Racism in contemporary african american children’s and young adult literature

Suriyan Panlay

RACISM IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN
AMERICAN CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG
ADULT LITERATURE


Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Series Editors
Kerry Mallan
Faculty of Education
Children and Youth Research Ctr
Kelvin Grove, Queensland, Australia
Clare Bradford
School of Communication and Creative Art
Deakin University
Burwood, Victoria, Australia


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recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new
combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and
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Suriyan Panlay

Racism in
Contemporary
African American
Children’s and Young
Adult Literature


Suriyan Panlay
Thammasat University
Bangkok, Thailand

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
ISBN 978-3-319-42892-5
ISBN 978-3-319-42893-2
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42893-2

(eBook)

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For Mum and Dad


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There is a well-known, almost culturally untranslatable word in Thai called
‘namjai’, literally referring to ‘the pouring of the heart’, typically used to
describe an act of kindness one generously extends to another.
Upon the completion of this book, I am forever grateful for the namjai
of the following kind individuals: Dr Christine Wilkie-Stibbs from Centre
for Education Studies, University of Warwick, for her words of encouragement and insightful criticisms; Professor John McRae of the University
of Nottingham and Professor Jonothan Neelands of the University of
Warwick for their comments on the final draft; Brigitte Shull and Paloma
Yannakakis from Palgrave Macmillan New  York for their interest in the
project and their kind assistance throughout the publication process; my
best friend Gary Rutthaporn Malayaphun and the two girls—Culi and
Kaopote—for being there every step of the way.
My Anthony—I am glad I have found you.
For Dad—thank you for instilling in all of us the importance of learning.

For Mum (3 June 1929—4 September 2014)—thank you for the stories, all those years ago, under the night skies of southern Thailand. I will
carry them with me. Always.

vii


CONTENTS

1 Introduction
2

Internalised Racism and Critical Race Theory

1
19

3 Wounded

57

4 Tongue-Tied

93

5 Displaced

125

6 Triumphed

157

7 Conclusion

187

Index

203

ix


CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1

“I CRYING FOR ME WHO NO ONE NEVER HOLD
BEFORE”

Claireece Precious Jones or “Precious”, as she is better known in the
novel, is an illiterate, obese, dark-skinned protagonist of Sapphire’s Push
(1996). Precious loathes herself for being “so stupid, so ugly, worth nuffin” (p. 34) and, having been made part of a racialised landscape where
an image of the self is crooked, misrepresented, she is led to believe that
her existence is nothing but a “vampire sucking the system’s blood. Ugly
black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for”
(p.  31). In her mind’s eye, however, she is a “beautiful chile like white
chile in magazines or on toilet paper wrappers ... a blue-eye skinny chile

whose hair is long braids, long long braids” (p. 64). Upon encountering
a stranger’s kindness, Precious cries—“I crying for me who no one never
hold before” (p. 18).
In Sharon G.  Flake’s The Skin I’m In (1998), another young adult
text explored in this book, 13-year-old Maleeka Madison is perpetually
haunted by her own dark skin and African features: “Somebody said I had
hair so nappy I needed a rake to comb it” (p. 13). This feeling of inferiority, unfortunately, has landed her at an inner-city school instead of a better
school across town as she is threatened by “them girls [who] looked like
they come out of a magazine. Long, straight hair. Skin the color of potato

© The Author(s) 2016
S. Panlay, Racism in Contemporary African American Children’s
and Young Adult Literature, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42893-2_1

1


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S. PANLAY

chips and cashews and Mary Jane candies. No Almond Joy-colored girls
like me” (p.  39). Young Maleeka is also envious of her friend Malcolm
at her school for having “a white dad and a black momma” (p. 17), with
“long, straight hair [and] skin the color of a butterscotch milkshake”
(p.  17). In her very own words, Malcolm is “lucky” simply because he
“looks more like his dad than his mom” (p. 17).
When their self-perceptions are constantly doubted and ultimately
reduced to nothingness—ugly black grease to be wiped away, punish, kilt,
changed, finded a job for, and when physically morphing themselves into

