Tag Archives: white privilege

The Boychick’s Bookshelf: The Paper Bag Princess

Welcome to The Boychick’s Bookshelf! In this series, I review children’s books of interest to those who want to raise children free from and opposed to kyriarchy. These reviews will focus on books which showcase stories and lives beyond the dominant culture of white straight middle-class families, or which contain explicitly anti-kyriarchy messages (anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-sexism, anti-heterosexism, anti-cissexism, anti-violence, anti-colonialization, and so on).

The Paper Bag Princess

The Story

“Elizabeth was a beautiful princess”, engaged to the snobbily-drawn Ronald — both of whom appear to be prepubescent — when a dragon comes, burns down her castle (and burns off her clothes! — at which illustration the Boychick accurately points out “she has no nipples!”), and whisks away her fiancé. Elizabeth dons the closest thing to a garment she has left — a paper bag — and sets off to find and rescue Ronald. When she tracks down the dragon’s lair (by following the trail of horse bones), she tricks the dragon with fawning praise into using up all his fire and then flying around the world so fast he promptly collapses asleep. The dragon now unarmed and unarousable, she slips past and frees the prince. Rather than being appropriately appreciative, Ronald declares her a mess, and tells her to come back after getting cleaned up when she is once again “a real princess”. Elizabeth retorts that his appearance is that of “a real prince”, but he is “a bum.” The final scene shows her skipping away — happily alone, still clothed in her paper bag – into the sunset, and we learn “They didn’t get married after all.”

Intended Audience

Elizabeth and Ronald are both white, blond, and (obviously) class privileged — at least until Elizabeth’s castle burns down — so the annoyingly usual expected audience of middle class white families applies. More specifically, The Paper Bag Princess seems aimed at white girls who are already familiar with the princess narrative, but I wouldn’t say that’s necessary: while the Boychick hadn’t yet been exposed to that narrative, it didn’t hinder his enjoyment of the book.

Changes in the telling

My main problem with The Paper Bag Princess — apart from the white, blond characters — is when Elizabeth declares Ronald to be “a bum”. Although the meaning of “bum” as “buttocks” predates that of “tramp”/homeless/lazy person (and let’s just pause a moment to marvel and be disgusted at the conflation of “homeless” and “lazy”), and outside the USA the bottom definition reigns supreme (if, thanks to US cultural colonialism, not exclusive), its primary use in the USA is lazy/homeless, particularly in the “you are a” construction. (In fact, the Boychick protests when I use bum for butt — it’s the one Britishism he actively rejects.) And as long as that strong implication of, and conflation of, “lazy hobo” is there, I am not willing to use it as an insult. Thus in our readings, we’ve changed it to any number of other insults, including jerk, butthead, or — my Doctor Who fanatic’s favorite — “giant eyeball“.

My only other concern with the book, which I can’t do anything about, is the way Elizabeth uses flattery to outwit the dragon. I love that she defeats him nonviolently, with only her intelligence and words, but it bothers me a bit that she uses such a stereotypically feminine way of doing it. “Is it true” she asks, that he can burn up ten forests/fly around the world in ten seconds? And then, when he does, she plays every bit of the easily-impressed femme and proclaims it “magnificent”. While I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with what she did, I do wish that she could have used her quick wit to out-think the dragon in some other way, if only to show girls that relying (even in such a fabulously subversive manner) on the tropes of femininity isn’t the only way to get what they want.

Right on!

The above caveats aside, I adore the messages of this book: intelligence and character are far more important than appearance, vanity will lose you your lunch (or post-castle-entrée snack), don’t stick around with someone who can’t appreciate you for who you are, girls are entirely capable of doing the rescuing, and the princess doesn’t need to end up with the prince to be happy. It is, essentially, a second wave feminist wet-dream of a kids’ book, and I love it for that, even as I acknowledge its concurrent problems.

But does it appeal? The Boychick’s take

The Boychick really likes The Paper Bag Princess, though I will say that seems to have more to do with the dragon than with the feminist messages. His absolute favorite part is first whispering and then yelling “Hey dragon!” with Elizabeth, as she checks that he’s well and truly out of it before freeing Ronald — I would not read this book with him any time I needed him to be especially quiet! But it seems to be just right for the stage he’s at: enough of a story to be engaging, but not so long and involved he loses track.

Buy it, Consider it, Skip it, or Compost it?

Consider it. (Link goes to Powell’s; or buy through Amazon.) The white leading characters, the use of “bum” as a derogative (again, given that we are USian and it doesn’t really mean arse to the Boychick), and Elizabeth’s use of flattery stop me from offering it my highest rating, but I do still love and recommend it. And, as demonstrated by how involved the Boychick gets, it is simply fun, and as willing as I am to share with him not-so-fun selections, to have one that is so upbeat that also carries excellent messages I find worth the imperfections.

