ABSTRACT
As mentioned above, we find very few episodes of overt racism or discrimination in these books about immigration and international adoption. The stories appear to be more engaged in depicting processes through which foreign-born children gain self-confidence and manage to feel integrated into the local group, rather than on delving into experiences and clashes of seemingly hostile social contexts. Discrimination is in most cases a “supplementary” rather than a “constituent” (Porter Abbott 230) event of the plots; that is, if it is portrayed, it has no further importance for the development of the story. This approach might respond to a rather prevalent idea that the best tool against discrimination is to ignore prejudices, an approach widely criticized by anti-racism stakeholders who claim that the idea that we live in a post-racist world is instrumental for maintaining racial hierarchies (Bonilla Silva 1–6). The circumvention of discrimination in these books may also derive from a more general attitude toward children’s literature as a tool to safeguard innocence of childhood from the corrupt world of adults (cf. Rose). As such, these narratives would seek to distance themselves from depicting the ills of a society that discriminates people based on color and/or social and geographical origins to focus on more hopeful stories. Moreover, it may also be the case that authors and mediators believe that the depiction of discrimination may instill ideas about hierarchies, as argued by one of the S.O.L. reviewers. It goes beyond the scope of this study to assess the effectiveness of this approach, if only because the effect of reading and cultural consumption on our worldviews can hardly be measured by quantitative means. Yet, we may wonder if this depiction of welcoming societies where racism is presented as a matter of the past facilitates the maintenance of racist worldviews, dismissing the opportunity to understand how ‘races’ have been and are social constructs.
