A Week of Comics
At the beginning of August, I got to spend an entire week in the Cartooning Studio, an intensive workshop for adults at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. What fun!
My goal was to further develop the graphic novel that my daughter Yunhee and I have been creating, a fictionalization of her middle school experience – being teased, loving to read and draw manga (Japanese comics), and learning to stand firm in her identity, including being Korean and adopted. It’s called Manga Girl.
Here’s one of the images I went in with:
and here’s what I came out with, after the inspired teaching of the young, phenomenally talented staff (biggest change was switching from marker to brush line):
I also completed the outline of the story and 13 spreads of thumbnails (small sketched layouts of double pages). Now it’s in my daughter’s hands for scripting.
Some of the interns posted an account of the entire workshop on the CCS Schulz Library blog, from Day 1, through Day 5 (my project is mentioned – and that’s me in the turquoise shirt).
Read MoreThe Different One: Racial Identity Development
“Yoh-roh-bun-dul, ahn-nyung-ha-shim-nee-ka.” I open many of my school presentations with this photo and a greeting in Korean: “Hello, everyone. This is my picture. When I was seven years old, I moved to Korea. From then I learned two languages and two cultures. This is my eighth birthday.”
After I’ve translated the introduction, I go on to share a little about my childhood: how conspicuous I was as a tall, light-skinned, light-haired, large-nosed, round-eyed American, growing up in South Korea in the 1960s when few foreigners lived in the country. When I went to the market, a crowd of people would gather around me, marveling at how different I looked. It was kind of like being a princess, I tell the children.
This early experience provides an ideal segue for a discussion of difference. “I was treated as if I was special. What do you think I learned about being different? That it was fabulous! It was certainly working well for me. But is this how we always treat people who are different?”
I ask the students how many of them have ever been “the different one” – because of skin color, body size, learning style, language, the only boy, the only girl, and so on. Usually most children in the classroom raise their hands. “How did that feel? What happened to you?” I ask. We talk about being left out, being teased, being called names. I’ve had this discussion with children as young as first and second grade.
With older children, I then go on to share a simple explanation of Racial Identity Development – how each of us comes to understand race and to think about our own race:
“As we grow, each one of us gets ideas of who we are by the mirrors that are held up for us, including mirrors about race. You’re having this experience right now. If you’re one of many, like one of the boys on a soccer team, you don’t think much about being a boy. But if you’re one of a few, like the only girl on the soccer team, you think about it all the time, because everybody tells you you’re a girl, you’re different.
“Race is like that, too. In the United States, if you’re white, you usually don’t notice it because the majority of people are white. But if you’re a person of color, you tend to notice it a lot more. Everyone reminds you all the time that you’re the different one. So our different experiences of race give us different ideas and different ways of thinking about race.
“When I was young, the mirror of responses of other people to my difference – ‘You’re American! You’re American!’ – made me notice that I was white. Do you think that my friend Ok-soon, on my left in the photo, thought much about being Korean? No, because everyone around her had similar hair, skin color, and features. She blended in.”
Any racial experience in the lives of older children can be an opportunity to introduce the concept of racial identity development, individually or with a group, with lead-in questions such as:
– Do you notice skin color? When do you notice skin color? Why do you think certain skin colors stand out more? (Usually when a person is different from the group.)
– Do people with majority skin color stand out? Do they think about their skin color much? Why or why not? (When you blend in with the group, your skin color is taken for granted. It’s the norm.)
– How do people get treated when they are seen as different?
Racial Identity Development has much to recommend it as an introduction for young people to the topic of racism:
1. It’s a non-threatening approach that doesn’t automatically provoke defensiveness.
2. It sets up a level playing field by including everyone in the discussion and the groups that are being examined.
3. It offers a way to get white kids thinking about themselves racially, to counteract the silence and invisibility of race in the white community.
4. It’s a natural segue into the concept of socialization, including in-groups and out-groups.
For an in-depth explanation of racial identity development, see Beverly Daniel Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
Read MoreRace Talk with Young Kids: How to Start
When our Korean-born daughter was four or five, one of her favorite adults was Hyo-Jung, a young Korean-American friend.
At some point during each visit with our daughter, Hyo-Jung would lift a strand of her glossy, straight black hair, then a similar strand of Yunhee’s, and sing, “Same hair!” The game never failed to delight Yunhee and I’m sure helped forge a deep bond with this lovely woman who looked like her, as none of her immediate family members did.
Hyo-Jung was simply pointing out the obvious, in a relaxed, playful, affirming tone. For people who’ve been dealing with race every day of their lives, as many people of color do in the U.S., this might not be a difficult feat; it’s an everyday topic.
But research shows that, by some counts, “75% of white families never or almost never talk about race with their children.” Obviously, if statistics like that cover your experience, breaching the topic may not come out relaxed, playful, and affirming the first few times. But it’s a good standard to reach for.
Here are some first steps for talking about race with very young children:
Start with the assumption that our children DO notice race. Just because they don’t appear to based on what they say doesn’t mean they’re not categorizing. Many studies have documented that children – and even infants as young as four months – detect differences in skin color.
Where in the world did we get the idea that they don’t see it? Children are natural sorters. They see, and we teach them, the “green car, pink pig, yellow flower, red ball, brown shirt …” but all of a sudden when the color is on skin, it’s invisible?
Of course, one of the reasons that children don’t voice their observations is that the adults around them have given them implicit but clear messages that it’s not to be talked about.
Include colors of skin and shapes of features in sorting games, as naturally as referring to the grass, the cat or the ball. Color identification, comparing and contrasting, alike and different (“Same hair!”). That’s all that very young children are seeing. Those categorizations don’t yet come with the charged complexity or value judgments that older people bring to the topic.
Tailor the conversation to children’s ages and developmental stages. As with so many other topics, adjust the amount and type of information as children mature, and as needed in response to their questions and comments.
And, picture books are a great way to introduce the topic.
Next up, six titles that can start the conversation.
Further reading:
Here’s a terrific short article, “5 Tips for Talking About Racism with Kids,” including a Q&A with Dr. Beverly Tatum, president of Spelman College and author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on racial identity development and race conversations. (My only quibble is that to accurately reflect the content of the piece, the title should say “Race,” not “Racism.” Talking about racism, though it can overlap, is another topic for another post.)
Yay
Voices of Adoption