‘blue-eyed’ skinny children with ‘long, straight hair’ is apparently their
only alternative available, Precious and Maleeka open up an old, hidden
wound that, for centuries, has haunted American blacks, a wound that has
often been treated, unfortunately, as their own individual psychological
flaws, leaving them, as a result, in a perpetual state of self-condemnation.
It is the representation of this kind of experience of inferiority and its
subsequent psychological devastation portrayed in both fictional and
nonfictional works that has become the provenance and premise of this
book. Whether it is taken directly from lived reality as the one undergone
by young Claudette Colvin in Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice
Toward Justice (2009), a National Book Award winner for young people’s literature—“Though being smart was an asset, Claudette soon found
that having light skin and straight hair was the surest key to popularity at
Booker T.  Washington” (p.  22)—or channelled through fictional characters as portrayed by Precious and Maleeka, the paralleled experience is
equally distressing. This book is thus set up to explore, through its focus
children’s and young adult (C&YA) texts, such racially silent/silenced
experiences and to un-silence them.
Both fictional and nonfictional representations cited above have compellingly captured the life of young African American girls caught in a
racial tide and harmed by self-inflicted psychological mutilations. From a
theoretical perspective, this type of racially and psychologically devastating
experience is an example of what has been formally identified as internalised racism or internalised racial oppression or psychological slavery or
a much-criticised term—racial self-hatred. As a theme, internalised racism has always been explored or treated, though ‘peripherally’, by African
American authors of both C&YA and adult literature. Toni Morrison’s
first novel, The Bluest Eye (1999), an adult book focalised through a
child narrator, is arguably the first full-length novel that puts this racial
issue at the centre, depicting how internalised white beauty standards or


INTRODUCTION

3

idealised whiteness can destroy the life of both black girls and women, or
what George Yancy (2008) refers to as “the psychological price paid for
bleaching the Negro soul in a flood of whiteness” (p. 184). Subsequent
titles by other contemporary African American authors that have helped
push this issue to the fore, particularly those representing the realm of
C&YA literature, include, among others, Rosa Guy’s The Music of Summer
(1992), Jacqueline Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (1994)
and Feathers (2007), Sharon Flake’s The Skin I’m In (1998) and Who
Am I without Him? (2005), Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade (2002)
and The Road to Paris (2006), Julius Lester’s Day of Tears (2005). These
titles, some of which are included as this book’s focus texts, have helped
magnify the issue through the eye of a fictional child, consequently making internalised racism immediate and real, reaffirming, once again, that
race/racism in America is never a thing of the past, and that postracial
or ‘race-less’ America (Bernard, 2011), a catchphrase currently dominating American racial discourse, is perhaps far-fetched, elusive and futile.
Also, as the emergence of African American C&YA literature is consistent with that of African American literature (Anatol, 2011; Smith, 2002;
Johnson-Feelings, 1990) in that it attempts, as suggested by Rudine Sims
Bishop (2012), to respond “to the social, political, and economic circumstances in which Black people in the United States have historically found
themselves—a part of and yet apart from American society” (p. 10), these
C&YA titles and their authors, therefore, have helped shape and form
an integral part of the rich body of what is presently known as not only
African American C&YA literature but also African American literature.
In essence, Precious, Maleeka and Claudette come to exemplify young
adults who have been socially and psychologically programmed to perceive
themselves as being ‘less’, and who often wish that they looked more like
the dominant group—“a blue-eye skinny chile whose hair is long braids,
long long braids” (Sapphire, 1996, p.  64). Unfortunately, these young
female characters equate ‘black’ with inferiority and ‘white’ with beauty
and superiority. By tracing their journeys from self-denigration to selfaffirmation, from invisibility to liberation and empowerment—some of
the recurring themes fundamentally permeating African American C&YA

and adult literature (Anatol, 2011; Rountree, 2008; Smith, 2002), these
C&YA texts are not only disclosing an interesting and integral part of the
present state of race in contemporary racialised America, particularly its
deleterious psychological effects towards the young and vulnerable but
they are also defamiliarising the very racial issue that otherwise has become


