{"id":1162,"date":"2009-01-18T13:40:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-18T21:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/01\/barack-obama-and-ezra-jack-keats.html"},"modified":"2016-12-14T09:27:04","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T17:27:04","slug":"barack-obama-and-ezra-jack-keats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/01\/barack-obama-and-ezra-jack-keats.html","title":{"rendered":"BARACK OBAMA AND EZRA JACK KEATS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazing amount of excitement, anticipation, and i expect resentment and suppressed fear right now around the obama inauguration<\/a>… i will try to avoid getting too deeply into politics in this blog despite my fascination with it — i’ve learned the hard way over the years that there is actually some wisdom to the old warning about talking about politics and religion across the dinner table.<\/p>\n

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but obama’s arrival has me thinking about someone else: old-school children’s writer ezra jack keats.<\/a> we learned about him as children, as the first writer to bring black characters into mainstream kid lit — i guess i assumed he was black himself. but turns out he was of polish-jewish descent — his dad’s last name was “katz.”<\/div>\n
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so first off, i love the fact that the offspring of european jews took the surname of england’s greatest romantic poet (who was himself a cockney and spoke that weird rhyming slang) and created a character who resembles, both physically and in his habits of mind, the nation’s first black president. (born just a few months before keats’ best book was released.)<\/div>\n
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by that i mean that the protagonist of “the snowy day,”<\/a>\u00a01962, who lives in that keatsian world of brooklyn-ish brownstone pastoral, shares not only a haircut but an introspective, analytical temperament with the nation’s soon-to-be-leader. there are several scenes, including one of peter in from the cold, soaking in the bathtub, where there are virtually no words on the page and we see him >thinking<.<\/div>\n
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it’s among the few images i know from kid lit that show characters in act of reflection or imagining. there’s a wonderfully simple illustration his footsteps across white snow reminds me of the work of alt-comic artists Seth<\/a>.<\/div>\n
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it’s too soon to tell how obama will govern, and how he will handle this incredibly bad economy and a demoralized nation — i will not make any predictions… but i think it’s fair to say it’s been a long while since we’ve had a president with this reflective, even poetic, temperament that we find in keats’ books. (there’s probably a counter-argument here that what we need is “a man of action.” let’s table that for the moment.)<\/div>\n
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so my final irony here is that my son ian, a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old living in the hills above 21st century los angeles, can respond so fully to the tale of a black kid walking in the snow, almost five decades ago, in a city my kid has never visited and a season he has never really exp\"snowy-day_large\"<\/a>erienced. the book gives ian a glimpse into a world he’s never seen before. \u00a0through his enthusiasm,\u00a0he’s taken me there too.<\/p>\n

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Photo credit: Ezra Jack Keats Foundation<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazing amount of excitement, anticipation, and i expect resentment and suppressed fear right now around the obama inauguration… i will try to avoid getting too deeply into politics in this blog despite my fascination with it — i’ve learned the hard way over the years that there is actually some wisdom to the old warning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3392,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,142,34,30,562,65,563],"tags":[720,750],"class_list":{"0":"post-1162","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"category-kid-lit","9":"category-literary","10":"category-los-angeles","11":"category-obama","12":"category-politics","13":"category-winter","14":"tag-black-history","15":"tag-obama","16":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3395,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions\/3395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}