Welcoming New Neighbors

Woke up this morning excited about a project I'm helping to develop: "I'm Your Neighbor: Reading Projects that Build Bridges Between New Arrivals and Longterm Communities."

I’m Your Neighbor is a project which promotes the use of children’s literature featuring “new arrival” cultures and groups to engage the entire community in a discussion of commonalities and differences. 

The project features a recommended list of books and an evolving list of engagement projects for educators, librarians, and community organizations who seek to build bridges.

The goal of the project is to both support communities as their cultural makeup evolves and to create opportunities for children’s literature featuring refugees, immigrants, and “new” marginalized groups.

I'm headed to Chicago tomorrow to speak about the project at the International Reading Association Convention, with co-creators Kirsten Cappy (Curious City), book engagement consultant; and author Terry Farish. Our panel will address these questions:

How do we welcome new arrivals in a manner that truly makes room for them in the classroom, school or larger community, particularly when their cultural, language, religious and/or racial identities are unfamiliar to long-term community members? 

How do we ensure that everyone in the community is engaged and appreciated so that resentment is diminished and learning can flow both ways? 

We'll be presenting three titles as examples of the books and activities that "I'm Your Neighbor" will promote. All three are set in Maine.

The Good Braider by Terry Farish is a young adult novel featuring a South Sudanese girl making a new home in the U.S.

Moon Watchers: Shirin's Ramadan Miracle by Reza Jalali, which I illustrated, is an older picture book about an Iranian-American Muslim family.

My own just-released A Path of Stars is a picture book told in the voice of a young Cambodian-American girl.



Please join us in building this project. Sign up to stay informed as the project develops: ImYourNeighborBooks. Share

• book titles 
• questions and challenges 
• suggestions for languages to include for buttons and t-shirts
• organizations we should know about
• possibilities for funding

More information in my post about A Path of Stars and the New Neighbors projects, on IRA's ENGAGE: Teacher to Teacher Blog

When We Don't Talk About Race with Children

Just read a fascinating article in The Nation about how young adults ages 18-30 think about race in this country. A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that, "a solid majority of white Millennials, 56 percent, say that government has paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and other minorities. An even larger majority, 58 percent, say that 'discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.'"


Columnist Jamelle Bouie, expressing his puzzlement at "how anyone could plausibly say that discrimination against white people is a problem in the same way that it is for minorities," posits some possible causes for what might lead young white people to this conclusion. This one jumped out at me:


"... we live in a culture where honest conversation about race is rare, especially among white people, where it’s surrounded by fear and anxiety. For many white kids, if not most, racial conversations are limited to a few units in elementary and middle school. Otherwise, they’re left to fend for themselves, which either leads to a sense of privileged obliviousness—i.e., you live and act as if this were a 'colorblind' world, despite the fact that color matters for many people—or confusion and resentment."

Much of the discussion of why children's books need to reflect the diversity of our nation focuses rightly on how crucial this is for children of color, who need to see themselves reflected. But white children need these books, too - and the conversations they provoke - for their own good. 


When the majority response to race is silence, dominant social norms and pervasive unconscious bias go unchallenged. White children experience no disturbance to a world view (often implied without being spoken) that casts them as the center of the universe, as the norm, as the definition of human. With no tools to recognize or unpack historical and systematic realities, race is perceived only in individual terms. 


"Left to fend for themselves," white children grow up drawing their own conclusions. This is not good for them, or for any of us.

Kony 12 and Images of Africa

Today high school and college students across the nation will be covering their communities with posters demanding the arrest of Uganda's Joseph Kony for his abductions of children into his Lord's Resistance Army, in an action entitled "Cover the Night," organized by Invisible Children through a video that's gone viral. 


Margy Burns Knight, co-author of Africa is Not a Country (which I illustrated), wrote this April 4 post for Teaching Tolerance, suggesting that we make this a teachable moment and take the time to examine the complexities of the situation - such as the on-the-ground realities in Uganda, the implicit messages of the video, the impact of viral campaigns, and the aims of Invisible Children, to name a few. 


"... if we introduce complicated situations such as the LRA as 'stopping the bad Africans,' we set our children up to assume they can save Africa—or worse—that they should be the saviors of Africa," Margy writes. 

Boston University's African Studies Center has created an excellent study guide, "React and Respond: The Phenomenon of Kony 12," including a brief history, detailed guidelines for teaching the material and analyzing the video, and extensive resources. The guide identifies these core stereotypes/generalities which may be activated by an uncritical response to the video: 

1. Violent crises are part of the “African condition.”  

2. Africa is all the same. Africa is often seen as homogenous, and a place of the exotic, primordial loyalties (tribalism), poverty, underdevelopment, and corrupt and ineffective governments, as well as a tendency towards violence. 

3. Africa and Africans have little capacity to solve problems.

"Countries in Africa, like countries around the world, have human rights problems," Margy writes. "Our children should learn about them. But it sells short our children’s intelligence and the good human rights work going on around the world to teach it in flashy, dubious viral movies. Why not teach what people in Uganda think about Kony 2012? Our children, and the world about which we’re trying to teach them, deserve better."

To be Cambodian American

Ten years ago, when I received a commission from the Maine Humanities Council under their New Mainers Book Project, my assignment was to create a picture book representing the Cambodian-American experience. 

I considered it an impossible task; that is, on my own, I could not produce an authentic Cambodian-American story. But I thought that if I listened long enough, perhaps a story might come through me. I read every book I could find about Cambodia, the war, the escape, and life in the U.S.; most titles were survivor accounts. The local community was wonderfully supportive, especially my friends, educators Peng and Veasna Kem, who shared their own stories as well as advising me throughout the process; and Pirun Sen, educator and founder of Watt Samaki Temple, who reviewed the final draft and wrote an afterword.

The book that resulted, A Path of Stars, was published in February (see announcement here). There are a few children's nonfiction titles featuring Cambodian Americans, including Who Belongs Here? An American Story, by Margy Burns Knight, which I illustrated; and there are several picture books set in Cambodia, including Fred Lipp's The Caged Birds of Phnom Penh). But to my knowledge, A Path of Stars is the only fiction picture book available about the Cambodian American experience. (Dara's Cambodian New Year by Sothea Chiemruom seems to be out of print, although copies can be found online.) [Please suggest any other titles in the comment section.]

The book's release has created wonderful chances to connect with Maine's Cambodian community, which numbers about 2000, including Portland's Cambodian Dance Troupe. In February my friend Tania Jo Hathaway, who manages the troupe and whose daughter Sophia is one of the dancers, invited me to share the book with them. Taught by Sokhoueun Sok, a classical dance performer trained in Phnom Penh, the troupe includes sixteen girls, ages 4 to 20. Some are 2nd-generation Cambodian Americans whose parents escaped the Khmer Rouge; others were born in Cambodia and adopted by American families.

This week I attended a delightful performance of the troupe, luminous in brilliant traditional clothing, at a New Year's Celebration (the Khmer new year is observed April 13-15). But classical dance wasn't the only item on the menu; there was also break-dancing duo, a band playing Khmer pop songs, and a hip hop group.

When I met with the girls in February, one of the ideas that struck me is that their identity is a relatively new one. Communities of Cambodian Americans, such as ours here in Maine, began taking root in the U.S. in the late 1970's. The oldest American-born Cambodians - in any significant numbers - are in their 30s. What it means to be Cambodian American is being defined now, in all its variety, by these young people, creating a brand-new, unique piece of the American mosaic.

I look forward to the day when books about the Cambodian-American experience will be written and illustrated by the people who are living that story.