Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children's Literatue

Blinded by the White: The Responsibilities of Race

C H A P T E R S I X Blinded by the White The Responsibilities of Race I noted in chapters 1 and 2 how images in picture books become idealized by child readers. Children operating in an Imaginary logic read these images as metonymic representations of categorical signifiers and construct their expectations of the signifieds attaching to those signifiers through the repeated associations of image to text. Interesting to note here are the side effects of taking the part for the whole. For instance, if a child repeatedly sees a picture of a male attached to the signifier of daddy, he might make the assumption not only that all daddies are males, but also that all males are daddies. But it might not stop there. If most of the images of male daddies he sees are white with brown hair, then his expectation of the ideal daddy becomes one who is white with brown hair, and the actual daddies he sees in his life are likely to be judged against that expectation. This is even more true with imagery in books that doesn’t correspond to the child’s lived reality; that is, he is more likely to idealize images for which he has no actual correlates through which to correct or multiply his impressions. So if a country child repeatedly sees images of the city as dangerous, she forms her opinions and expectations on the basis of those images. Or if a child continually sees people with disabilities represented as helpless or grumpy or sinister, it should come as no surprise that he brings those associations with him when he encounters an actual person with a disability. This associative logic is the process in which multicultural children’s books attempt to intervene. By increasing the kinds of representations that children encounter, authors, illustrators, publishers, parents, and teachers are attempting to expand the boundaries of what children are likely to consider normal and valuable. b However, as most educators and parents know to their frustration, mere consciousness raising and image control do little to uninscribe racism. Real change must come on a structural level. Hence my method in this chapter will be similar to my approach to gender. Rather than focus entirely on images of racialized subjects, I instead look at how race functions as a psychoanalytic category, and specifically at how Whiteness instantiates itself as a signifier of desire. As I did with gender, however, I focus on how books for children can reveal the tenuousness and conventionality of the constructions of race, thus pointing the way for displacing modernist narratives with more open and fluid dynamics. The reader will no doubt have noticed that most of my examples have been taken from canonical—that is, white Anglo—texts of the past century. This is part of my point of how Whiteness has inscribed itself in modernism as a place of desire, a norm against which any other way of thinking seems deviant or specialized, not applicable to everybody. Critical multiculturalists focus on how images affect our subjectivity; those specializing in Whiteness studies are especially concerned with how we can maintain positive depictions of what it means to be white while still emphatically displacing the hegemony of Whiteness in culture.1 My argument attempts to uncover the logic of desire and signification that undergirds these projects. So once again, I direct our attention beyond the content of images to the structures under which they are produced and valued. I would tentatively suggest that in every culture, individual subjectivities and desires are constructed , constrained, and contained within and through the stories the culture tells. But in Western culture in particular, the valorization of reading and film as our primary modes of storytelling results tangentially and signi ficantly in the valorization of individuality and vision that come from replacing the communal nature of oral storytelling with the solitary reading subject, or the silent viewer in a darkened theater. Moreover, the iterability of the written signifier results in the reification of meaning, so that any attempt to take an antinormative stance generally ends by being taken up into the normative anyway, which is another way of saying that you can’t be permanently avant-garde. But why must this be so? Why is the normative so consumptive, so eager to draw everything into itself? The answer to this question lies in part in the nostalgic structure of subjectivity I...