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normalised in American racial discourse, or what bell hooks, in Writing
Beyond Race (2013), refers to as “the normalized practices of racism and
white supremacy” (p.  9). And this is one crucial aim that this book is
attempting to uncover and achieve.
Also, what makes this particular racial issue worth examining or
un-silencing, given its prevalence as a theme in contemporary African
American literature, including C&YA literature, is the simple fact that the
attention given to it in both race and literary scholarships has been few and
far between. Perhaps it is due in part to the discomfort and embarrassment
raised by the subject, especially how the blame is always put on victimised
individuals as their own psychological flaws instead of structural defects
or racial inequalities, which evidently reflects, as suggested by bell hooks
(2013) and Ellen Herman (1995), America’s long obsession with psychology. And this very obsession has compounded the matter, resulting,
unfortunately, in social problems being viewed or evaluated solely through
the lens of psychology instead of politics. Another aim of this book, therefore, is to explore, through fictional representations of the focus C&YA
texts, whether it is individuals’ flaws or structural defects that lie at the
heart of this racial malady.
Although the issue of internalised racism has been portrayed in various
channels over the years—autobiographies, essays, poetry, films, documentaries, novels—its place in critical literary research, including C&YA literature, has been limited, resulting, as shall be discussed further in the next

chapter, in this racial issue being misunderstood, understudied and, therefore, theoretically void. It is my intention, therefore, to revisit this very
issue through the eye of a fictional child, with Critical Race Theory (CRT)
as my key theoretical underpinning, to seek new messages, viewpoints and
positions on the issue of internalised racism, and also, and crucially, to seek
to develop a new critical discourse regarding this silenced racial topic in
relation to C&YA fiction. Principally, this book focuses on the interplay
between CRT and internalised racism and asks the following: (1) what
effects does internalised racism have on the marginalised characters, and
what are its manifestations? (2) what narrative strategies have been used by
the authors to help the main characters regain and reclaim their sense of
self? and (3) what is the contribution of CRT to C&YA literature?
In his discussion of African American literature and legal history, JonChristian Suggs (2010) argues that African American fiction/nonfiction
and the law are closely related, “The textual body of each, taken broadly,
can be read as the basis for an alternative text of the other” (p. 325). The


INTRODUCTION

5

law, as Suggs suggests, is central and omnipresent in African American
literature, dictating and determining “the creation of African American
racial and personal identity” (p. 328). Its centrality in black literary texts
is very much attributed to the fact that the black body has always been
legally ‘marked’ historically as properties or objects, with no or limited
legal rights, depending on the needs of the dominant group, “Africans
in America were, by the founding of the republic, romantic constructs
absent the quality of person ...; imbued only with the property of being
property; never capable of owning property” (p.  329, see also the discussion of CRT’s Differential Racialisation in the next chapter). Whilst
African American literature from 1825 to 1960, explicitly or subtextually,

centres around the law, from 1970 to present, Suggs argues, it attempts to
‘decentre’ the law, yet the law “emerges as central to [its] content, form,
and ideological concerns” (p. 328). As most of the texts included in this
book, as will be explored in later chapters, are a testament to Suggs’s arguments, it is only fitting, therefore, that a ‘law’ theory is made an integral
part of this literary endeavour.
As a recognised body of enquiry and as a movement, CRT is made up
of scholars and activists, with a clear common goal—“Studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power” (Delgado and
Stefancic, 2012, p. 3). Initiated in the mid-1970s as a critique of constitutional law, it has now spread to various academic disciplines, including
the humanities. Researchers in Education, Political Science and Ethnic
and Gender Studies, for example, have now considered themselves critical
race theorists, utilising CRT and its theoretical frame—though without
an activist dimension—to investigate pressing issues concerning their own
disciplines, thus making CRT even more fast-growing. Yet, it has not been
applied to this genre in a book-length project. As a theoretical and analytical tool, CRT is certainly a terrain unfamiliar to most literary scholars.
By breaking this new ground, I hope this book will become a valuable
addition to the field that clearly deserves more critical literary research
(Rountree, 2008; Johnson-Feelings, 1990).
I am drawing on CRT, which is grounded on theoretical, practical as
well as ‘activist’ dimensions, as my principal analytical tool to approach
the focus C&YA texts charged with racial conflicts, for the following
reasons. Firstly, given the pervasiveness of race, racism and racialisation
in present-day America, the theory takes into consideration both overt
and hidden racial injustice that has still permeated different spheres of
contemporary racialised America after the civil rights era. Secondly, it


