to talk about race, American schools fall back on normalizing "whiteness" and this could not be more strongly reinforced than in the books chosen (or not chosen) and used in ELA (English Language Arts) classrooms and more broadly in other aspects of mainstream education. Tatum argues, along with others, however, that at this crucial point (early childhood education) in cognitive and social development, we have an opportunity to use books, picture books and chapters books, to accomplish significant goals for anti-racist and inclusive education. To accomplish these goals can mean that: 1) we choose books for our libraries, classrooms, and homes that accurately represent people of color and white people (who are also a people of many...colors); 2) we, even in the context of recognizing that racism has a systemic past and present in our country, "choose literature that empowers children (and adults) with the vision that change is possible" (p. 42). This means recognizing white allies and resisters of racism, and black resisters of racism and resisters of victimization, and more broadly, to recognize all people who resist or move against prejudices, including gender, class, religion, sexual orientation, tribal affiliation, and physical and mental impairment prejudices. 3) We also choose to use picture books representative of people of color outside the contexts of Black History Month and outside the context of units on the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement and other times when it seems "acceptable" to recognize black resisters and white allies working together to establish a more inclusive equitable society. Because just as surely, for every positive image we create and share of people of color in our own time, the media in all of its permutations will offer hundreds more negative images of blackness for which we must struggle against.
Necessarily, the Just Like Me Project takes up and responds to the story (re)started when Obama took the stage at the 2004 DNC in Boston, Massachusetts, and said, "My presence on this stage is pretty unlikely...I stand here knowing that in no other country on earth is my story even possible", referring proudly and defiantly to his own multiracial heritage. In another, more racially overt remark at the DNC and one this project especially responds to, Obama said, "we have to eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white," proclaiming that reading and stories don't just belong in the realm of white experience. By charging his listeners to act and implicating all of us in allowing overt racism to go unchecked, Obama opened dialogues and renewed dialogues that challenge societal stereotypes as well as the Western literary canon and what it represents and to whom, even as its "integrity" is fiercely protected by Harold Bloom and other like-minded literary critics and scholars. Literature is not made alone by white people for white people; literature rather is a collection of human experiences taken down in words. Literature is a place from which the collaborative conversation between writers and readers begins.
The Just Like Me Project aims to bring volume to the stories of multiracial families and to normalize the lives of 21st century multiracial families and people as they, too, reach for, claim, and choose their identities like Obama and like Jordon are doing in collaboration with the literatures they read, they write, and they gain access to. While Jordon at age 3 was the beneficiary of an unprecedented media phenomenon that brought the Obama family and their stories and the way they look brilliantly into our lives, not all children at that critical moment of learning to read can seek readily available positive public images of and positive words about people who look like them, especially people attaining the highest political office in the world. At this pivotal juncture in our social history, we have a chance to make a place for stories about black and brown people who have traditionally and purposefully been ignored. The urgency with which this call goes out is greater than ever amid growing projections that the US will soon have the largest multiracial population in history.
Book featured on this page: Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti, illustrated by Michele LeMieux.