When I was a child, I never read books like “Amazing Grace.” Or “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters.”
It wasn’t because my mother – an elementary school teacher – didn’t want me to. Oh no. Almost from the time that I was able to hold a cup and a baby spoon with my fat little finger, she stuck books in front of me as well. First it was the picture books, then the books with big letters. Once I entered first grade in 1965, those baby books were replaced with the Alice and Jerry readers. All those books, with their idyllic portrayals of nature, fairy tale characters and everyday antics of blond, Beaver Cleaver-era white kids filled my imagination – and showed me that this reading thing was a big deal.
What they didn’t show me, however, was where children and people who looked like me fit in with that lily-white world.
Books like “Amazing Grace,” the 1991 children’s book of how a black girl proves she can be the best Peter Pan ever in a play even though her classmates say she can’t do it because she’s black and female, weren’t around back when my mother was buying me books. Neither was the book “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters,” a 1988 book that, through its pictures of women with clear African features, depicts the story of two sisters who go before a king who is choosing a wife.
But such culturally relevant children’s books – books that throw the cloak of invisibility off of the experience and culture of black people – are around now. And more are being published all the time.
Which is why a recent story in The Christian Science Monitor gave me reason to celebrate – and to sigh.
According to the Monitor, the explosion of multicultural children’s books in the early 1990s is still making a huge impact with black families. At Hue-Man Bookstore, a black bookstore in Harlem, for example, children’s books account for 30 percent of the sales of the 16,000 titles that it stocks.
That’s good news.
But what’s frustrating is that even though anecdotal evidence suggests that such books may inspire more black children to read, that trend needs to pick up steam more quickly to begin to close the reading gap that exists between black and white children.
And the gap is stark.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that just 12 percent of black fourth-graders were reading at grade level in 2000, compared to 40 percent of white fourth-graders.
And recent studies done by the National Center for Educational Statistics found large achievement gaps between black and white children as early as kindergarten. For example, the center’s studies showed that in 2002, 73 percent of white kindergartners were proficient in letter recognition, compared to 59 percent of black kindergartners. Similar differences existed for recognition of words’ beginning and ending sounds, and for print familiarity.
But the studies also keyed in on a significant point – that achievement tests don’t measure literacy skills acquired outside of the classroom, and that an appropriate response to enhance reading skills is to match children’s learning capabilities and needs with the most appropriate instruction.
That’s important. And that’s where children’s books – especially those written by black authors – can play a vital role. For example, a 1988 book entitled “Baby Says,” by black author John Steptoe, uses only baby words to depict the relationship between a toddler and his older brother.
And while baby words might not be the vocabulary that one ultimately wants a black child to stick with, it at least takes the mystery and fear out of reading for many black children who, because of cultural and economic reasons, have to look after younger siblings at earlier ages.
That’s the hopeful part about all this; that while the reading gap still exists, it is within the power of black parents and black communities to close it by exposing their children to books that celebrate and recognize their existence. The books are there. And if many parents just heed Bill Cosby’s advice to forgo buying the Nikes in favor of “Hooked on Phonics,” in time we can close this reading gap.
The lack of culturally relevant books didn’t hurt me much when I was child because my mother was skilled enough to put the world in context for me. So I learned how to read by making do with the stuff that I had. Nowadays, black parents have more material to work with.
And fewer excuses.
