In “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation between Fields,” Katharine Capshaw calls attention to the deficit of children’s literature about/by people of color in relation to U.S. demographics. She reads ethnic studies onto children’s literature, and then attempts to explain why children’s literature might be particularly fruitful for furthering ethnic studies. Capshaw emphasizes the importance of producing more scholarship on ethnic writers so that it “can filter down into our classrooms to feed our students and their students” (238), helping to shape a more inclusive society.

Coincidentally, in discussing the purpose of her keynote address, Capshaw notes: “While my focus here is the United States, I hope to launch a conversation with colleagues who are experts on representations of race and racism as an interdependent dynamic in Canada, Australia, in the United Kingdom, Europe, the Caribbean, West Africa, and other contexts” (240). The order of this list, as well as the specificity with which she does (or doesn’t) name locations, serves to privilege Caucasian scholars, thereby reinscribing the very issue she wishes to draw attention to and dismantle. While Canada and the U.K. come early on the list and are named explicitly, places that would be home to larger proportions of “ethnic” writers are tacked on at the end, and referred to by much larger geographical regions (the Caribbean, West Africa) rather than individual country. Her colleagues from the U.K. are actually double-counted as she references both the U.K. and Europe, hinting at larger institutional biases.

Capshaw begins her speech by attempting to trace why race has become so difficult to talk about in U.S. scholarship, beginning with the Civil Rights Movement. After an initial influx of ethnic literature in the 1970s, production slowed and its place in academia became increasingly fraught: “With the commodification of ethnic texts, we find a deepened interest in what is authentic about writing, a turn to the sociological with the expectation of usefulness for the white reader within an institution… and representationality offering the ‘typical’ story framed within the limited narrative of a syllabus” (242). These works became reappropriated for white readership, and so were/are expected to fit into a certain narrative of American values and rhetoric. I appreciate Capshaw’s attention here to the politics of drafting syllabi, and the pitfalls of selecting works of ethnic literature that become representative of entire ethnicities in ways that are not always accurate or productive. She will bring up this issue again, explaining: “The ‘right story’ of an ethnic culture is something that we all still struggle with when constructing our syllabi, full well knowing that our pedagogy extends into the way the elementary and secondary classrooms work to produce citizens. In our own work and teaching, we need to watch for how we pose the supposed ‘truth’ of an ethnic community’s story through books” (244). Again she emphasizes the trickle-down nature of scholarship/pedagogy, and the tensions present in course-design as we strive to construct classes that satisfy multiple curriculum requirements without watering down content. Given such limited space, how do we tell the “‘right story’ of an ethnic culture,’ or of any minority community for that matter?

Capshaw goes on to note some vulnerabilities or limitations that children’s literature may have in attempting to incorporate ethnic studies, most interestingly its “attraction to the colorblind” (246) whereby works attempt to posit themselves as positioned in a “post-racial” (247) society despite all evidence to the contrary. I appreciate her reminder here that “We can’t be afraid to name racism as racism” (247), and I would extend this by saying that white educators can’t be afraid to discuss racism in general, even if they cannot identify with all of their students’ experiences. (This is a conversation we had in my own classroom when a particularly insightful student asked how I felt as a white educator, speaking to an entirely of-color class about racism).

Capshaw then goes on to examine the advantages children’s literature might have in hosting ethnic studies. However, I’m unsure how many of these advantages are really specific to children’s lit, as they often seem to categorize many, if not all, subfields of English. Her initial formulations of these three advantages are incredibly general: “We can see” (249); “We can speak” (250); “We can dream” (251). And even once she articulates these ideas more explicitly, there is not much about them that seems particular to children’s lit. For example, she mentions how the field is “aware of our situatedness and the connection of our work to actual people outside the academy” (249). But I’d argue that most every subfield is concerned with some sort of wider reaching politics that exceed the boundaries of academia. Nor is children’s literature the only field that is “fundamentally interdisciplinary” (250). And surely it’s also not the only place where new pasts and presents are dreamt. Her claim that “there is something special about children’s literature generically in terms of opening new pathways. Our writers are worldmakers in a way that other genres cannot achieve” (252) seems a bit glossing and unsubstantiated. What about Science Fiction? Or even just Fiction more generally? Isn’t every text an example of world-making? So while I agree that ethnic literature needs to become more of a priority, and that children’s literature is as good as any place to start, I somewhat disagree with her rationale as to why it might be better than anywhere else.