White Christmas. White knight. White light. Confessions of a recovering white-minded woman.
My wish for a horse was almost realized when my family moved to a farm in New Berlin, Wisconsin. Though people drove from Milwaukee to buy our amazing garden vegetables, it’s our barn and field blanketed in white snow that I remember most. I didn’t grow up thinking, gosh the snow is white, like me, or that the whiteness made it the best place on earth to live. Anyone reading this from Wisconsin? The winter sun through the window is enticing, but if you go outside, you’ll freeze your cheese off.
Moving to Florida ended my hay fever days there, but as a young adult, I adopted a life of another’s culture far from the white tobogganing hills of Wisconsin, and my white mind.
You love who you love. Right?
My first realization that I suffered from white-mindedness came during a heated argument with my Asian husband. “So tell me, Janet,” he’d shouted, “what’s a real American supposed to look like to you?” (I’m tapping quickly on my keyboard here. Don’t recall what triggered the argument specifically, but it’s still not a pleasant moment to remember.)
My embedded prejudice snapped out between us, invisible, and painfully revealing. Denial and defense mechanisms pulsed through me, but the truth silenced them. He was right. White is how I envisioned the face of an American. Shame followed, but not just for myself, for all those others who’d never left the igloo.
Me? A Christian-principled woman who believed in fairness and compassion for all actually believed an American could only have white skin? More awful and revealing was how could I ever be a decent mom to my bi-racial daughters with those hidden, contorted, biased thoughts?
Realizing how infected I was with white-mindedness, I headed to the library to search for books with characters my daughters could relate to.
There were none.
It seemed, white-mindedness wasn’t just my problem. The publishing industry was infected, too. That’s when I decided to become a children’s writer. Loving history, I gravitated to historical fiction stories that blended my heritage with my children’s Japanese heritage.
Twenty years later, after co-authoring a novel with one of my daughters, an outlandish president, and finding an amazing editor from Reycraft Books, my one-woman melting pot show came to life. (I have two upcoming middle-grade releases in 2025 and 2026).
Happy ending. I’m excited!!
But I’m sorry to say, some publishers are still struggling.
I was asked recently to review a children’s book from a publisher promoting it as “multi-cultural.” It was a picture book biography on heroes of World War II. The group selected was a balance of racially and culturally diversified heroes, but the individual profiles were somewhat slanted. (It takes a sufferer of white-mindedness to recognize another.)
But what really caught me up, was the artist’s depiction (or by direction of the publisher?) of our heroes of several races. I can’t show you. Copyright laws. But I will tell you, all of the heroes are brown, or a shade thereof.
Not kidding.
Maybe it’s a certain illustration technique, so I’ll claim ignorance if it is, but honestly? I wanted to see the white heroes, white. Black ones, black. Mix-raced heroes-mixed.
Perhaps it’s a publisher’s attempt to balance the sticky issue of inequality? To make us all appear equal? One thing my husband and children have taught me, as the minority in my family, is that being treated equally isn’t the same as being treated fairly.
And here’s my personal revelation: I love being white. I love that my children aren’t white—and so are they. I just don’t want to be entombed by it anymore. Our cultural differences make us unique and complicated—diverse and gorgeous. Respecting that isn’t by representing everyone with one color to even us up.
For those who I may have ever offended by my white mindedness, I am so sorry. I promise to do better. We can all do better.
It’s a process.