Your Take — and Your Chance!

Have you read The Paper Bag Princess? What do you think, and what do your kids think? What other books with strong female protagonists and subversion of the princess narrative do you know of, and would you recommend them?

AND! Because I was sent a copy by a fabulous reader (thank you!) after buying one myself and before taking it off my wish list, I have an extra — which means one of you gets to have a copy. Simply comment below to the effect of “please enter me!” by 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time (UTC – 7) Friday the 27th of August 2010, and I will draw a name at random the next day. Winner will be contacted via the email used to comment, and will provide me with shipping information.

Anyone, anywhere in the world is welcome to enter — I only ask you to refrain if you already own a copy.

———————–

Purchases made through the Powell’s and Amazon links offered here support this blog and compensate — quite minimally — my time and work as a blogger. I encourage you to support local, independent booksellers whenever possible, but if you’re to order online anyway, why not support an independent blogger?

Have a book you want me to review? Suggestions are always welcome, and books sent to me via my Wish List receive priority review status and are an excellent way to support and encourage the Boychick’s Bookshelf project.

49 Comments | Posted on 21 August 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, The Boychick's Bookshelf | Tags: feminists don't laugh, Gender, gender roles, white privilege

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Dear White Lactivists

Dear White Lactivists,

Racism is not our prop.

Racism is not dead, it is not gone, it is not a thing of the past, it is not almost eradicated, it is not someone else’s problem, and it is not something we are subject to (please eliminate the phrase “reverse racism” from your vocabulary posthaste).

Racism is not our prop. It is not ours to hold up to compare breastfeeding discrimination against. It is not ours to make analogies with (“getting kicked off a plane due to breastfeeding discrimination is just like how black people used to not be able to eat in the same restaurants as white people!”¹). Here’s the thing: the very fact that we think racism is ours to appropriate, to pin down and treat as dead and gone and harmless now, is a sign of racism’s continued existence.

Please, read about white privilege (we have it), the definition of racism (we are all guilty of it), and the state of anti-racist activism since Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yes, there has been anti-racist activism since 1968. Because believe it or not, racism didn’t end after a declaration of a dream or with the death of a dreamer.

If you take away nothing else from this letter, please, please remember that there are many lactivists of color, and we need them, and we need to center them in our mutual activism (because for decades we have been excluding them from our circles), and when we deny and erase and ignore and perpetuate the racism they face every damn day, we are driving them away, shoving them to the margins again, and saying “Your experiences don’t matter, your lived reality doesn’t matter, and if you care about breastfeeding then you should just shut up and sit down and take this degradation of your humanity.” Furthermore, we miss out on learning about — and thus lose the opportunity to dismantle! — all the ways that racism and breastfeeding discrimination interact and reinforce each other. Which means we are failing at lactivism.

Now, if we are extremely careful, and extremely respectful, it might, sometimes, be possible to draw parallels between anti-racism work and anti-breastfeeding-discrimination work. Because while specific oppressions differ, marginalization often functions the same (or similar) regardless of the topic — but again, it’s not as simple as saying “breastfeeding discrimination is just like racism!”, because that’s simply not true. Breastfeeding discrimination, like racism, is a social justice issue; it is a systemic oppression, with aspects both institutional and social; it needs to end; and everyone, breastfeeding or not, white or nonwhite, ought to care about these topics. But breastfeeding discrimination is limited to a specific time in a person’s life; one’s breastfeeding status is not visible in every moment, as it is for most (though not all) nonwhite people; and perhaps most fundamental, breastfeeding (or not) is an act, whereas race is an intrinsic, immutable part of who someone is². To say breastfeeding discrimination and racism are the same is to display a bewildering ignorance of the nature of both.

So please, my fellow white lactivists, I am begging you: stop it. Find other ways to raise awareness of the importance of breastfeeding, of the problems with discrimination against breastfeeding. Find other ways to make the emotional impact you desire. It may take you a few moments of thought before speaking, a few weeks or months to retrain your thoughts until it’s not the first analogy you reach for, but trust me: when fewer women are driven away from lactivism, when more babies are breastfed, when our common humanity is recognized and honored, it will be so worth it.

