Winner, Children's Lit Association Book Award

I am thrilled to announce that Racial Innocence has won the 2013 Book Award from the Children's Literature Association. I'm deeply honored to see my book join the ranks with past winners, which include stellar works such as Nathalie op de Beeck's Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Marah Gubar's Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008), Kimberley Reynolds's Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Julia Mickenberg's Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2006), Katharine Capshaw Smith's Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2004), Claudia Nelson's Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850-1929 (Indiana University Press, 2003), and Lois Kuznets's When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development (Yale University Press, 1994). When I look at this list (and the much longer list of all the winners and honorable mentions for this award), I realize how deeply these books have influenced me, and how many of them I cite in Racial Innocence or elsewhere. Many, many thanks to the prize committee chaired by Elisabeth Gruner, to ChLA president (and Bryn Mawr College alumna!) Claudia Nelson, and most of all, to the Children's Literature Association for fostering decades of exemplary children's literature scholarship, without which I never could have written Racial Innocence.

"Riveting"

Michelle H. Martin, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina and immediate Past Present of the Children’s Literature Association, has reviewed Racial Innocence:

“Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence offers an impressively rich and thorough analysis of late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century materials related to childhood, illustrating the means through which black children were systematically excluded from being categorized as innocent. Relying on personal accounts, archival records, historical documents, toys, and other articles with which children played, she then illustrates how, through their own forms of play and performance, black children effectively resisted this systematic negative scripting and assaults upon their childhood and humanity. Most noteworthy is the way that Bernstein pieces together layer upon layer of evidence from multiple sources--written documents, accounts of performances, musical scores, sales records from toy companies, and documented interviews with descendants of slaves--to make a convincing argument that runs counter to how Americans have historically thought about black children and their play. . . . Racial Innocence not only offers a new perspective on an important era in African American history and children’s literature history; it is so well written and well researched that it offers a riveting read for any scholar interested in the subject. Bernstein’s research is informed by major resources as well as obscure documents and records that would have been easy to overlook, but which add a wealth of support to her argument. Any reader who ingests Racial Innocence will look at this historical era with different eyes, and I, for one, will never see Raggedy Ann and Andy in quite the same way.” Michelle H. Martin, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38.1 (Spring 2013): 96-101.

Michelle H. Martin is the distinguished author of Brown Gold: Milestones in African American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002, which provides a superb analytical overview of the subject. I'm honored that Professor Martin has reviewed my book, which I always envisioned as forming a dialogue with her own.