The Value of Caribbean YA Books in Reducing Bias and Prejudice
To reduce destructive transgression, every individual in society needs to experience, from birth, being valued, respected, secure and to be raised to perform lifelong socially cohesive behaviours and self care.
Forgiveness is not easy, especially after a lifetime of being short changed by loss of opportunity or even the passing over of someone's eyes when you believe that you are worth more than a glance.
It can be possible if more of us, alive now as adults, recognise the shortcoming in ourselves and commit to change. This is not going to happen spontaneously, and Caribbean YA books can play a role. A reading of passages from fiction or memoirs can help to open up thoughts of the effect of living as a person both giving or receiving bias. The value that I am pointing out here is more than documenting examples of bias and prejudice in society, but allowing it to liberate us from victimhood and also performing as a bigot and a bully, which most of us perform, to some degree, throughout our lives.
Our cricketing heroes, do have passages in their books that describe the insults and prejudice that they received while playing overseas. It would be useful to discover what they had in their personal resources to allow them to overcome this. Twinned with their experiences, would of course be, the real life sad decline of sportsmen who broke a society rule and played for money in South Africa during apartheid. Examples of books by these sportsmen are Whispering Death by Michael Holding and Six Machine by Christopher Gayle.
Another moment describing prejudice that converted to triumph is The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands where, at a moment when a racial slur was used in her presence, but at a time she had an upper hand, she performed with outrage to memorable effect.
In "A Way To Escape" by Michelle Thompson, it is the expectation that women will be the hard workers and accepting of the harmful behaviour of their spouses to themselves and their children can be explored and how she got out of it. Dew Angels by Melanie Schwapp also has a mother who does not do well by herself or her children because she is under the control of a domineering husband. In each case, both mothers found a way of redemption.
The favourite bias of authors in the Caribbean is the colour bias and how it connects to the class bias. This is an important issue that needs to be told and retold with the aim of gradually dismantling it. Books that do not explicitly tell you the skin colour of the characters may also be helpful in this regard. My books Bad Girls In School, Young Heroes of the Caribbean do not describe skin colour of characters. I have freed the reader to see the actions of the characters without explicitly describing their skins. It allows the reader to add that bit of imagination and it may be interesting to hear what different readers thought and whether that affected their view of the characters or not. I did use skin colour in my book Something Special.
The stories in YA books are a treasure trove of promoting greater justice and harmony in the society if leveraged where it can become available to young minds. Not just in the written form, but also as other media products such as stage plays, radio dramas and films and documentaries.
Promoting them will hopefully spur even more creations that address the range of social challenges that can be imagined and that we live with.
The organisations in our society that support hegemony or cause change are, naturally, crucial to any influences that change bias and prejudice.
Some of these influences will be to urge voluntary behaviour, such as the Ministry of Health Jamaica Moves lifestyle programme, or non-voluntary such as the justice system.
The actors who will carry out these influences will be teachers, health workers, law enforcement officials, policy writers and persons who create and distribute content that is widely consumed by our societies.
In the UK today, arising out of comply or explain regulations related to reducing bias in companies that are related to race, sex and gender differences, publicly listed companies are expected to put policies in place to reduce behaviours that are unfair to certain segments of the population.
In the USA, it is the radical activists against policies of the government and longstanding abuses by celebrities and a range of powerful figures who have been pushing for social change that will reduce biases.
Moving adults humanely toward change is complex, and one of the outcomes is that persons are at least aware where before they were unaware, I can call this process sensitisation. We need more of this in order to move the society ahead.
The Jamaican society, being pluralistic in lifestyles and biology and ethnicity, has developed a morass of ways to denigrate and be biased against groups of people.
At this time, we should be investing in sensitising ourselves to discover and acknowledge our ingrained biases and learn how to disentangle ourselves from them.
I should be trying to realise how I am biased against my students, co-workers, church sisters and brothers, patients, and members of communities that I am supposed to serve. When I become aware of my prejudices due to disability, lifestyle, personal history, physical appearance and social behaviour and performance, then I am ready to invest in myself and become less bigoted.
Are we brave enough to probe and acknowledge our biases and do our part to stop it when it is shame on us and harmful to others?
END
A bookshelf with a few Jamaican books suitable for YA audiences
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Here is the Implicit Harvard Test
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
The test says that I am not biased against men or women who are attractive or not....something like that.
