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I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.
I suspect most people are not thinking about the plausibility of genetic relationship between depicted family members when buying children's books. For one, people can have family members whom they are not genetically related to. For two, children's book authors are known to take creative liberties with reality for the purpose of telling an entertaining story or imparting a moral. For example, they may depict an animal doing something it is quite unlikely for it to do in reality (like a caterpillar eating chocolate cake) or imagine entirely new creatures which do not exist (like large furred horned hominids or dragons).
It's called "representation" and while it has assorted supplementary arguments (e.g. "minority children benefit from seeing people like them in fiction"), at its core it isn't anything as coherent as a proposition. Like Scott discusses in Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments:
If it was a specific proposition it might have a stopping point. But it isn't "demographics in fiction should match the demographics of your real-life country", it isn't even "at least 50% of characters should be non-white'. It's that SJW types cheer or boo characters based on whether they're members of their favored or disfavored identity groups. So fiction influenced by them often ends up with demographics ranging from noticeably influenced to completely absurd. (And that isn't a stopping point either, even completely absurd levels of representation are often criticized for the representation being problematic in some way, having attracted a SJW-inclined audience that doesn't notice how hard it's trying to cater to people like them.)
Of course, this sort of sentiment regarding identity groups is not limited to fiction. For instance a major stated reason why the CDC recommended a COVID-19 vaccine-prioritization scheme that depriorited the elderly relative to "essential workers", contrary to their own estimates on what would save more lives, was because the elderly are more likely to be white, as I discussed in this post. Similarly various governments such as Vermont prioritized non-whites outright. As a matter of strict logical argument it doesn't seem like these things should be related, but in reality someone predisposed to like arguments in favor of the "underprivileged" will generally apply that bias whether the stakes are "realism in a fictional setting" or "many thousands of lives".
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Ah come on mate, a caterpillar eating chocolate cake is fantasy anthropomorphism of the traditional sort in children's books from "A Wind in the Willows" to "Winnie the Pooh". White person and Latino person marry and have kids is reality, and in reality unless they are adopting, they won't end up with "Asian kid and black kid". If the book is about 'adopted families are real families', great fine that's a wholesome message, but if it's just meant to be ordinary typical "mommy and daddy and brother and sister" then it is pushing a message. "White mommy and Latino daddy have brown baby" is not a problem, but "White mommy and Latino daddy have Chinese baby" is, unless the text is explicit about "Mommy and Daddy couldn't have a baby of their own, so they adopted you and they love you just as much as if you were their born baby".
Well, at least it wasn't Anti-Racist Baby.
I thought that you were making it up, or that it was a parody, or something. But no, that book is dead serious. And it has overwhelmingly positive reviews, no less. I think that any hope I had for the US as a functional society has just died. :(
I wouldn’t read too much into overwhelmingly positive reviews- my priors are distinctly that the overwhelming majority of reviews are fake anyways.
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I couldn't believe it either, but no, it's a real thing. Why am I still surprised at the entire industry around Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Mongering?
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Miscegenation.
According to basic genetics, all human are a result of repeated "Miscegenation".
I am not saying this is my view, but it is perfectly consistent to say that you like the races as they are and don't want them to mix, even if other races had to be mixed to produce the current races.
If white Mommy and Latino Daddy are married, having kids within marriage, and Daddy sticks around so that the kids have a stable family with at least one breadwinner, I am all for that message being pushed to kids in preference to "Mommy has three babies by three different daddies which is why one is Asian, one is black, and one is brown, but Mommy never married any of the baby daddies who are off having more kids with a selection of hos, bitches, and side pieces. And this is fine and normal, now let's all sing along to the song about the newest Pride flag!"
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It's not consistent because you need to define a clear boundary between what constitutes a race. I'm a strong believer in HBD but in this case the precise definition actually matters and the racial definitions always have some degree of arbitrariness, and even what we currently define as "black americans" in the US are actually racial hybrids.
If I find 1% ashkenazi or 1% black in some of these people can I stop considering them white and put them in their own categories? What even constitutes a White, do you have to have the right amount of Yamnaya? Do actual Caucasians or middle easterners count? It doesn't make sense.
No you don't. You've never had to. Nothing in the way human society works relies on precision to such a degree.
You don't need to make a rule for the 1% mixed or the octaroons, just enforce general social norms. People will work out the exceptions for themselves. That way "the good ones" will mind their own business nad you will not be having stupid bikeshedding nonsense arguments designed to grind the whole enterprise to a halt.
Actually existing societies based on race always felt the need to establish legal boundaries of "pure race" with great detail and precision.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Casta_painting_all.jpg
And in most of these societies people routinely passed as a different race than they were born as, and no one cared very much. Particularly in IberoAmerica.
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Why does it need to be precise?
