Reading into the Next Generation (This is not about Critical Race Theory)

So I read to my child on the regular and we’ve been reading chapter books together for, well, many years, at this point. I have a, well, lets call it a “strong affinity” for the classics. So we have read our way through Oz and most of the way through Narnia, and we’ve read a number of books from the turn of the century, where the specific century is the 1900s.

We are, in fact, reading a children’s series from this period now. We got through the first book unscathed, but we started the second book recently, and I don’t think we made it past the first page when we met the Black cook of the household. And he was, and I am not making this up, basically apologizing to the heroine for the fact that he was Black. And this involved a buttload of context to make sense of. Our heroine who is around 7 years old is horrified that he is apologizing for being himself and hurriedly assures him that he’s fine just the way he is. So in that sense, the book is fairly progressive in the way that you’d expect from a New England born and raised author at the turn of the century, but the society is definitely stratified in a different way than my child has experienced.

So we did context. We talked about how some people don’t think Black people are the same as White people; like their skin color somehow indicates something about their brains or their bodies. We talked about how we know with science that it simply isn’t true and that we have access to more information and more exposure to people of different colors so we get to understand these things in a way that people in our past simply didn’t. The child said that they learned about slavery in school. The child asked, “What if there still people today who thought that?”

And I did not say, “They’d be wrong and stupid.” I just said, “There are people who think that today and they’re wrong. We know that they’re wrong. We’ve seen it demonstrated over and over.”

Then I explained about internalized self-hatred based on stereotypes, like how the Black cook devalues himself because he’s heard for so long that he’s not worthy that he’s come to believe that. And that’s why it’s so important that we remind ourselves and each other that we are worthy. Because those voices that tell us we’re less than have an impact. We come to believe that we’re less than. And we tell people we’re less than, because that’s what we truly believe, but it’s lie that can’t be allowed to stand unchallenged. And our heroine does the right thing here; she may not have the words to say, “You are valued. You are important. Your characteristics have value. Nothing about you makes you less worthy or less important as a human being than anyone else in this story.” but in her way, she does express that.

Then society comes in like a little bitch and reminds the Black cook that he’s just the help and entitled only the grace that the households deigns to bestow upon him.

This series is going to be super challenging for us. After dealing with the racial issues, we moved directly into class issues and the stratification of the household when snooty aunt comes to stay and believes herself and the members of her family to be upper snoot and her niece’s husband’s extended family, who is living there, to be white trash.

Shit gonna get real in here.

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At some point ‘ll have to start a discussion thread about the value of reading literature like this, which is very dated in attitude. The stories and themes of these books are timeless and the characterization is on point, but they are hopelessly mired in their own time. I always struggle with this. Pride and Prejudice is very much tied to its social mores and cultural context, but it doesn’t feel as charged as some of these other books. I always go back in my mind to Trilby, a book I had to tap out of because it was so antisemitic that I just couldn’t get past it. Oliver Twist, on the other hand, is also horribly antisemitic and still very readable, even today. I just can’t isolate what makes Oliver Twist a classic that’s still popular today (as popular as Dickens ever is, I guess) and beyond the word Svengali, no one knows anything about Trilby.

So am I doing my kid a favor by reading these books that have fallen into obscurity in part because of cultural shifts. Is it helping to open up and have these discussions? Or is it exposing the kid to bad ideas that I never want the child to internalize?