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offers multilayered and realistic modes of analysis to explore how various social hierarchies (gender, class, sexual orientation, etc.) intersect
within power relations. Thirdly, and most importantly, CRT also takes
into account essential tools needed for psychic survival in a racialised
landscape, ones that can help victimised individuals, as represented by
young fictional characters, to identify and define themselves as subjects, not objects—a crucial step towards mental decolonisation or what
Malcolm X (a figure, like Frantz Fanon, associated more, historically,
with harsher means or eye-for-an-eye) terms ‘psychic conversion’, as
well as individual and group empowerment. Such an identification and
definition, for which this study is arguing, will accordingly afford them
to be both black and American at the same time. This last point is
crucial as it reflects one commonality shared by both CRT and African
American C&YA literature. As it is well recognised in the field, one key
ongoing goal of African American C&YA literature, other than securing
the visibility of black children on the printed page through positive portrayals, filling the historical gaps, as well as nurturing and encouraging
racial pride and identity, is to provide a coping mechanism or a vehicle
for survival for its young readers (Bishop, 2012; Anatol, 2011; Smith,
2002). And this is another important reason why CRT is a fitting candidate for the analysis and interpretation of the current project, and why,
as a recognised body of critical enquiry, it is needed in contemporary
racialised America.
Equally important is its limited role in literary studies, particularly
in C&YA literature. Whilst CRT is not a completely new and different
approach to race, it has not before been applied, as stated earlier, to any
literary study in a book-length project. A relatively few literary enthusiasts
employing CRT as part of their literary analyses tend to put an emphasis
only on one tenet of this race theory, particularly its Intersectionality, leaving aside and untouched other tenets, such as Everyday Racism, The Social
Construction of Race, Interest Convergence, Differential Racialisation,
Voice of Colour, Counter-Storytelling, which, arguably, are crucial and
equally thought-provoking (see detailed discussions of each tenet in the
next chapter). In light of this lack of literary research, it is my intention,
therefore, to turn the gaze of this book to CRT and make great use of its

various theoretical foundations to analyse and tackle the issue of internalised racism depicted in contemporary African American C&YA literature, to see how well a theory originally developed for legal purposes can
help transform a literary landscape.


INTRODUCTION

7

Each of the above tenets will be utilised to analyse  the focus C&YA
texts at different stages of the book to help explain—from literary, racial,
social and political perspectives—what lies behind the issue of internalised
racism, and what conclusion, if any, can be drawn. And through a combination of these major CRT tenets, I am convinced that it is possible
to delve deeper under the skin of this racial issue, as well as to critically
analyse its various contributing factors, including the personal, historical,
socio-political as well as the individual and collective. CRT, however, is
not the only theoretical and analytical tool used in this book. In order
to thoroughly examine the complexities of the issue of internalised racism, I am also using an array of theories, encompassing, among others,
literary studies, cultural studies, African American studies and postcolonial studies. Critical and theoretical works by key contemporary African
American C&YA scholars employed as part of the analysis include Rudine
Sims’s (1982) framework of the three categories of books, particularly her ‘social conscience’ and ‘culturally conscious’ books, Donnarae
MacCann’s (2002) examination of the antebellum and postbellum
white supremacy in children’s literature, Dianne Johnson-Feelings’s
(1990) interrelationship between African American children’s literature
and adult literature. Critical works by C&YA scholars outside the USA,
such as Clare Bradford’s (2007) postcolonial readings of children’s literature and Christine Wilkie-Stibbs’s (2008) juxtaposition of narratives
of literary and actual children/young adults, particularly her theoretical concept of the notion of ‘child-outsiderness’, among others, are also
included. The book also makes use of key theoretical concepts by scholars in the fields of African American literature, African American studies
and cultural studies, such as Toni Morrison’s (1992) Africanist presence, Patricia Hill Collins’s (2009) black feminist thought, bell hooks’s
(2013) white supremacist thinking and practice, Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s
(1988) Signifyin(g), Edward Said’s (2000) reflections on exile, and Julia

Kristeva’s (1991) foreignisation. Like the marriage of the major CRT
tenets, the amalgamation of these theoretical views clearly allows me a
wider access to the same topic from different angles, resulting, I believe,
in a thorough, multilayered and multidimensional racial analysis that is
uniquely African American, which is evidently in consonant with both
the genesis and the principle of CRT. As a theory, CRT’s strengths lie in
its close relation to other disciplines, particularly legal studies and feminism. Its key theoretical positioning, since its inception, is also influenced
and informed by European theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques