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To the exclusion of all else. That's what I'm complaining about. It's to the exclusion of all else. Representation of families like ours, the majority of my nation, if this semi-random sampling of search engine recommended examples is to be believe, have been all but completely extirpated from contemporary children's book.
If representation matters, as the people advocating inclusion of interracial or LGBT families claim it does, why have they erased my family?
My guess is that there's still going to be great amounts of older children's books available representing in the great majority heterosexual families of your country's majority ethnicity (or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.), no? At least when I go out in bookstores to check what they have, they usually have reprints of old classics front and center.
My guess is that a lot of modern children's books authors specifically think about the great majorities of existing children's books not showcasing groups other than heterosexual families of a country's majority ethnicity, and thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.
Wait what? How are bears intended to represent an ethnicity? Their clothing seems to be generic American farmer, to my non-American eyes based mainly on the father wearing overalls. Are overalls restricted to farmers of some particular ethnicity in the US?
What could make a family of bears represent a non-white family? All I can really think of is eating ethnic food instead of honey, or perhaps wearing clothing of a very specific ethnicity instead of generic farmer.
Is it impossible to create a generic family of animals who might represent any family of any group?
If they are brown bears native to Europe (with European names) it is obvious whom are they supposed to represent.
Being species of bear originating from other part of the world?
Their names are "papa bear", "mama bear", "brother bear" and "sister bear". "Berenstain" is the name of the authors, not the bears, but Dr. Seuss (who assisted with the creation of the series) described them as "Berenstain bears" later to distinguish from other bear books after they became popular. I do not understand how you've determined they are Eurasian brown bears (which range from central Europe to Japan) instead of North American brown or grizzly bears (which was my assumption).
One possible way I can interpret this argument: any character, unless explicitly characterized as non-white, is assumed white and anthropomorphic characters of no particular ethnicity are impossible? E.g., baby shark is white (not Korean?!?) since it's a yellow shark of indeterminate gender who sings a 3 word song.
If the story is set in completely fantastic world unrelated to anything IRL, you are right that assigning RL racial identity to characters is absurd.
If the characters live in world that is just like our (North American suburban) world, except that the people are funny furry animals, assigning RL racial identity to characters is unavoidable.
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Skidoosh.
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As an American, the Berenstein bears are clearly intended to be white, exurban, and southern/lower midwestern.
What makes them white and exurban (as opposed to rural)? What would a black exurban (or rural) southern/lower midwestern family of bears look like?
Again - my question is how to make anthropomorphized characters (that fit the constraints of children's media, i.e. nothing complex) non-white? In India this could theoretically be accomplished by exploiting ethnic dress (e.g. Sindhis wear very distinct clothing, at least for special occasions) for characters that actually wear clothes. But as far as I'm aware the US has almost no ethnic dress - the only ones I can think of are either for obscure groups (Amish, American Indians) or racist stereotypes that would be poorly received ("gangsta" clothes, sombreros).
So lets make it very concrete. Here's monkey mechanic. He's a monkey and he likes to help people by fixing their cars (with a monkey wrench). His only non-fixing stuff interest that I've observed is bananas. How do you make Monkey Mechanic non-white? (Or feel free to make other characters non-white, e.g. the giraffe who keeps hitting his head on the roof of his car.)
Their neighborhood is depicted as exurban/far suburban, their clothing(particularly the hats) is distinctly white, semirural, and working class, and the way the very special episodes on diversity are framed is clearly white and southern/lower midwestern.
A black coded southern bear family would probably be black bears to begin with, with a few other aesthetic distinctions(eg clothing), but you'd also probably be looking at more emphasis on sport and probably older-behaving cubs, without getting into obvious stereotypes.
I admit, I am unfamiliar with the particular style of hats from 1962 so I'll have to take your word for it. What kind of hats did black exurban working class people wear? Or were there no exurban black people in the midwest?
Also, is it impossible to have anthropomorphic children's characters that are simply not coded as anything? Is it impossible for Baby Shark to simply have no attributable human ethnicity? Would the Berenstain bears no longer be white if they were nude and hatless?
Further question, is Babar white or black? He was born in Africa but raised in France and adopts thoroughly western behaviour and dress, and maintains them even when he returns to Africa to rule the elephants (or maybe all animals, it's been a while since I read it.)
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Really? I was sure they were supposed to be a suburban Jewish family—but that might be because every time he hears the books mentioned, my dad exclaims, "They don't go to synagogue either!"
But there may not be textual evidence for his reading. I've mostly been able to avoid mentioning books since childhood
Aren't they shown celebrating Christmas?
Probably, but maybe it's a Jewish Christmas.
Do the books depicts a traditional Thanksgiving meal shared with Momma Bears family, then the traditional menorah lighting at least three states away from Papa Bear's nearest relative, and also show a Christmas Day where the bears unwrap the presents that are obviously books first spend hours of reading in silence, briefly thanking each other, then reading while they eat enchiladas?
