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I agree 110%!

Your post makes me think of Mildred D. Taylor’s 1997 ALAN acceptance speech, in which she grapples with writing scenes and using language that is potentially painful for readers in her historical fiction about the Logan family:

“I am hurt that any child would ever be hurt by my words. As a parent I understand not wanting a child to hear painful words, but as a parent I do not understand not wanting a child to learn about a history that is part of America, a history about a family representing millions of families that are strong and loving and who remain united and strong, despite the obstacles they face.

In the writing of my most recent work, titled The Land, I have found myself hesitating about using words that would have been spoken in the late 1800s because of my concern about our “politically correct” society. But just as I have had to be honest with myself in the telling of all my stories, I realize I must be true to the feelings of the people about whom I write and true to the stories told. My stories might not be “politically correct,” so there will be those who will be offended, but as we all know, racism is offensive.

It is not polite, and it is full of pain.” http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/spring98/taylor.html

The crucial difference is that you’re writing about the hero of the story holding and expressing racist perspective about , while Taylor is depicting white antagonists in the African-American Logan family’s. I’m eager to hear what others have to say about this.

Thanks, Betsy Bird. Who on earth is reading The Hired Girl and thinking, “That Joan — she really *gets* people”?

I’ve seen variations of this conversation in many places recently, and at bottom I’m not sure the question of this post’s title is really the one being asked. (Or at least, not the one being asked by people raising concerns about the treatment of prejudiced viewpoints in various children’s books.) To me, the question is one that can be more difficult to articulate– not whether a text should include bigoted or otherwise objectionable views, but *how* those views are presented and contextualized within the story. And often, that reading of “how” depends a great deal on one’s own perspective and experiences.

For example, my reading of Joan’s attempt to convert her Jewish employers is informed by my own experiences as a Jewish woman, and also by my knowledge of many other such stories– and the way that conversion is often used as a motif in books written by non-Jews about Jewish experiences. (One could call it a trope.) If I, in sharing my reading, raise issues with Joan’s conversion attempt, then the counter-argument that this element is historically accurate and true to Joan’s character doesn’t really address the issue of context that I’m raising. The question isn’t just about an author’s decision to include prejudiced views and actions, but about *how* the author’s contextual decisions often reflect views the author may or may not be aware of. It seems worth noting that these discussions occur most often in cases where authors are writing about experiences outside of their own identities.

I think the related question– about whether writers should have faith in young readers’ ability to negotiate contextual clues and not take prejudiced views or actions at face value– also falls within this framework. Often, what I see is writers (and critics) discounting the perspectives of young readers who are able to contextualize the *author’s* viewpoint in ways that go against a dominant reading.

For anyone in these discussions who hasn’t read it, I highly recommend Toni Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. See, for example, her reading of Huck Finn. Many might argue that Twain offered an accurate portrayal of the racism of his time period, and that he trusted his readers to see that this is a commentary on racism and not an endorsement of such views. But Morrison’s reading gets at the deeper question I see being asked in these discussions– about how Twain’s decisions as a writer reflect on his own, biased, imagination.

Betsy, while I appreciate you taking this on, you take an argument in which I question one line I one book, in the context of a Newbery Award discussion, to suggest that such a questioning means I distrust child readers In toto, and any controversial passages at all.

We have to be able to talk about issues of race in children’s books, as passionately as we do about the rest of it, without making this a “Black or white” discussion.

The one question I think we can start with is: why did you put the question about what a Native kid reading the book might think as your last concern? Why aren’t we all making that our first concern? Well, because we’re centering our whiteness, is why. Because our entire society centers whiteness, is why. Because we want to get derailed in BUT ARE WE ALLOWED TO EVEN WRITE THIS (clutches pearls clutches pearls). You’re allowed to write any darn thing you want. But that means we, the critical adult audience, are also allowed to then ask hard, uncomfortable questions about that thing you wrote. That’s just part of the deal.

