I Belong To Me Analysis

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I Belong to You and You Belong to Me Within the Context of Literacy, Identity, and Multiculturalism The American family of today looks drastically different from the archetypal American family of the twentieth century. Following the advent of globalization, rapid diversification of American society has made multicultural and multiracial households commonplace for the first time. As the country at large struggles to embrace its increased diversity while simultaneously confronting the challenges that it poses, the same balancing act is being reproduced on a microscale within multicultural household units and the schools which serve them. At the same time, while multicultural households are indeed becoming more ubiquitous, American families …show more content…

As children become aware of their own racial and cultural designations, it is important for parents and schools to help them develop a sense of comfort and security with respect to such facets of their identity. Picture books are an exceptional tool through which parents and teachers can offer such support, as they are highly accessible and can be written with the purpose of generating narratives that resonate with the audience. In I Belong to You and You Belong to Me, the themes of identity, belonging, and legitimacy are explored through the lens of Kian, an American, kindergarten-age child whose father and mother hail from Uganda and China, respectively. At the conclusion of the book, Kian learns to value the rich and unique experiences that his biracial …show more content…

From as early as six months of age, infants can distinguish differences between unfamiliar faces of their own race from unfamiliar faces of a different race; moreover, Mary Ellen Goodman found that children ages three to five not only exhibited strong racial awareness, but that as many as a quarter of the children expressed strong racial values and attitudes that were not necessarily modeled after adults in their lives by age four. As Kian’s story progresses, readers are invited to consider these familiar concepts of color and race: In the beginning, the unusual nature of Kian’s family is attributed solely to discrepancies in the physical appearances of his father, his mother, and himself. The book provides very simple language to aid readers in conceptualizing Kian’s unique state of racial being, concluding that “he looked somewhere in between”. At this point, the audience understands that Kian is different from his peers and that this difference stems from the racial heterogeneity which exists in his family. Moreover, multiracial and uniracial readers alike are introduced to the concept of “mixed race” as a distinct racial

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