If I could have my mom back for one holiday, it would probably be Christmas.
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This has already been done. Hood Berenstain: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0NN0gtBcxtk
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But that creates its own problem, the way that the actual percentage of any minority population within the general population is misrepresented. Whether that be thinking that black people are a greater share of the US population than they are, or LGBT people (especially trans). If people are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate 2% of the general population?" they are much less likely to say "yes" than if they are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate this sub-population (which you think is 10-20% of the population rather than 2%, because you've been deluged with books and social media where in an ensemble case of five, at least one is this particular sub-population)?"
It's also easy and lazy, and may be down to "do I want my book to be published?" even more than "do I want to be Diverse and Inclusive?" because see the YA fiction kerfuffles over race and transgender. Publishers nowadays may be more inclined to go for "we want DEI" and to not even consider a book that has all-white family, so if you're a kids' book author and you want a career, be darn sure to mix up the races and orientations of your characters.
There's also the stupid partisan political stuff, like the gay White House rabbits. No kid is going to read those books, but adults who want to feel like they're sticking it to the Man will fall over themselves to buy those kind of books. Personally I think the whole mania around the kind of pets the Presidents and Vice-Presidents own is crazy, but people do get all worked up over it. So the Pences had a pet rabbit, one of their daughters wrote kids' books about it, and of course this had to get political, because the fussbudgets can't let anything lie:
I don't know how many 6-8 year olds were longing for a book about a rabbit getting gay married, but hey, John Oliver is a hack and this let everybody show off how progressive they were. And it wasn't even thinly-disguised, the first page outright states that this rabbit is part of the Pence family. Haw-haw, Pence is anti-gay and wants gay conversion torture camps set up everywhere, let's make his daughters' pet rabbit gay and get gay married, that'll show him!
(How old is Oliver, again? I think 6-8 years of age is too high for his mental age).
I dunno, what amount of children's books would you surmise are about gay couples? We have a bunch of old and modern ones at our house, and leafing through them, I've spotted some cases where some background couple might be gay, but obviously since they're background they're not being featured in a major role.
I have perhaps more experience in watching kids' TV, and out of all the children's shows I've seen, I've seen one instance where there's a bit player gay couple (for the record it would be Chip & Potato, where the main character's family's (which is as traditional a straight 3-child family with a cop father and, for the most of the series, homemaker mom you could imagine) neighborhood also has a couple of smartly dressed male zebras who appear to have adopted children. They don't actually go "we're gay and have gay zebra sex in our bedrooms" or anything like that and feature in maybe two episodes. This is my understanding of the general extent of representation in this field, at the moment.
I think that John Oliver thing can indeed be marked in the category of "it's a bit, not actually intended for children's books oeuvre", as you indicated.
I wouldn't freak out about things like "fleeting background gay kiss" in a movie, even a kid's movie. I think the recent flop by Disney, Strange World, is being presented as (by both sides) "it was because it was gay/inter-racial/strong women" but I think mostly it was probably awful (I'm just going by the trailer and the synopsis in Wikipedia).
Funnily enough, had they made a movie about the family patriarch, Jaeger Clade, and his adventures in the Strange World, I think it would have been a lot better. He seems the most interesting character in the trailer; his grandson, Ethan, is only there to be Gay Teenager First Out LGBT Character in a Disney Movie, and Searcher (Jaeger's son, Ethan's father) is insufferably wet. Look at the trailer and see if you agree.
The art style is also terrible, I've read it described as "Cal Arts style" but I don't know if it's so. It's that recent style where all the faces look the same (big eyes, potato nose, small chin, generally expressions of surprise or anger) like the female faces in "Frozen" all being identical, and the male and indeed female faces in this one being the same. Black, white, male, female, all have the 'big eyes, potato nose, big open-mouth expressions'.
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Do you feel particularly erased, seeing as you're the majority of your nation?
The greater the percentage of some demographic in the country that isn't represented, the greater the number of people erased.
Only if the demographics of the books constitute "erasure" in the first place. You are begging the question.
Surely then nonwhite people shouldn’t complain about erasure of their experiences if people of their skin tone aren’t represented, then, if demographics of characters in books don’t count as erasure?
I was not aware that I had argued otherwise.
I assume you agree, then, that the progressive push towards showing disproportionately more minorities in media for representation and to combat erasure, etc etc., is similarly ill-argued.
I actually didn't express an opinion that the claim was ill-argued, but rather that it was not argued at all. I suppose that 30 years ago the existence of certain groups was probably ignored by children's literature, though I don't know that "erasure" is the best term to describe that phenomenon. Regardless, that is no longer the case. Nor is it likely to be the case that OP's demographic is ignored in the children's literature currently available for sale.
BTW, is it safe to assume that you agree that complaints about Halle Bailey being cast as the Little Mermaid are misplaced, as well?
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