I find that, often, one part of this argument is – you must be the kind of person who only wants NICE things to happen in fiction. You must not care about THE TRUTH. To which, of course, the only response is: depends on who you’re asking to tell you the truth. Let’s take a look at Tim Tingle’s HOW I BECAME A GHOST. There’s a book that is raw and unblinking in its portrayal of what happened to the Choctaw people as they were forced onto the Trail of Tears. Would anyone who has read it say that it is “sanitized” or “nice” version of history? Certainly not. And yet examples like this rarely come up in these conversations about “REAL history isn’t gentle!” Yes, marginalized people know this more than anyone.

I’d also come back to your final line: kid readers, like all of us, can reject something as untrue and still be impacted by it. Sarah raises a good point – “historically accurate, tho!!” doesn’t address the larger issues of what happens when a reader in the here and now interacts with this text. To say that they will simply say, “Well, that’s how it was back then!” and go about their merry way doesn’t address that, in many cases, that’s how it still is today.

I would love to trust readers, too, but trust itself rests on respect, and that respect has not been there for so many people/peoples who have been othered by the media, whether we’re talking about children’s books or films, or whether we’re talking about the past or the present day.

Did anyone click on the link that Jonathan provided? Not the one to my site but the one to his Google search? I think it actually makes my point. Go look. The first three images in the first line (Men/Women/Male Native) are stereotypical–but more important–they are costumes that people can get for Halloween. Because THAT is what comes up first, I think it tells us a lot about what people know about respect for Native people–or rather that they do NOT respect Native people. Maybe they dress up that way out of ignorance, or out of a misguided sense of what it means to honor a people, but I do think it speaks volumes about why we cannot trust the reader.

Once you’re at the point where we’re looking at a particularly book (that someone has already made the decision to publish and promote) and a character and a time period, it certainly makes sense for that particular character to have particular misconceptions and bigotries built into her way of seeing the world.

But when it starts to feel like the primary role of American Indians or people of color in the body of juvenile historical fiction is to provoke white people’s prejudices (or demonstrate what a hero they are for NOT holding those prejudices), or to spur white people to action… that’s a problem for me. When I find myself getting frustrated and exhausted by the way male authors write about women, I can retreat to a big pile of books by women, about women, to reset my internal expectations. (And I hope that men are reading them, too.) Native kids (and non-Native kids who walk around in our current, still-racist world, as Debbie points out) have a MUCH smaller pile of books to resort to–far too few for a kid who’s a prolific reader.

So I guess my question would be “how much more historical fiction about white people do we really need?”

So I guess my question would be “how much more historical fiction about white people do we really need?”

I would argue that stories about lower-class white characters that do more than play on poor-but-good stereotypes, especially in certain historical time periods, are still necessary. The rampant fetishization of the Victorian and Edwardian upper class among adults interested in the time period (just look at vast swaths of steampunk or some of the uglier ends of Downton Abbey fandom), to the detriment of discussions of poverty and the working classes that made that kind of living possible, suggests to me that books like The Hired Girl still absolutely have a place. And as a Catholic child who was often frustrated by depictions of nominal Protestant Christianity in books (The Baby-Sitters Club and Little Women both come to mind as examples that confused and surprised me), the presence of an explicitly Catholic main character like Joan, however imperfect she is, would have meant a great deal to me.

Are those needs as pressing as the need for books that reflect greater racial diversity and respect for audiences of colour? No, I don’t think so. Do those books need to include lines like the one in question here? No, I don’t think so, either. But I question the notion that we’ve exhausted historical fiction about white characters entirely, when there are intersectional issues that remain underwritten and underpublished.

