2020: NEW KID by Jerry Craft
This is how I feel every single day of my life, like I'm falling without a parachute.
In February 2012, a group of white college students thought it would be hilarious to commemorate Black History Month by putting fried chicken in the mailboxes of their university's Black Students Association and African Students Association. They were doing this to be assholes at their majority-white school and harass the students who looked different from them. It's bad. It's an open act of racism. We wouldn't call it a "microaggression" because once you start purchasing food and walking it over to someone's mailbox, you're crossing the line into "aggression".
This particular incident didn't happen at White Working Class State College in Racism County, Kentucky. It happened at Notre Dame, a private school where smart white people pay a lot of tuition and get a rigorous education so they can enter the upper tiers of professional society. I had graduated from there just a few years before this happened; my classmates have gone on to become doctors, lawyers, professors, and authors of children's-literature-themed newsletters that reach almost eighty non-paying subscribers every week. Presumably, the students who pulled the fried chicken stunt - not crusty racist old men, but millennials who would have been born, at the earliest, in 1990 - and their classmates who thought it was funny, have gone on to lead similarly comfortable and successful lives.
Oh, also, Notre Dame is a Catholic school that loves showing off how Catholic it is; these students had a crucifix hanging in every single one of their classrooms, went to Mass every Sunday night in their dorms, hugged their roommates during the sign of peace with those bro-slap hugs, and came out of all of that saying "lol the blacks love fried chicken am I right?".
In a January 2022 episode of This American Life, NPR interviewed a Texas parent who was working to get a book banned from her children's school for allegedly promoting "critical race theory". The book was a critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a Black kid in New York trying to fit in to his fancy mostly-white prep school, but that was, apparently, actually, insidiously, about crushing white people through sheer force of guilt. In the parent's own words:
"...you don't harm future generations of children because you went through a bad experience. You don't poison the minds of my children even if it happened. You do not poison the minds of other kids and make them feel like they have to make concessions for being white…these books teach children the preordained conclusion that white children have wealth, status, and race privilege, while children of color must suffer the racist ignorance of these privileged families."
The NPR interviewer pointed out that it was unlikely that the author engineered a book to manipulate white guilt and indoctrinate children, given that many of the events in the book, like a black teen getting a KFC gift card as a secret santa gift, were drawn directly from the author's experiences. But the parent had the well-reasoned and thoughtful response we've come to expect from people who ban books: "nuh-uh".
"You really think he was given KFC gift certificates? Because he says these are things he went through."
Yes, I really do think that Jerry Craft, author of 2020 Newbery medalist New Kid, did get KFC gift cards from his white classmates. I've seen people who were supposed to be way better than this, do way worse chicken-based racism than that.
A few weeks ago, I described Jerry Spinelli's child's-eye-view of racial prejudice that he wrote into Maniac Magee: because Magee is unhoused and unschooled, he gets to know people of different races before he ever learns what racism is, or the history of racism in the segregated town of Two Mills. When he does see racism, when he does hear someone say something bigoted, it doesn't make any sense to him, because he knows all of these people personally but he doesn't know where racism comes from.
The white characters in New Kid are the complete inverse of this: the students and teachers at Riverdale Academy Day School are well-off, well-meaning, generally liberal-minded folks who are definitely aware of the history of racism in America, who definitely agree in the abstract that "racism is bad". But none of them have ever seen, much less spoken to, a Black kid in their lives. And it's in this environment that we find twelve-year-old aspiring comics artist Jordan Banks.
Jordan lives in Washington Heights and dreams of going to art school; however, his parents enroll him at the prestigious prep school instead, knowing that it's a long commute, knowing that Jordan will be one of very few non-white students there, but also knowing that this is going to be his most direct route to conventional professional success. Through a series of episodic chapters, we track Jordan over the course of the school year as he struggles to find his place at Riverdale and make new friends.
Riverdale is, as you'd expect, extremely awkward for Jordan. Jordan rides across the full spectrum of code switching on his bus route out to Riverdale, slowly adjusting his hoodie and sunglasses to look more or less "urban" as he gets closer to or further from the city. The first Black adults Jordan sees at the school are chauffeurs dropping off a legacy student from a third-generation Riverdale family's mansion. Teachers awkwardly mention financial aid opportunities while glancing in his direction. The students and faculty repeatedly call him by the wrong name, constantly confusing him with one of the other dozen Black kids at the school.
As you can see, New Kid, among other things, is a pretty definitive catalogue of every microaggression from the current era. My personal favorite is from the soccer coach, who at one point tells Jordan "just get out there and run fast. I know you can do that! I mean, because you look athletic! Not because…you know…We're all created equal, Jordan. I really believe that."