Sincerely,

A White Lactivist

This and all else in quotation marks in this post are paraphrases; I am not quoting or linking to specific examples, because the meme is so widespread: to point to one or two instances would be to pretend that this doesn’t happen again and again and again and again in white lactivist circles. This is not a “them” problem, something that only some white lactivists do and therefore something only some white lactivists need to care about: no, this is very much an us problem, because even if we haven’t done it, we have allowed it to happen and to continue. ↩
Being a person-who-breastfeeds might be a very important part of one’s identity, and I am not denying that; I am saying, though, that that identity is not created or solidified until one does the act of breastfeeding — whereas one’s race is more or less assigned at birth, through no will of one’s own. ↩

27 Comments | Posted on 16 August 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: activism, attachment parenting, breastfeeding, Privilege, Race, racism, USA, white privilege

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Quick hit: Race affects everyone

I’ve heard it before. I’ve said it before. I base my writing and my activism and my parenting on this fundamental truth: race affects everyone’s life.

Still, when I heard it from Pam Spaulding¹ in a BlogHer session, there was that moment of frisson, that “what?” that comes from my privilege, from the belief drilled into my every neuron from birth on that race is about them, those brown people over there, not me, I don’t have to worry about race, race doesn’t affect my life directly.

Years of working to rid myself of it, and still that moment appears. Still. Maybe always.

Perhaps there is no getting rid of that moment completely. Most of the time, now, such a phrase feels right at home in my ears, familiar in my heart. Race affects everyone. White people have white privilege. I am infected with racism. My soul nods — not because it loves these things, but because it knows them, now, knows the knapsack I was granted at birth (was grafted on me at birth), and works daily to become familiar with its contents.

But still, sometimes, when least expected, someone will reference, offhand, the thing on my back — and I startle. Just for a moment, but I’d forgotten. I can forget. Everything in my culture wants me to forget, wants me to stop talking about my knapsack, wants me to stop pointing out the emperor’s. And sometimes it succeeds.

Maybe I can’t get rid of that moment completely, but I can change what comes next: of course it’s there. Of course it’s real. Of course race affects everyone. Of course race is a part of my every moment. I can recognize that frisson for what it is: the protestations and self-protections of the privilege inside me. It is not truth: it is what kyriarchy would have me think true, so that I might propagate racism, scatter its poisoned pollen everywhere I go.

I cannot counter that which I do not acknowledge exists, and so I say, again: I live with white privilege in every moment; race affects me; race affects you.

Race affects everyone.

Paraphrase: “…because race affects my life. Well, race affects everyone’s life.” ↩

8 Comments | Posted on 12 August 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: BlogHer, Privilege, Race, racism, white privilege

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Quick Hit on Hair: Not-White Is Not Other

Black folk and hair — and more so, white folk and Black folk’s hair — is a touchy (ha. ha.) damn subject. Because of the white supremacist culture I live in¹, I barely have any vocabulary for talking about Black hair, especially in its natural state. What vocabulary I do have that is appropriate and non-offensive I owe to writers like Tami Harris; what vocabulary I have that is incomplete or inappropriate, I owe to kyriarchy, white ignorance, and my own failure to do the work before me.

But here’s one thing I do know: Black hair is not other-than. It is not different-from². It is definitely not less-than.

Everything in the culture I am raising the Boychick in says otherwise. When Black men and women are to be taken seriously, their hair must look, as much as possible, like White hair. When it is natural, it is reviled or exoticized. My job therefore, in part, is to counter those messages: to normalize it, to center it.

Thus this exchange with the Boychick today, driving past the community college in the less disturbingly monochromatic part of town³:

Slowing to let a pedestrian cross, I spy a light-skinned young apparently-Black man with a 4″ rather floppy afro, comb riding in the back. The Boychick says: “That’s bad hair.”

“Which? The guy with the tall hair?”

“Yeah. That’s bad hair.”

“Why do you think it’s bad hair?”

“Because it’s bad.” (What can I say, he’s three.)

“That style of hair is called a fro, or an afro. See, people have different kinds of hair. Some people’s hair, mostly Black people’s, is sort of kinky, or really curly, and soft and light, and if they grow it long, they can sometimes get it to poof out like that. My hair can’t do that. My hair just hangs down. I think his hair was kind of cool.”

“…Oh. Yeah, it’s cool.” (Three is a very suggestible age, when they’re not practicing obstinacy.)

A few minutes later, I look back, and he’s playing with his hair.

“My hair falls in my face. That’s silly!”

Three.

***

Maybe I contributed to exotification. Maybe I used words that will offend should he repeat them. I am terrified — always, when talking of race — of saying a wrong thing.⁴

Terrified, yes, but not petrified, because the only thing worse than saying something wrong is saying nothing at all, and letting kyriarchy’s messages colonize him unexamined, unprotested, undisputed. And so I try.

