Blurring Race

The first time I read "Snowy Day" to my kid, I thought- what a lovely simple story about snow falling in Brooklyn.  The second time I read it, I noted that the main character, Peter is a black boy and how the story had nothing to do with his race, which is one of the many reasons that this Ezra Jack Keats book is beloved by all, and even the post office made the snowy exploits of Peter into postage stamps.

I don't know why I thought it was Brooklyn, but the illustrations were so soothing, even when the children got into a snowball fight, and life seemed so sweet and simple. When the only conflicts and mysteries of life came from the disappearing of a snowball from his pocket. I must have read this book to Hiro a thousand times.

I always assumed that Ezra Jack Keets was black. He grew up in East New York. Even when he had a retrospective at the Jewish Museum, it did not dawn on me that he was not black.  Even when I saw a photo of him, I was still convinced that he was black.  There are black Jews right? The pictures we create in our minds with ingrained prejudices are hard to break.  But does it really matter if the author of all those books about Peter and Archie and Amy and Suzie and all the pets were black, or white or Jewish or not?

We live in Woodside Queens, where our next-door neighbors are Irish on one side, and on the other side is a Bhutanese Snooker Hall Bar and Restaurant. Also on our block are Mexican, Black, Columbian, Korean, Chinese, Greek, Italian, and Filipino families as well as families consisting of mixtures of several races and cultures.  As an Asian person, when I first moved into the neighborhood, I got spoken to in Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalong, and Japanese, when I entered stores and restaurants.  Every culture just assumed I was one of them, and immediately spoke to me in their mother tongue.  And even now, I cannot often tell a Columbian person apart from a Korean person, nor does it really matter. This is what a melting pot does, it blends and blurs racial markers and makes them irrelevant so we can see the uniqueness of every individual.

Hiro also makes colorblind assumptions. He thinks a classmate who has a white father and a Hispanic mother is Chinese because she is taking Mandarin classes...because why else would some kid be forced to take a language that was not her mother tongue?  He also thinks that an Indian classmate is Black because she has dark-ish skin.  I wonder if this colorblindness promotes raising an anti-racist kid, or the opposite?  The great thing about Ezra Jack Keats' images is that they seem so ordinary and that childhood "should" look like that. By sharing these books with children, the construct of a blended race neighborhood becomes ordinary. Black children and white children are in a world where a black teacher is in charge of a pet show, though if you were to watch the news these days, this seems like a fabrication from a children's book author's imagination.

The Game: 

Slow Looking with Peter

 

The Pet Show

I introduced this game a few weeks ago at our Family Friday cocktail hour, with this image by Ezra Jack Keats, after reading the Slow Looking books.  The goal was to get people to look closely and carefully at something and though a Zoom game session with drinks may not have been the perfect setting, it did slow down our time together to create pockets of interesting conversation. At one point, someone commented that a group of adults has probably never stared at this image for so long, which was probably true. 

It can be played in a Museum, through Zoom or anywhere.

Players: 2+

Age: old enough to be able to write the alphabet.

The Gear: an image of some type, pencil/pen, and paper, timer.

The set up: 

If you are playing from home with people in the room with you, find an image from a book or magazine.

If you are playing virtually with others on Zoom: find an image on your computer and share the screen so everyone can see it.

If you are in a Museum (do you remember those?), find a work of art everyone agrees on and sit in front of it. (I really miss going to museums even though most of them symbolize white looting...but anyway ....)

To start: write the alphabet vertically on the left side of your paper. Set a timer for 15 minutes or however long you want to play.  Ideally, pick a time and double it or add 10 minutes to the initial time, long enough so that your mind starts to wander. The point is to look at the image longer than you think you can.

When the timer starts, look at the image and write down things you see that start with every letter of the alphabet. 

The objective: 

You want to find things and write down items that seem obvious that everyone else might see.

Point system: If you want to do this as a meditative activity, you don't need to keep score.  But since everything is a competition in our house these days, after the timer goes off, take turns and report what everyone wrote down.  You get one point for every item that others also wrote down.  For example, if for the letter "A" you wrote down "Afro" and 3 other people also wrote down "Afro", you all get 4 points.  The object is to try to be in unison, not to be unique and cleaver. The goal is empathetic looking.

Everyone keeps their own score and is played on the honor system.

What was fascinating about looking for things that started with tricky letters was that several people saw things that were not there.  For example, for the letter T, three or four people saw a Turtle, which does not exist in the painting.  All four said the green hat on the boy who is popping his head into the frame on the left side was a turtle.  Or you really had to look at the picture's narrative to understand what was going on.  Both Philip and I said "Itch" for the letter I- what the boy on the left was doing.