Particularly because my next book tells the story of a prejudiced white character being temporarily fostered by a black family, this discussion has been close to home for me. I felt like it was appropriate to put the character’s assumptions about black people right out front and to make it clear from whence they came (her grandmother) – but I felt like it was equally important to correct those assumptions within the text. Maybe that’s me not trusting my readers to get it right, but it’s like that comedian who quit because he wasn’t sure people were laughing at the right part of his jokes — you don’t want to hold up something to ridicule (or, at least *I* don’t) and let a reader walk away with the idea that the idea is correct. To my mind, there are indeed subtleties in this – racism is insidious in its pervasiveness, as is sexism, etc.. I know it’s gauche for writers to “send messages” in our work, and we have all recently heard and rehashed the big argument against having an “diversity agenda” in writing, but I believe we all write with purpose, if we are wise. There are choices to be made in subtly asserting our beliefs and gently righting misconceptions, as it were… And all writers make a choice to acknowledge this or not, I guess, based on what we feel is important.

Books like THE HIRED GIRL, which have a lot to like in them despite the issues, provide the means for us to learn how to be fans of problematic things, to learn how to listen and sit with the discomfort of maybe not catching things which upset other people, and for me, at least, to be a better writer. I know thinking about this won’t help me produce a perfect book – good luck with that, huh? – but a more thoughtful book in this world of reflexive, unrepentant and systemic prejudice can only be a good thing.

[…] are some lively debates going on at Heavy Medal and Fuse #8 about Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, a presumed favorite for 2016 Newbery consideration. […]

I’m with the writer of this article all the way. Ms. Bird is correct that falsification of history (and our ancestors’ sensibilities) for the sake of contemporary political correctness not only shortchanges the readers, it robs them of the opportunity to know where mankind has been and how far we’ve come. It’s one of my peeves with so much “historical” fiction. It isn’t historical at all. It’s contemporary with decorations of older superficial details.
Writing for young readers is a responsibility, and writing about other times and places for any age is a greater responsibility still. Tell the characters’ truth.

Sure! To be clear, I don’t think the answer to my question is “none.” But as people who are outside the Newbery committee, we have the luxury of looking at this particular text as a part of a larger field of literature. My first, lizard-brain, instinctive pushback to “but it’s historically accurate!” is often “but this might be the only line a student reads about American Indians all year!”, and that’s a problem that this book alone can’t solve, and that I don’t expect it to.

I do consider plucky lower-class historical white girls to be overrepresented (without having actually done a count), but you’re right that many of them appear in poor-but-good morality tales, and I’d believe that few of them are explicitly and accurately Catholic.

Betsy, I responded above in defense against your two paragraphs starting “Does it come right out…” as I felt that was putting words in my mouth, but perhaps I was only choosing to take personal offense. I do think that’s skewing the argument I was trying to make at Heavy Medal. If we can put that aside, I agree with nearly everything you say, except for your final assessment of how well this all works in HIRED GIRL. I’ve tried to explain why here: http://blogs.slj.com/heavymedal/2015/10/15/the-hired-girl/#comment-218683

Into this discussion, and by no means to turn it into a discussion about something else, I just want to interject that we need more Roman Catholic characters in children’s lit. When I first read The Hired Girl I cringed for Joan’s behavior regularly (who didn’t?), but one of my first thoughts was that I couldn’t believe she *was* Roman Catholic. It blew my socks off! She’s the main character too, not a secondary character! All through reading the book I felt grateful for that.

Thank you, Betsy. This was a beautifully, thoughtfully written post. I feel like a lot of the conversation occurring on Heavy Medal is “But what will the children think?!” – which is the *exact* argument challengers used when attempting to ban two books from my library in the last couple years (Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty and Monster).

Thanks, Nina. Naturally I meant no offense to you. I should note that the term “it comes right out” is a screenwriting phrase I picked up from my husband about elements of a storyline that can be removed without detriment to the whole.

Thank you for your thoughtful and swift reply. My comment was a bit too much tangent for me to be comfortable with, in retrospect, and so in interest of not derailing the conversation further than I already have (and I apologize for that), I just want to acknowledge that I’ve read your answer and wish you a good day.

