Defining an identity or identities is a complicated task. Identification comes through various external and internal sources. African Americans (as well as other minorities) are often defined as ‘other’ by the dominant society in which they live. When the identity offered by the minority does not match with the identity offered by the majority, the subject must find ways to negotiate such differences. In The Souls of Black Folks (1903) W. E. B. Dubois articulated in that there is a duality within the African American that makes identity a complex concept. The African American is both ‘African’ and ‘American.’ This African American duality is often in conflict with itself, since
white Northern European American identity has long denied the African American his/her American identity. As Dubois points out:
… the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sightedness in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, the double- consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder…(22).
Dubois’ double-consciousness includes the concept of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. Dubois’ is noting the subjectivity of the African American. Subjectivity is often used interchangeably with the term identity; however, the term subjectivity is the “social and personal being that exists in negotiation with broad cultural definitions and our own ideals” (Hall 134) while identity is “a flat, one-dimensional concept” (Hall 134). Dubois’ “two-ness” is a part of a number of different identities. Subjectivity is the combination of identities, which include identities formed through race, class, gender, etc. The construction of those different identities includes authors’ various constructs and also constructs of selfhood, i.e. what one thinks of one’s self.
Society, that is the group surrounding the individual, also determines subjectivity since location inside and outside that group helps determine the individual’s view of self. In “The Shifting Status of African Americans in the
American Collective Identity” (1998), Rebecca Kook notes that issues of identity are explained through either this inclusion or the exclusion of groups of people. Kook claims, “traditional” studies of identity “portray an identity and citizenship entrenched in ideas and concepts” whereas newer studies “approach citizenship through a prism of membership, thus shifting the discourse from ideology and concepts to issues of inclusion and exclusion” (154). Inclusion and exclusion are important considerations in viewing the constructs offered in African American children’s literature from the 1930s. Justifying Kook’s views, Sandra Carlton Alexander states that “...issues of self-actualization, social legitimation, inclusion, and exclusion are at the literal or symbolic core of some significant African American works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (379, emphasis mine). The same socio-political aspects affected constructs of African American childhood in the 1930s. In the vacuum created by exclusions of African Americans from white society, African American society developed separately. The sub-society of African American childhood has not had that same independence since its development has always been controlled by adulthood, white and black. African American childhood has had an identity projected by adults in both the white community and the African American community.
Projected identity is controlled or denied subjectivity, affecting the self- view of the individual. When self-identity is denied, passively or aggressively, selfhood radically differs. “Our identity,” writes Charles Taylor,
is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people of society around them mirror
back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. (249)
Carolyn Gerald reinforces Taylor’s view when she states:
…man projects his cultural and racial images upon the universe and he derives a sense of personal worth from the reflection he sees gazing back at him. For he defines himself and the world in terms of how others like him. He discovers his identity within a group. (qtd. in Sims 4)
Subjectivity of the individual is not just based in self-identity. Subjectivity is also defined within the identity of a group. Society is constructed through groupings and the identities of childhoods are found within the multiple layers of society. African American childhood’s selfhood is a by-product of society constructed by adulthood. Adult formed literary constructs mould constructs of childhood, constructing the prototype of who the child will be, as well as what the child was and is through literature. (See Aries, 1960 and Rose, 1984).
The difficulty in determining identity in literature for the African American is as complex as determining identity in reality. In The Signifying
Monkey (1988) and Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Radical Self”
(1987), African American critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. adapts Dubois’s idea of “two-ness,” applying it to literature and renaming the concept as “double- voicedness” – African American literature, like the African American him/herself, draws upon two voices and cultures, the white and the black. As Ralph Ellison pointed out in 1958, white Americans were “so absurdly self- deluded over the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness” (Fishkin).
Shelley Fisher Fishkin expands Ellison’s statement in her book Was Huck
Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (1993). The
interrelatedness between blackness and whiteness has been established through writers such as Ellison, Fishkin, Toni Morrison, and linguists who look at the influence of African Americans on language.
