Solidarity: A Content Analysis of Black and Jewish Characters in Picture Books

• In Event: Disrupting the Single Story: Transformative Children’s Literature for Social Justice

Abstract

The United States has witnessed an increasing rise in anti-Black racism and antisemitism. Black children have endured suffering in education. They are disproportionately placed in special education (Codrington & Fairchild, 2012), underrepresented in gifted programs (Ford, 2013), and subjected to inequitable disciplinary measures (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2016). These dehumanizing experiences, referred to by Bettina Love (2016) as "spirit murdering" in schools, contribute to the well-documented cradle-to-prison pipeline (Bryan, 2017). Negative impact can occur to Jewish children when educators predominantly center on normative white Christian culture (Blumenfeld, 2006). Jewish students often do not see their Jewishness in the curriculum, teaching materials, and pedagogical practices, which can result in feelings of marginalization among Jewish children and families in public schools. This lack of representation can contribute to an increase in hate incidents targeting Jewish children.

The Cooperative Children's Book Center's 2022 survey on diversity in children's and YA literature found Black characters represent 12% of book characters and Jewish characters represent a mere 2% (Cooperative Children's Book Center, 2022). Despite the common assumption that children's literature is a pure and apolitical medium created solely to instill a love of reading, the reality is that every book has implicit or explicit ideological implications (Braden & Rodriguez 2016).

Understanding the power of picture books and that curricular violence can be one way that Black and Jewish students internalize negative views of themselves, their communities, and their histories and send harmful messages to their non-Black and Jewish peers, in this paper we conduct a critical content analysis of picture books that depict interactions between Black, Jewish, and/or Black Jewish characters.

Two theoretical perspectives were employed: Critical race theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and HebCrit (Rubin, 2020), along with the research tool critical content analysis. This framework was employed to gain insights into the representations of Black and Jewish stories and their sociopolitical contexts.We conducted a content analysis of 171 children's picture books featuring Black, Jewish, and/or Black Jewish characters. We carried out an extensive search using multiple sources. We further investigated a subset of twelve books featuring historical figures that were Black, Jewish, and/or Black Jewish, in which the character was coded as central to the text. (No Black Jewish characters were found in these books.) The initial examination focused on identifying elements of CRT and HebCrit within texts.

When examining the messages conveyed by these books, a prevailing theme that emerged was solidarity. However, this narrative needs to be complicated to understand the type of solidarity found, whether reciprocity of solidarity is identified, and pedagogical practices to share these messages.

Authors

• Meir Muller, University of South Carolina

• Eliza G. Braden, University of South Carolina