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Derrida and Antonio Gramsci, as well as influential historical black figures
such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B.  Du Bois, Martin
Luther King, Jr. (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012), thus naturally making
its approach to race interdisciplinary, relevant and effective. And this is
another reason it is adopted as the key theoretical frame for this booklength project. And since the book is interdisciplinary in nature, encompassing both humanities and social studies, looking at one of the pressing
social issues in contemporary America through the eye of a fictional child,
any theoretical position or conclusion this study is arriving at will certainly help enrich not only literary scholarship, particularly that representing the realm of C&YA literature, but also race scholarship.
Representative African American C&YA texts included in the discussion, particularly those depicting internalised racism as part of their central theme through their female protagonists, are Jacqueline Woodson’s
Feathers (2007) and I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (1994), Tanita
S. Davis’s Mare’s War (2009), Sharon G. Flake’s Who Am I without Him
(2005a), Bang (2005b) and The Skin I’m In (1998), Nikki Grimes’s Bronx
Masquerade (2002), Sapphire’s (1996) Push, and Rosa Guy’s The Music of
Summer (1992), with Julius Lester’s Day of Tears (2005), Walter Mosley’s
47 (2005) and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) being
used as additional texts to illustrate an historical overview of slavery and
colour stratification in America (Day of Tears and 47) and the civil rights

movement in the 1960s (Brown Girl Dreaming) (see detailed discussions
of each text in the next chapter).
Although the focus of this book is on the female characters, it needs to
be pointed out that this particular racial issue is not strictly a black female
experience. For males, such as Fourty-seven, a protagonist in Walter
Mosley’s historical novel 47 (2005), or some of the minor characters in
the focus texts, for instance, are also caught in the same web of self-hatred.
And the experience, as this book will demonstrate, is most devastating,
particularly for the youngsters who are in the process of becoming, or, as
suggested by bell hooks (1994a), who are “striving to construct positive
identity and healthy self-esteem” (p. 211). Yet, whilst both females and
males are oppressed by their race, black men, argues Patricia Hill Collins
(2013), are “privileged by their gender” (p. 14). This, together with the
notion of childhood or youth, the point that I will raise and argue for
throughout the book in support of CRT’s Intersectionality to enrich its
theoretical stance, is part of the main reason why the focus of this book
is on the female characters, for they have come to represent lived experi-


INTRODUCTION

9

ences or realities of those who are most powerless, who actually occupy
the bottom of social ladder. However, whilst gender might play a significant role, this book as a whole is attempting to offer transparency that is
not muted by this very factor.
These literary texts—shaped and informed by cultural practices of
present-day America and driven by an authoritative narrator and an authorial voice and viewpoint—as I shall discuss throughout this book, represent
a larger construct or a ‘reconstructed world’. They portray what is possible
through the author’s research, memories and recollections, together with

the act of imagination. Fundamental racial issues that these texts represent
through the life of their young characters, which clearly have an impact on
the politics of black identities, as suggested by Cai (2002) in her discussion of stereotyping and the politics of representation in C&YA literature,
are not just literary or aesthetic issues but also social and political ones.
These are texts made up of small and local narratives chronicling everyday
lives of (young) ordinary Blacks who are not part of a ‘monumental history’ or ‘grand narrative’, and, like a character from Davis’s Mare’s War
(2009), previously neglected, historically denied or narratively excluded
(Gates, 1987). Another important claim I am making in this book, therefore, is that these texts become not just ‘composite stories’ with historical
significance but also ‘counter-stories’, which, as far as storytelling goes, are
integral in creating a space for resistance and agency for both the fictional
and outside child.
My decision to include them as representative texts is not because of
the numerous awards they have amassed, although that, to a great extent,
helps confirm their literary merits, but mainly because they are texts
that courageously and compellingly, through the eye of a fictional child,
tackle fundamental racial issues affecting the politics of black identities
in America today. These are literary texts that address, as suggested by
Tessa Hadley (2014), “The intricate workings of institutionalised power”,
as well as help reconstruct, as I shall argue throughout this book, a different social reality (Delgado and Stefancic, 2013), based on an African
American experience, one that can help establish a more balanced and
fairer social discourse on race. Also, the fact that these C&YA texts span
almost nine decades of American history and capture racial issues that have
been silenced during various historical periods, including internalised racism, makes them worthy of a thorough investigation and, therefore, are
ideal for this study.