I think the soccer coach's awkward motivational speech is a good example of what sets New Kid apart from other children's novels about race. Almost every single white person at Riverdale means well. Even that KFC gift card was given in good faith, by a classmate who just happened to really like KFC. Jordan is not enduring a battery of openly racist attacks, and nobody is coming at him out of hatred. But meaning well isn't enough to prevent yourself from repeatedly embarrassing and belittling the one Black kid you know. As Craft put it in an interview with The Horn Book, “well-meaning doesn’t mean well-doing”.
That makes New Kid unique, and more importantly, it makes New Kid pleasant. The book is smart and sweet and often hilarious; it is not a clip show of Black suffering and misery. I've read those books before, and so has Craft. Several times throughout New Kid, he takes comedic potshots at the bleak and miserable literature that is often marketed to young Black readers; the "Mean Streets of South Uptown" book series in the novel seems to be a pretty clear parody of something like the Bluford High series. Conventions of that branch of literature - dead family members, escaping the 'hood through sports, a white savior teacher - are all openly mocked throughout the novel. New Kid isn't about racial hatred or urban blight, it's about a kid who sucks at sports and likes to draw and just wants to feel a little more comfortable in a school full of well-meaning people constantly putting their feet in their mouths. For most of the novel, the stakes are remarkably low: Jordan makes a few friends and plays Call of Duty. He gets Chinese food with his grandpa. He draws goofy things in his notebook making fun of his teachers. And by the end of the book, he feels like things are maybe going okay.
Perhaps this is obvious, but none of this counts as Critical Race Theory in the literal sense of what CRT is, or even in a broad dumb-guy understanding of what CRT is. I don't think there's a reasonable middle schooler who would read this book and conclude "oh no, I am complicit in horrifying oppression because I am white, and my only option now is to live the rest of my life consumed by paralyzing guilt". Again, this is a good and funny story and not a polemic against white people. Although there's one scene that stays with you, especially knowing what New Kid would eventually be banned for.
Shortly before the end of the novel, Jordan's homeroom teacher - one of the characters who repeatedly calls her Black students by the wrong names - finds his sketchbook and discovers his cartoons about his experience at Riverdale, including a few cartoons making fun of her own slipups. Jordan uses drawing as his creative outlet to think through things and work out his frustrations, but his white teacher basically sees this as a personal attack or even a threat:
"I had no idea that you were so…so…angry! Why are you so angry at the school? And at life?...I see this book as a polemic against everything the school stands for. And me!"
Jordan points out that the reason he sketched his teacher calling Black students the wrong name is that, well, she actually did that quite a bit:
"How can I be attacking the school if all this stuff really happens? I mean, no offense, but you call Drew by the wrong name all the time. And the year is almost over. And some kids DO look down on kids on financial aid. And kids stare. ALL THE TIME! It’s not always so easy being different!”
Reading this, while knowing that it mirrors a conversation that would happen at a Texas school board meeting two full years later, is wild. After this book comes out, a real white lady is going to say “this book is too angry at white people and this author needs to calm down” and then the real author is going to say “well, I wrote all of that stuff because it actually happened”, and then the real white lady is going to say “nuh-uh. And even if it did happen, you shouldn’t take it out on white people”. It’s all right there in the book! Craft actually predicted the main objection to his work! The teacher tells Jordan that “being different is a blessing” and “you should be proud to be here”.
But Jordan gets the last word - and Craft provides the right response to the argument he anticipated - when he says “Ms. Rawle, can I ask you a question? Would you teach at a school in my neighborhood? You know, so you could be special?” and it’s all you can do not to yell out loud “HELL YEAH HOW’S IT TASTE.”
In The Cross of Redemption, James Baldwin wrote:
“Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, "what I want", but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.”
New Kid is not trying to be a James Baldwin essay in graphic-novel form. But Baldwin and Craft each found a way to perfectly summarize the ongoing reality of racism in a handful of sentences. Baldwin wrote in a era when Black Americans were being told to go home, stop protesting and complaining, stop making white people feel guilty, you all got what you wanted, most of racism was fixed and you weren't going to fix the rest of it by causing a big stink, and the cops are just beating you up because you're not following directions. Craft writes in an era where…well, maybe a few of those things are still happening. And there are plenty of people around who mean well, but meaning well is not enough, because meaning well is not doing well.
And then there are others trying to keep sweet and funny and compassionate stories like New Kid out of their schools, to keep kids from hearing that maybe they have to try to do well, from hearing that there are kids who don't look like them but are a lot like them and who can be their friend, but they need to try to do well. They need to act like the world is bigger than they think, but that they're not alone in it.
Some people don't even bother to seek out stories like that; they grow up and become college students who shove fried chicken in mailboxes and parents who ban books for made-up reasons and people who just generally try to brush off the idea that prejudice or racial disparities even exist. But deep down, none of them would like to be Black here. For many of them, I'm guessing it's not that deep down.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1950 medalist, The Door In The Wall by Marguerite de Angeli.