Not My Idea, by Anastasia Higginbotham

A little white girl sees a news story about a white cop killing an unarmed black man.  This raises all sorts of questions for her--and her mom.  Should she turn away and ignore this, or have a conversation about race?  Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness, written and illustrated Anastasia Higginbotham, tells this little girl's story of a growing awareness of race and racism.  We don't see color?  She says, "I do see color!  I see yours, mine, and everybody's!  You can't hide what's right in front of me."

Mom points out subtle ways that racism is all around: the scrutiny black kids get at the store, when white gets get little scrutiny.  The white people who lock their car doors when the see a black kid on the street.  At the library she reads about the ways white people have systemically denied black people economic opportunity, education, and residential choices.  She also learned about brave people--black and white--who have spoken out and created change.

Higginbothan paints a bleak picture.  This book has no pictures of our black president, and no hint that many black people are very successful today.  She writes, "Racism is still happening.  It keeps changing and keeps being the same."  The book is stuck in the middle of the civil rights era, or maybe even before.

And boy, does she lay on the white guilt.  In her "contract binding you to whiteness" she says you get: "stolen land, stolen riches, special favors," and whiteness gets "to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of color."  What a bleak picture of race relations.  It makes me wonder if Higginbotham, who is white, is ever around other actual black people, or if she only gets her information about race relations on the news coverage of the Ferguson riots.

I'm not so naive to think that racism has completely disappeared, or that it will ever be purged from the hearts of men and women.  But the vision of Not My Idea seems stuck in about 1950.  Maybe her own white guilt is preventing her from getting out and seeing the wider world.


Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!