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In her most recent publication, Just Us Girls: The Contemporary African
American Young Adult Novel (2008), a close reading textual study of
contemporary African American young adult novels, Wendy Rountree
states that her book is an answer to an academic call proposed by Dianne
Johnson-Feelings (1990), encouraging more scholars to study the relationship between African American children’s literature and adult literature. As a scholar of both African American children’s and adult literature,
Rountree has observed that, regardless of their readers, African American
authors tend to portray similar themes, such as racism, acculturation, child
abuse, sexual orientation and, particularly, coming-of-age and identity as
also reflected in the focus texts chosen for this book. This thematic crossover also coincides with Katharine Capshaw Smith’s (2002) discussion of
the landscape of ethnic American children’s literature. Smith argues that
such similarities are not only common but also crucial in helping C&YA
texts “recoup lost heroes, fill the gaps of historical memory, subvert ethnic
stereotypes, and advance revisionary versions of cultural identity” (Smith,
2002, p. 6), which, in turn, as suggested by Bishop (2012), help Black
children who have been historically wronged or othered to feel valued and
validated in their own social context. These similarities, argues Giselle Liza
Anatol (2011), also reflect general cultural and political needs regarding
the emergence of both C&YA and adult literature, which are to address
(1) “the striking absence or the persistent stereotypes of people of African
descent in mainstream literature” and (2) “the longstanding ‘ghettoized’
experience of the body of work itself within and without the larger field of
canonical literature” (Anatol, 2011, p. 621). And these are my main reasons that, all through this book, representative C&YA texts are set against
key examples of adult works, particularly Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
(2004), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1999) and her 1997’s Paradise.
The purpose of my inclusion of these adult texts, first and foremost, is
not to downplay the role of C&YA literature nor to make a comparative
analysis but to use them as catalysts or pointers for discussion. Secondly,
based on critical works by African American literary scholars discussed
above, the great body of African American literature is made up of both
C&YA and adult literature, therefore it is my firm belief that it should be

treated as part of the whole, not as a distinctly separate body. For by so
doing, not only will it help solidify the body of works but also strengthen
certain African American literary theories, such as Morrison’s (1992)
Africanist Presence and Gates’s (1988) Signifyin(g). As a theoretical frame
to approach African American literature, Morrison and Gates have gained


INTRODUCTION

11

their strengths through their applications on adult texts. Extending their
analyses to literary texts written for children and young adults, as this book
will prove, would yield a more complete picture of African American literature, and in turn, strengthening their theoretical foundations.
In her seminal work Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience
in Contemporary Children’s Fiction (1982), Rudine Sims, through her
close reading and analysis of 150 children’s books published between
1965 and 1970, dedicates one chapter to the five African American C&YA
authors whom she refers to as ‘Image Makers’, which are Lucille Clifton,
Eloise Greenfield, Virginia Hamilton, Sharon Bell Mathis and Walter
Dean Myers. Their ‘culturally conscious’ books reflecting the ‘distinctiveness of African American experiences’, Bishop states, have made them “the
frontrunners in the creation of late Twentieth-century African American
children’s literature” (Bishop, 2012, p. 8). In her more recent scholarship,
Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s
Literature (2007), Bishop praises a new batch of writers such as Jacqueline
Woodson, Angela Johnson, Rita Williams-Garcia, Sharon Flake, Sharon
Draper, for their courageous voices and innovations. Like all the authors
included in this book, I believe these are the new ‘image makers’ of the
twenty-first-century African American C&YA literature, whose depictions
of black lives and identity have certainly helped create—for both the fictional and outside child—a space for resistance and agency.

To obtain a complete picture of its detriment, as portrayed in the focus
C&YA texts, and based on three main research questions discussed above,
the book explores internalised racism and its manifestations in three main
areas, starting from psychological manifestation, looking at how young
fictional characters are psychologically wounded by internalised racism and
how the wound gets (mis)directed towards the self and others. It focuses
next on linguistic manifestation, discussing how being made to adhere to
the dominant linguistic code can destroy fictional characters linguistically
and psychologically. The book then moves on to the sense of displacement and dislocation as experienced by the young characters, exploring
the direct aftermath of postcivil rights desegregated America and its contemporary influence, as well as outlining the new set of challenges and
problems facing American blacks, particularly the young and vulnerable.
And finally, it discusses narrative strategies utilised by the authors to help
the characters regain and reclaim their sense of self. Specifically, this book
is structured through the following main chapter headings:


