The Rain Came Down: Book Analysis

There are a variety of different children books that are great about talking about culture and there are also children books that don’t do the greatest job with teaching children about culture. The two books that I will be examining are Mrs. Katz and Tush and The Rain Came Down. The first book, Mrs. Katz and Tush is written by Patricia Polacco that was published in 1994. This book is a great example of multicultural because it shows true meaning of friendship and how similar and different each culture is. It shows examples of love for race, religion, ethnicity, gender and age throughout the whole book. The two main characters in this book are Mrs. Katz, who is an older widowed lady who becomes good friends with her neighbor Larnel. Larnel …show more content…
What is sexism? Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on sex (Masequesmay, 2016). So, in other words it’s unfair treatment of people because of their sex. This stereotype is used throughout the whole book. For example, he talks about the pizza man, the policeman, the ice-cream man, the barber, the painter, the taxi driver, the truck driver, the bakery, and the grocery man are all males. Not one single one of them job duties are a woman. The only females in this book is the little girl, the mother and the female in the beauty salon. All these jobs that the men were doing, the women could easily have been represented as well. The author could have been a little less sexist and used a variety of different job duties for both sexes. The book was published in 2000, there shouldn’t be any reason that he couldn’t have used females because by then, females were in the working field. Not only was the author using sexism, but he was raciest as well. What is racism? Racism is the belief that characteristics and abilities can be attributed to people simply on the basis of their race and that some racial groups are superior to others. Racism and discrimination have been used as powerful weapons encouraging fear or hatred of others in times of conflict and war (Shah, 2010). The only black person in the book is the barber. The rest of the illustrations were white people doing all the job duties. By just changing a few characteristics of some of the males, the author could have been doing less stereotyping. We may all wonder why he chose to discriminate the black people against the white people. In reality, every single human being is the same just with different characteristics. We are all human and have rights. Another stereotype that is happening in the children’s book is age. Shannon doesn’t use a variety of age in his book, “The Rain Came Down”. The