I am still searching for a test to confirm my biases.
I acknowledge that I am biased against artistes who sing off key.
Forgiveness is not easy, especially after a lifetime of being short changed by loss of opportunity or even the passing over of someone's eyes when you believe that you are worth more than a glance.
It can be possible if more of us, alive now as adults, recognise the shortcoming in ourselves and commit to change. This is not going to happen spontaneously, and Caribbean YA books can play a role. A reading of passages from fiction or memoirs can help to open up thoughts of the effect of living as a person both giving or receiving bias. The value that I am pointing out here is more than documenting examples of bias and prejudice in society, but allowing it to liberate us from victimhood and also performing as a bigot and a bully, which most of us perform, to some degree, throughout our lives.
Our cricketing heroes, do have passages in their books that describe the insults and prejudice that they received while playing overseas. It would be useful to discover what they had in their personal resources to allow them to overcome this. Twinned with their experiences, would of course be, the real life sad decline of sportsmen who broke a society rule and played for money in South Africa during apartheid. Examples of books by these sportsmen are Whispering Death by Michael Holding and Six Machine by Christopher Gayle.
Another moment describing prejudice that converted to triumph is The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands where, at a moment when a racial slur was used in her presence, but at a time she had an upper hand, she performed with outrage to memorable effect.
In "A Way To Escape" by Michelle Thompson, it is the expectation that women will be the hard workers and accepting of the harmful behaviour of their spouses to themselves and their children can be explored and how she got out of it. Dew Angels by Melanie Schwapp also has a mother who does not do well by herself or her children because she is under the control of a domineering husband. In each case, both mothers found a way of redemption.
The favourite bias of authors in the Caribbean is the colour bias and how it connects to the class bias. This is an important issue that needs to be told and retold with the aim of gradually dismantling it. Books that do not explicitly tell you the skin colour of the characters may also be helpful in this regard. My books Bad Girls In School, Young Heroes of the Caribbean do not describe skin colour of characters. I have freed the reader to see the actions of the characters without explicitly describing their skins. It allows the reader to add that bit of imagination and it may be interesting to hear what different readers thought and whether that affected their view of the characters or not. I did use skin colour in my book Something Special.
The stories in YA books are a treasure trove of promoting greater justice and harmony in the society if leveraged where it can become available to young minds. Not just in the written form, but also as other media products such as stage plays, radio dramas and films and documentaries.
Promoting them will hopefully spur even more creations that address the range of social challenges that can be imagined and that we live with.
The organisations in our society that support hegemony or cause change are, naturally, crucial to any influences that change bias and prejudice.
Some of these influences will be to urge voluntary behaviour, such as the Ministry of Health Jamaica Moves lifestyle programme, or non-voluntary such as the justice system.
The actors who will carry out these influences will be teachers, health workers, law enforcement officials, policy writers and persons who create and distribute content that is widely consumed by our societies.
In the UK today, arising out of comply or explain regulations related to reducing bias in companies that are related to race, sex and gender differences, publicly listed companies are expected to put policies in place to reduce behaviours that are unfair to certain segments of the population.
In the USA, it is the radical activists against policies of the government and longstanding abuses by celebrities and a range of powerful figures who have been pushing for social change that will reduce biases.
Moving adults humanely toward change is complex, and one of the outcomes is that persons are at least aware where before they were unaware, I can call this process sensitisation. We need more of this in order to move the society ahead.
The Jamaican society, being pluralistic in lifestyles and biology and ethnicity, has developed a morass of ways to denigrate and be biased against groups of people.
At this time, we should be investing in sensitising ourselves to discover and acknowledge our ingrained biases and learn how to disentangle ourselves from them.
I should be trying to realise how I am biased against my students, co-workers, church sisters and brothers, patients, and members of communities that I am supposed to serve. When I become aware of my prejudices due to disability, lifestyle, personal history, physical appearance and social behaviour and performance, then I am ready to invest in myself and become less bigoted.
Are we brave enough to probe and acknowledge our biases and do our part to stop it when it is shame on us and harmful to others?
END
A bookshelf with a few Jamaican books suitable for YA audiences
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Here is the Implicit Harvard Test
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
The test says that I am not biased against men or women who are attractive or not....something like that.
I am still searching for a test to confirm my biases.
I acknowledge that I am biased against artistes who sing off key.
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