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1.2

CHAPTER 2: CRT AND INTERNALISED RACISM

As a theoretical and analytical tool, CRT is certainly a terrain unfamiliar
and foreign to the field of literary studies. This chapter is thus set up with
an aim to help the reader grasp its basic tenets and realise its potentiality in
literary analyses. The chapter also discusses relevant literature surrounding
the issue of internalised racism, including intra-racial racism; provides a
brief historical overview of skin colour stratification in America, particularly through Donnarae MacCann’s (2002) critical study of white supremacy in children’s literature and two historical C&YA novels, Julius Lester’s

Day of Tears (2005) and Walter Mosley’s 47 (2005); and introduces the
primary C&YA texts that will be used in the book.

1.3

CHAPTER 3: WOUNDED

Through the theoretical lens of CRT and its following four tenets—The
Social Construction of Race, Differential Racialisation, Everyday Racism
and Intersectionality, this chapter is aimed at exploring how young fictional characters are psychologically wounded by internalised racism, how
the wound gets inflicted upon the self and others within the black community. My argument regarding the literary characters’ psychological wounds
is primarily premised on or attributed to the detriment of controlling
images still ravaging American landscape today. The chapter also takes into
account the issue of intra-racial racism, also known as colourism or colour
caste system, referring to racial discrimination within the black community
against those with darker skin and more African features. These will be
read and analysed against the following fictional texts written for children
and young adults: Sharon G. Flake’s Who Am I without Him (2005a) and
her 1998’s The Skin I’m In, Nikki Grime’s Bronx Masquerade (2002),
Sapphire’s Push (1996) and Rosa Guy’s The Music of Summer (1992).

1.4

CHAPTER 4: TONGUE-TIED

The focus of this chapter is on the linguistic manifestation of internalised
racism/intra-racial racism portrayed in the focus texts. Utilising CRT’s
Social Construction of Race, Differential Racialisation and Everyday
Racism tenets as my theoretical frame, this chapter turns its gaze to the linguistic aspect of internalised racism, looking at how being made to adhere

INTRODUCTION

13

to the dominant linguistic code can lead fictional characters to being not
only linguistically crippled but also historically deprived, and the damage is
extended to both the self and the black community. Through the following C&YA texts: Tanita S. Davis’s Mare’s War (2009), Sharon G. Flake’s
Who Am I without Him (2005a) and her 1998’s The Skin I’m In, and
Sapphire’s Push (1996), the chapter also discusses the significance of the
focus texts in making visible inner psychological and linguistic wounds of
those haunted by internalised racism in ways that factual evidence alone
is perhaps inadequate or less powerful in drawing the reader’s belief and
sympathy. The texts themselves are also dynamic, complex, multilayered,
offering, through authoritative narrators and authorial voices and viewpoints, realistic accounts of what it is like to be young and black and
female in contemporary America.

1.5

CHAPTER 5: DISPLACED

Utilising CRT’s Interest Convergence, this chapter delineates what life is
like for young American blacks to grow up in a world where formal racist
barriers and practices have been made outlawed. It explores, through the
eye of both fictional and nonfictional children as depicted by Jacqueline
Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), Feathers (2007), and I Hadn’t
Meant to Tell You this (1994), and Sharon G. Flake’s Bang (2005b), the
direct aftermath of postcivil rights desegregated America, as well as outlines the new set of challenges and problems facing American blacks, particularly the young and vulnerable, causing them to feel displaced and
dislocated. What has been gained on political fronts, as will be discussed
in the chapter, cannot eliminate deep-rooted psychological vulnerabilities

and insecurities. The triumph, if anything, only gives rise to confusion.
Drawing also on parallel, painful and disorienting experiences regarding
those living an exile life, particularly through Said’s and Kristeva’s theorisations, this chapter displays and highlights what it is like to be ‘home
and exiled’. The chapter also discusses America and its obsession with psychology. Through CRT’s Interest Convergence, it exemplifies that social
problems in America tend to be viewed through the lens of psychology
instead of politics, resulting in the blame being placed on victimised individuals as their own psychological defects rather than on structural flaws
or racial inequalities.


