2024.10.03

私の最近の研究について Jefferson M. Peters:英語学英米文学専攻

Depictions of Race in American Children’s Literature and Popular Culture

Before the American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), Walter R. Brooks began subtly inserting themes about racial tolerance and discrimination into his Freddy the Pig series of children’s novels. Brooks began using his farm-pig hero Freddy to at times represent African Americans in Freddy’s Cousin Weedly (1940). In the novel, published during the segregation era, a white woman refuses to sit next to Freddy in a movie theater because he’s a pig, while the theater manager tells her that anyone who buys a ticket has the right to watch a movie.

Another instance occurs in Freddy Plays Football (1949), published five years before Brown v. Board of Education ended racial segregation in American public schools and two years after Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play Major League Baseball. Here, Freddy tries to become the first animal to enroll in the local high school so that he can become the first animal to play football on the team.

Animals also represent people of color in other works of American popular culture. In a 1973 Peanuts newspaper comics story, for instance, Snoopy receives hate mail when he is about to break Babe Ruth’s home run record at the same time that Hank Aaron was receiving hate mail for attempting the same feat in the real world.

Does it demean people of color to represent them with animals? Why and how do authors use animal characters to explore race? Thus far, I have found no scholars who discuss race in the Freddy the Pig books. No scholars have treated race in Brooks’ novels, and I hope to fill that gap.