Viewing page 13 of 84

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

CRITERIA IN SELECTION OF
BLACK LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

JACQUELINE LEE YOUNG

"I am the smoke king.
I am black.

I am darkening with song
I am harkening to wrong!
I will be black as blackness can,
The blacker the mantle the mightier the man,
My purpling midnights no day dawn may ban."

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1899

ONE OF THE acute problems between black and white Americans is that society in the United States continually tells these groups that they are different. Not only does it say they are different, but, also that the black group is inferior to the white group. This message has been communicated in many ways via different social media. This is not a recent development but one that began with the introduction of black people to America. The nature of this social communication has had a detrimental impact on the individual black self image and the collective identity of black people. Much insight is not required to understand what being told for generations that one is inferior will do to that group's own self-esteem and self-evaluation.

The concept of "white over black" has had a significant influence on the shaping and the development of American history. Over three hundred years ago when blacks first appeared on American soil, they began their "long journey" of reacting to this concept as a means of psychological and physical survival. Several historians, in giving detailed accounts of the black experience of slave passage to America, the institution of slavery, and the adjustment to the 
____________________

Jacqueline Young is presently an evaluator for Title I Program in District 16, Brooklyn, and was formerly an early childhood teacher.

107