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1.6

CHAPTER 6: TRIUMPHED

Theoretically driven by CRT’s Counter-Storytelling and Voice of Colour
tenets, this chapter encapsulates the benefit of reauthoring one’s own
story and reality. It delineates, through counter-storytelling, how one
can shatter the silence and assert one’s own agency, in order to become
empowered, liberated and visible. To illustrate how black authors share,
repeat, imitate, critique each other’s text, the chapter also explores intertextuality or Signifyin(g)—a practice commonly observed in both adult
and C&YA literature particularly through the distinctly observable use of
black English vernacular. Representative texts included in this chapter are
Tanita S. Davis’s Mare’s War (2009), Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl
Dreaming (2014), Feathers (2007) and I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This
(1994), Nikki Grime’s Bronx Masquerade (2002), Sharon G. Flake’s The
Skin I’m In (1998), Sapphire’s Push (1996) and Rosa Guy’s The Music of
Summer (1992). As all the literary texts investigated here deal primarily

with young characters psychologically mutilated and displaced by internalised racism, the ability to tell their own stories, to become their own
translators, in their own black tongue, affords them a chance to begin
anew. And as some of these texts (e.g. Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade
and Sapphire’s Push) are informed by an autobiographical form of ‘Life
Writing’ or ‘Life Stories’, they allow these young characters to recount
their own realities, as well as determine the course of their own otherness
from an authorial position. The chapter also discusses the significance of
the focus texts as a set of historical records representing America’s ‘new
collective history’, as well as the issue of paradigmatic optimism prevalent
in C&YA literature.
When I first started working on this project in the early 2012, the
shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American teenager
from Florida, by a neighbourhood watchman George Zimmerman got
everyone’s attention and sparked public debates and racial tensions across
the USA. Once again, America has been made to collectively examine and
ask the very essential racial question—Do black lives matter? Feeling threatened by a ‘possible intruder’, 28-year-old Zimmerman shot to death the
hooded Martin who, as it turned out, bore nothing but a bag of candies
and a can of iced tea. Later that year, Jordan Davis, another 17-year-old,
also from Florida, got shot in a parking lot of a convenience store yet again
by another white man for ‘playing the music too loud’. And just recently,
on 9 August 2014, the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African


INTRODUCTION

15

American, and a subsequent acquittal of a white police officer involved, literally put Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the whole America, on fire. Weeks
and months after, more cases of police brutality and racial profiling, particularly those targeting minorities, have been reported. Eric Garner, Dante
Parker, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott—the list goes on—are

all part of the ‘statistics’. Almost daily, as reported in most papers around
the country, black lives are made insignificant, taken away, nullified—
“About twice a week, or every three or four days, an African American has
been killed by a white police officer” (Wilkerson, 2014). These incidences
reveal that how white and black kids are treated, profiled, incarcerated
or even killed by the police in America is not proportionately matched—
“Even though white Americans outnumber black Americans fivefold,
black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed
when they encounter the police in the US, and black teenagers are far
likelier to be killed by police than white teenagers” (Wilkerson, 2014). For
such small missteps, the life of African Americans can be taken away from
them—for good. All these examples show that ‘race, racism and racialisation’, for which this study is arguing, have always been an integral part of
the American landscape, and yet they tend to get swept under the ‘postracial, colourblind’ carpet. These cases of racial injustice illustrate real scenarios of everyday life of black kids in postcivil rights America, how their
lives are, as put simply by Younge (2014b)—“dispensable, despised, discarded”. Whilst these are not examples of internalised racism themselves,
they are examples of behaviours or snapshots of the malaise in the society
that arguably have contributed to its cause, making one ultimately fall
victim to his or her own prosecution. As commented upon by Wilkerson
(2014), “The devaluation of black life in America is as old as the nation
itself and has yet to be confronted.” When your image has always been
historically and systematically distorted, discredited and devalued in the
collective imagination, or painted as threatening and violent as shown in
the above cases, as well as in the focus texts through their young African
American characters, eventually you start to view yourself through the
white gaze, the image seen is, therefore, distorted, ugly and inferior. The
feeling of self-loathing, consequently, is made inevitable. By systematically
examining the issue of internalised racism and its detrimental psychological effects, particularly towards the young and vulnerable, as portrayed in
contemporary C&YA fiction, this book is pushing ‘race’ to the fore, thus
making it relevant, immediate and real.

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