Imagining New Hopescapes: Expanding Black Girls’ Windows and Mirrors

Abstract

More than 30 years ago, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop (1983) conducted an exploratory case study to analyze the reading preferences of a 10-year-old Black girl named Osula.An avid reader, Osula had once enjoyed science fiction stories, but her interests changed as she eagerly searched for books that included Black girls.This modification in reading preference prompted Dr. Bishop to analyze the importance of books about Black people to Black children and to better understand what literary components appeal to Black youth as they read books about Black people.However, with such a pointed interest in stories featuring strong, Black girls, Osula's preferences constricted the number of books she would find in the early 1980s.Bishop noted that the list of books Osula chose to bring to the interview were mostly written before 1980, an historical period in which representations of Black characters were limited or completely omitted.In a study of over 5,000 children's books, Nancy Larrick (1965) found that only 6.7% of the books included one or more Black characters.In a subsequent study, Chall et. al (1979) found that the number of books with Black characters had increased to 14.4%; however, the researchers also noted that doubling the percentage from Larrick's study still left 86% of children's books housed in an all-White world.After the increase, Bishop (1992) acknowledged a distinctive decrease in books about Black people, noting that between 1980 and 1983, approximately one percent of all children's books published included Black people.In other words, although books with Black youth characters existed, they were small in number.With such an insignificant number of children's books featuring Black characters, it would be difficult for any child to find enough books to match their preferences, but Osula's interest in science fiction narratives and stories about Black girls further complicated the matter.Science fiction and fantasy (SFF) were rare in Black children's books, with only a few Black authors contributing to Black youth representations in the genre (Bishop, 2007).Additionally, Bishop's (1982) study of 150 contemporary realistic fiction books for Black children revealed that less than 40% of the analyzed texts featured Black female youth.In other words, at the time of Bishop's interview study with Osula, the number of books featuring Black girls was minimal, and the number of books including strong, Black girls in SFF was almost nonexistent.From the analysis of Osula's reading preferences as well as the dearth of reading options for all Black children, Bishop (1983) considered the implications of having a body of literature in which Osula could find the representations she sought.Thus, the metaphor of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in children's literature was formed.Specifically, Bishop (1990) stated 1 Toliver: Imagining New Hopescapes: Expanding Black Girls' Windows and Mirr

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