Any well trained teacher or psychologist will tell you children can learn empathy from reading books and identifying with the characters. The same goes for adults. Books that no one finds offensive are generally on an intellectual level with instant pudding. The characters are predictable and unidimensional—inadequate for in-depth reading because they don’t fairly reflect the complexity of human beings, the actual society, or human needs. As TV advertisers may use mashed potatoes to stand in for ice cream during a hot extended shoot, the audience never sees what’s really inside.
Children are small people of varying capabilities and beautiful imaginations. However, indoctrinating them with absolutes or violent fantasies in the hope that they’ll never question the static perceptions they’re fed is to box them into artificial reality that will confuse them in the future. Introducing them to truth, beginning with simple concepts, may be preferable, as studios such as Disney’s Pixar seems to be attempting to do. Of course, children aren’t the only ones being fed incomplete pictures of the world. Huge uproars by adults over the skin colors of cartoon characters who spout identifiably white American dialogue prove that those observers are offended simply by superficialities. They don’t even notice the characteristics of the culture being represented. They assume everyone should be like them.
America has only begun to offer entertainment that represents minority cultures and the background that helped those cultures grow separately. We need to be able to look inside characters and personalities to be able to realize the true nature of our surroundings and how it all came to be. Why? Because we live here and we need to understand the earth and all the creatures dependent upon it to ensure a bloodless survival. We don’t have to endorse harmful behavior. STAR TREK began the trend of assuming a peaceful future succeeds only on a base enriched by diverse humans and cultures. Gene Roddenberry was capable of seeing the big picture of life.
Recently, I read THE GRASS DANCER by Mona Susan Power of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose accolades, education, and experience throw shade on many authors. Her novel doesn’t tell the reader about the Sioux people; she takes you within. Like viewing an autopsy, it’s not always an easy exposure. She plays with time in various chapters as those who don’t live by clocks do, revealing events and ancestors that influence the present. She writes through the mystical beliefs of many Sioux, a system foreign to whites. Although city dwellers are willing to accept and sometimes embrace ancient rituals from their own ancestors, they may have trouble respecting the spectrum of ancient beliefs held by various Native American tribes…just as they struggle to respect the tribes themselves. I had a dear friend who was Sioux, and this book validated her in a way that I wish she had lived to read. As someone who straddled white and Sioux cultures biologically and socially, she often allowed herself to believe she was to blame for the fact that people didn’t understand her. In spite of her success, she felt she didn’t truly belong anywhere, not unlike the author of my second book, Trevor Noah.
BORN A CRIME is an autobiography by an entertainer who was born to a white man and a black woman in South Africa, according to the deliberate choice of his mother in defiance of the law at the time. Due to his cleverness, Noah eventually became world famous as a comedian and host of THE DAILY SHOW on TV’s COMEDY CENTRAL. Within his story, he wrestles with his own isolated, life-threatening, sometimes humorous youth wherein the fierce ambition of his mother and his facility with languages helped save him—although he was a dangerously reckless near-delinquent—to become the successful multicultural man he is today. He was hidden as evidence of crime during his experience of apartheid—a system modeled on American Jim Crow to exacerbate cultural divisions that would enhance white control. Even after its demise, Noah never stopped feeling like an outsider both in South Africa and abroad because his total self defies categories. (Even as a mixed race man, he still merits more consideration than a female such as his mother can claim in their male dominant society.) He thrives due to his ability to profit from and entertain those around him.
The aforementioned books provide insider knowledge of the very human experience of people from under-represented cultures. They expose similarities and differences from typical middle class American lives. They remind us of the reason people need to read. Reading can be an intimate conversation between an author and a reader who may have nothing but literacy to lift her awareness. It’s the autopsy I mentioned earlier. What you gain depends entirely on you as the reader.