By white supremacist I do not mean KKK-ruled, I mean simply that whiteness is supreme in the hierarchy of color we have created. ↩
Different from what white folk are used to, yes. But think about who it centers to call it “different”. Why is my hair not called different, because it is mostly straight, and thick? Because I am white, and my hair is the cultural default. ↩
Portland, Oregon is listed as among the whitest cities in the USA. The last quote I saw put us 4th whitest. ↩
I’m terrified of posting this, from fear that I have, and because the story of Black hair is not mine to tell. ↩

14 Comments | Posted on 23 June 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: language, Privilege, Race, speaking past fear, USA, white privilege

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The Boychick’s Bookshelf: Being Friends

Welcome to The Boychick’s Bookshelf! In this series, I review children’s books of interest to parents who want to raise children free from and opposed to kyriarchy. These reviews will focus on books which showcase stories and lives beyond the dominant culture of white straight middle-class families, or which contain explicitly anti-kyriarchy messages (anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-sexism, anti-heterosexism, anti-cissexism, anti-violence, anti-colonialization, and so on).

Being Friends

Karen Beaumont, pictures by Joy Allen

The Story

In a pleasantly rhyming first person narrative, we learn about two friends: one of whom, a white girl¹, likes jeans and caps and cookies and hanging upside down, the other of whom, a black or multiracial girl, likes gowns and crowns and cake and spinning around, but, as the oft-repeated refrain says, they “both like being friends.”

The art is realistic and delightful, with enough to explore in each scene to engage the reader but simple enough to be easily taken in. As a pet lover, I enjoyed spotting the dog and the cat (the girls’ pets) on nearly every page.

Intended Audience

By placing the narrative in the point of view of the white friend, this book, however subtly, others the black friend, making it a story aimed more at middle class² white families looking to encourage diversity than being a story by and for children of color.

That aside, I would highly recommend it, especially for girls. While they like doing different things, both the femme and the butch³ (the “princess” and the “chimpanzee”) are physically active (playing baseball, jumping on the bed, having pillow fights), academically engaged (“spelling C-A-T” and “counting 1, 2, 3″, and looking at the planets and stars with a telescope), artistic, and courageous (telling each other scary stories). Girls need to hear this message: that being “girly” or “tomboyish” means liking different clothes (and both are perfectly ok!), but it doesn’t have to limit the options of what we can do.

Changes in the Telling

The one page I would give much to be able to change is where the two friends express their “hate” for, respectively, peas and mushrooms, and their mutual desire for pepperoni pizza. I’ve tried to change this in the telling, but the Boychick has already learned to correct me with “hate” of vegetables. Since mushrooms and peas are two of the Boychick’s favorite foods, and he’s yet to have pizza without any vegetables on it (much less with pepperoni), I do not appreciate this book reinforcing the stereotype that kids don’t like veggies. (Some might not, but much as with gender stereotypes I’m convinced that cultural messages, such as this, play a far greater role than we generally acknowledge.)

Not something we can change, but I really wish there were a line explicitly acknowledging the races of the friends. “You are black and I am white” or “Your dad is black, mine is white, but both our moms are Jewish” or something that states what readers young and old will readily notice. Without this explication, the book becomes yet another brick in the “we⁴ don’t talk about race” wall that contributes to racism.

On the Bookshelf Because

Bought for the message of interracial friendship, kept for the messages gender expression diversity not limiting ability, enjoyed for the acknowledgment that everyone has both similarities and differences.

But Does It Appeal? The Boychick’s Take

I cannot tell you how much the Boychick likes this book. What’s more, even after reading it no less than three dozen times (between The Man and myself), we’re not yet sick of it either. The first day we had it, he wanted to read “the string book” (so called for the picture of the friends playing a string game on the cover) over and over again, and a week later, still requests it multiple times in a row. I think it’s safe to say the Boychick approves.

Buy it, Consider it, Skip it, or Compost it?

Consider it. The lack of explicit acknowledgement of race, the comments about food, and the white narrator stop me from wholeheartedly recommending it, but the positive messages on gender expression, the interracial friendship, and how much the Boychick simply adores it means you might want to consider adding it to your own bookshelf.

Your Take

Have you read Being Friends? What do you think, and what do your kids think? Are there other books with similar messages you prefer?

Note: This book was sent to us by a dear reader who purchased it off the Raising My Boychick wishlist.

Nowhere in the text are the children’s genders identified, but the book jacket and reviews state, and the pictures imply, that the two friends are both girls ↩
The children are pictured in a house or in a field, and always with abundant toys ↩
Femme and butch are not my favorite words, but I’m not sure what better ones there are. ↩
“We” meaning white folk. ↩