If you asked my daughter some 18 years ago what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would invariably answer: “A monkey.” A colleague recently told me about a friend’s son who was taunted at school with the epithet “monkey.” How could the same word be met with such different feelings by two young children? Well, my daughter is white, and my colleague’s acquaintance is black.

My daughter grew up playing on climbing structures and proudly owning the descriptor “monkey,” but she has the luxury of belonging to a racial group for whom “monkey” is not an ages-old term of denigration still in widespread use. Far too many children do not share that luxury. (And adults: remember white Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’ 2018 exhortation to voters not to “monkey it up” by voting for his African-American opponent, Andrew Gillum?) Librarian and critic Edi Campbell has brought to prominence how monkey imagery in children’s books can reinforce and perpetuate those harmful, negative connotations with African-American children.

 Recall Curious George, the eternal naif, brought from Africa by a white man who cares for George and strives always to keep George under control. When you recall the history of brown-skinned human beings brought from Africa by white people who “cared for” and controlled them, suddenly Curious George doesn’t seem quite so charming. He’s just one of many. Campbell has identified book after book in which monkey characters are depicted as buffoons and treated with paternalism by white people.

Suddenly it’s hard to see a monkey as innocent at all. And that is how we came to view Leyla, by Galia Bernstein (reviewed in this issue), as something other than the positive lesson in mindfulness it was no doubt intended to be. A young baboon, Leyla is overwhelmed by her large family and runs away for some peace and quiet. A yogic lizard gives her a lesson in mindfulness (there is a delightful, wordless double-page spread of the two characters meditating), and she is then able to rejoin her family and find peace within herself.

Even though there are no white characters anywhere in this book, it shares in many racist tropes. Her family is enormous, with 23 cousins. “That’s too many!” And “They are always busy, always fussy, always noisy.” “Too many” and “too noisy” are accusations frequently flung at black families, and the depiction of Leyla surrounded by relatives searching her for fleas reinforces the racist misapprehension that black people are “dirty.” When Leyla returns to her family after her visit with the lizard, she enacts the role of the buffoon, exaggerating her adventure with rolling eyes that recall minstrel shows and lying about the size of the lizard. It’s important to remember that the source of the wisdom she receives is not of her people. Her hair even sticks up instead of lying down flat.

Will many readers see a delightful story about a baboon who learns self-care? Absolutely. Children in large families will no doubt recognize Leyla’s feelings, and when not viewed through the monkeys-as–black-people lens, her antics fall within the scope of familiar, funny preschooler behavior. And the mindfulness instruction is on-point.

But, as our reviewer confessed to me, now that I have seen the connections, I can’t un-see them. I can’t help thinking that even as benign-looking a book as this might give license to some other white child to call some other black child a “monkey” and think “it’s just a joke.”

Maybe we just need to call it quits on monkeys for a while, let the generations purge. Goodness knows, there are lots of other animals we can populate our books with.

Vicky Smith is the children’s editor.