Thank you, Tanita! That’s exactly what I felt when I first read Debbie Reese’s post about this: “the discomfort of maybe not catching things which upset other people.” I had no memory of the passage, so I’m grateful to other people for pointing it out. It still surprises me that I can breeze by passages that might be hurtful to others, because, as a librarian, I think it’s part of my job to help kids read critically, and to show them it’s okay to be critical of things they like. I hope conversations like this will make me a better librarian, too.

This post focuses on how young people might read irony in a text– that is, whether they recognize the ironic distance between author and character (which I still don’t think is the issue those objecting to the passage are really raising.) But I just wanted to add that I think the dynamics of how young readers interact with books, and with the prejudices in them, is one of the central themes in The Hired Girl itself. Joan is first and foremost a reader. Her knowledge of the world comes partly through the books she reads, and she also, increasingly, uses her knowledge of the world to read against those beloved books. This back and forth of contextualization and re-contextualization includes her attitudes and conceptions about Jewish people, for example, and about prejudice. She uses the knowledge she’s gleaned from Ivanhoe to try to understand the Jewish people she meets, and then uses her experiences with the Jewish people she knows to contextualize attitudes presented in Ivanhoe.

But I think the picture of reading included within The Hired Girl also points to some of the problems people are addressing. As Debbie notes, this work of contextualization depends on the other experiences with which one reads against a text. Joan’s reading when she’s at the farm is different than her reading once she’s lived with the Rosenbachs. For most non-Native readers in the US, those other experiences include a litany of misrepresentations in books and media, little accurate knowledge, and few relationships with actual Native people. When it comes to the presentation of Jewish people in this book, I would also argue there are many images and associations Schlitz herself has absorbed from books like Ivanhoe, which maintain their hold on the imagination despite real knowledge of Jewish people. This includes the supposedly “good” stereotype of the idealized Rebecca. I think books can work on the imagination even when we have the means to put them in context.

As Angie says, all of this also continues to center the perspective of the reader who is encountering people and prejudices from the outside– not the reader whose context is their own very real, painful experiences as the target of those prejudices. Books like Roll of Thunder center the child *experiencing* prejudice, which is different from a book that focalizes a character with prejudiced views. In the later case, again, I don’t think the question is one of accuracy or even inclusion, but of how the author treats and understands both those views, and the reader who has experience with them that the author lacks.

I don’t believe Betsy is suggesting you distrust child readers in toto, just that you distrust them about this.

I'm not the author of the post, but I thought you might like to know that Wrede has commented on the controversy.

http://amaresu.dreamwidth.org/375317.html

Did I see that clearly? Did she write "Lewis and White" expedition? Doesn't she mean "Lewis and Clark?" Why did she Freudian slip "white"?

I just want to scream every time I see that line about "prepping the land for human habitation." Because American Indians weren't living there, and weren't even really human! They were just helping out before the real colonists arrived!

Just want to say I've read your blog regularly since I discovered it last week and although I'm primarily Jamaican, my grandfather was a quarter Native American. I really dislike the idea of the book.

I understand that a writer of alternate history has a right to create her own story. But I think a publisher should be quite aware of "the other" when publishing a story like this.

I mean...it's okay if this author creates a story where people find and discover an unexplored continent. But why name it Columbia? And why find an alternate America? Couldn't she make an alternate Antartica? Why did she have to create an America with no original native peoples there? Does that kind of thing even happen? She should've unnamed the continent or included the natives or gone to Antartica or another planet. Alternate history is not about "literally" -- I mean in literature-- erasing a people who are already greatly decimated and in many cases destroyed. To me, it hints at a deeper issue: whites simply wishing folks of color simply were not here messing up their (the whites) perfect land.

What gives you the right to tell the author what they should have done or not done? She has the right to do what she wants, name the country anything she likes, place the story anywhere.

Anonymous,

Of course, Wrede can do anything she wants to. She did, in fact, do what she wanted to.

This is not, for me, a question of "rights" to do this or that. I can offer some fighting words and say "I have the right to say anything I want to about her book" but that is only a fight about "rights" and that won't get us very far.