For the African American child, society is further complicated since as an African American, they are outside of the majority culture and as a child, they are outside of adult culture. Likewise, in African American children’s literature there is a “two-ness” or “double-voicedness”, which is complicated further by the power position of the adult writing for the child. Adults are the gatekeepers of childhood, determining what is published and produced for the intended child audience. Since there are no universal concepts about childhood, constructs as perceived and written by authors depend on various views of history, culture and society. Defining literary constructs involves defining adult authorial views presented to the child populace as a means to control childhood desires and possibilities. Literary constructs identify the child, silencing them by making the child reader seemingly unable to construct their own identity.
Paradoxically, in defining childhood, the adult author is also defining adulthood. Although one could argue that there is now a third level of definition between adult and child – that of the adolescent - words such as childlike, childish, maturity, etc., all refer to the defining of childhood as something in opposition to adulthood. Childlike is not adultlike. Childish, when applied to an adolescent or an adult, means not being adult. Maturity is not being childish or childlike or being beyond childhood. This defining
through negation is symbolic of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of binary opposites. Pairs such as adult/child and white/black are defined by what they are not and by which group has the power. For most of modern history, the white adult has held the power. In the 1930s in America, the white male majority held power however, areas of resistance were beginning to establish themselves in the system. In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors was passed, mainly due to pressure exerted by the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Women also won the right to vote in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment. The ratification of these two constitutional amendments signalled a shifting of power in American society. Women united together in support of just causes with a result of increased of political power. In a time when modernity was established and minority groups were finding ways to be heard in the majority, the African American community was struggling to decide who there were and just what their voice should say.
As discussed in Chapter One, great divisions existed in the African American community. The only shared identity they had with one another had its roots in the shared history of slavery and the stereotypical portrayals in literature and film. These stereotypes constructed an African American image, although it was, in Taylor’s words, “a misrecognition.” Various scholars throughout the last century have defined stereotypes of the African American character in literature. As discussed in Chapter Two, Sterling Brown’s essay in the “Journal of Negro Education”, published in 1933 and especially insightful as it pertains to the time period of this study, states that
“[t]he Negro has met with as great injustice in American literature as he has in American life. The majority of books about Negroes merely stereotype Negro character” (180). He identified the following stereotypes as being “important enough for separate classification although overlappings do occur” (author’s italics): The Contented Slave, the Wretched Freedman, The Comic Negro, The Brute Negro, The Tragic Mulatto, The Local Color Negro and, The Exotic Primitive. Brown further clarifies that:
all of these stereotypes are marked either by exaggeration or omission; that they all agree in stressing the Negro divergence from the Anglo- Saxon norm to the flattery of the latter; they could all be used, as they probably are, as justification of racial proscription; they all illustrate dangerous specious generalizing from a few particulars recorded by a single observer from a restricted point of view – which is itself generally depicted by the desire to perpetuate a stereotype. (180)
Brown’s essay convincingly shows how white writers and white critics upheld the institution of slavery and after the Civil War, oppressed African Americans through Jim Crow laws, making the search for identity for the individual African American and the African American society with American society almost impossible. Huggins notes,
The challenge to find black identity within the American cultural context was made more difficult because the stereotype which defined Negroes for most Americans was the obverse of the Protestant Ethic, that convenient measure of deserving character. Laziness, slovenliness, and excessive sensual appetite deserved no reward except poverty and dishonor. (142)
The culturally conscious literature for the African American in the 1930s is flawed since the culture displayed centres on a white world in which the black subject is an ‘other’ attempting to become, or at least successfully mimic, whiteness.
Since this study privileges children’s literature in searching for the constructs of African American childhood, children’s literature becomes the vehicle for identity for the African American child through text and illustration. The larger context of the search for identity for African Americans in general is important when considering a sub-section of that society – the child.