Dear Families,
Arms Wide Open: Turning Community Inside Out
“I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.”
~Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree
There is a powerful human instinct to seek commonality. We often presume that this must be rooted in the biological drive to protect our own genetic future, and certainly on some level there may be some truth to this explanation. However, there is clearly also greater complexity to the evolutionary story of our diverse world. An emphasis on the notion of protecting one’s own leads people to be fascinated by examples in other species that seem to contradict this explanation, in which protection and empathy appear to cross the species line and defy genetics—a dolphin rescuing a human, a tortoise raising a baby hippo, the fable of the mouse and the lion. It is particularly interesting, then, that the scientific definition of “community” largely goes against the idea of prioritizing commonality and similarity above all. When describing human communities even the dictionary definition focuses on “common characteristics, attitudes, or interests” that draw people together. However, the scientific definition is quite the opposite. It refers to “interdependent organisms of different species living together.”
What might happen if we saw human communities through this scientific lens of diversity rather than similarity? What if our understanding of community were rooted in our interdependence and in our shared purpose rather than in our shared traits?
The author Andrew Solomon asks us to consider community and love in this way, not as a turning inward to embrace those who are similar to us, but rather by looking outward, throwing our arms open, and creating an expansive model of love, “an ecosphere of kindness.”
I think about this each year as we approach Martin Luther King Day, for as important as this day is in acknowledging the values that Dr. King and the civil rights movement pushed forward, and in reminding us to continue the work of bending “the arc of the moral universe” toward justice, it is also problematic to isolate this work to a single day of honor and remembrance. As educators, we speak each year about the dubious tendency to package our conversations about inclusion into a single day. In doing so, children internalize the hidden curricular message that this is a limited, singular conversation, or a moment to simply reflect on history, rather than engage in an ongoing process of noticing who might be standing outside our communities, inviting them in, and constantly expanding our own ecosphere of kindness.
Though adults often view young children as being “color blind” or immune to difference, the research shows that the seeds of bias are sown very early, and most often not through overt messages of hate, but rather through the subtle messages children draw from the world around them—from who is present and who is absent, from the roles different people occupy in their lives, and from the media. It is our responsibility, therefore, from a very young age to expand their view and complicate the categories that the world so often presents to them. The author and illustrator, Christopher Myers, says, “Images matter. They linger in our hearts, vast ‘image libraries’ that color our actions and ideas, even if we don’t recognize them on a conscious level.” He calls upon us to take responsibility for diversifying the range of images in our children’s lives every day so that their sense of connection and affinity to a wide range of people expands rather than contracts:
“To make images, to tell stories, to trouble the narratives that pervade so many people’s secret hearts and minds...It is a responsibility I hope we share, all of us who love literature and children...We can no longer stand for our futures to be isolated, segregated, lonely, and angry. We can no longer turn a blind eye to stories that create worlds in which difference is viewed as a burden, a dry educational tool, a threat—or, worse, is simply rendered silent and invisible...I have a responsibility, one I share with all of you, to create that world in which we want to live.”
Diversifying the landscape of our children’s minds and hearts is big work. It is bigger than a single day or a single biography. But it begins in small ways, with the books we read to our children each night and the experiences we expose them to, not on one day, but every day.
As a small start, below is a short list of picture books that might begin to expand the image libraries in your own home. This list is only a brief sampling of the deep well of resources and experiences available, which one at a time have the potential to accumulate, expanding our children’s view of the world, their understanding of community, and their visceral sense of who “belongs.” And in purposefully and regularly sharing a wide range of images, stories, and experiences with our children, perhaps our own ecosphere of kindness might expand as well.
The Snowy Day (and the entire Peter series) by Ezra Jack Keats
Bee Bim Bop by Linda Sue Park
The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson
Yo! Yes? by Chris Raschka
Wings by Christopher Myers
The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi
The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig
Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Pena
Another by Christian Robinson
Just in Case You Want to Fly by Julie Fogliano
Shabbat shalom,
Alicia