Using literature to move toward an anti-racist future

Developing empathy is regarded as a method to destabilise racism and move forward as a culture that has overcome white supremacy (Brock-Petroshius et al., 2023; Hopson, 2023). Using literature to inform identity and confidence in young people is one step towards that end (Adukia et al., 2023; Hughes-Hassell & Cox, 2010). Through close analysis of Dragon Hoops (2020) and American Born Chinese (2006) by Gene Luen Yang, examples of empathy and humour can be considered devices to do exactly that; to use literature to develop empathy in young readers and move toward an anti-racist future.

Yang is an American author of Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese parents (Kurzweil, 2023). His work in Dragon Hoops and American Born Chinese places him in the Golden Age of Comics, the current age (McCloud, 1994). Both titles can be considered graphic novels and employ the conventions of the comic book genre. The description ‘graphic novel’ has been said to “create distance and construct difference between more ‘serious’ adult texts and the simple juvenile narratives and styles generally associated with comic books” (Naghibi & O’Malley, 2005, p. 227).

As a self-proclaimed comic fan (Yang, 2026), the author does not seek to place these works above classic comic conventions, embracing the Ligne Claire or Clear Line style (Hatfield, 2005). This can be seen in both works with the absence of texture or shadow in the illustrations. Earle (2014, p. 2) asserts that “Ligne Claire is a lens through which the world attains some level of clarity and comprehensibility.” Yang’s use of this style confirms his deft use of comic conventions to dismantle white supremacy, giving voice to Asian Americans and helping all readers “contest the structures” that keep racism in place (Naghibi & O’Malley, 2005, p. 232). This strong use of iconographic imagery allows the reader to place themselves in the experience of the main character regardless of their own race (McCloud, 1994).

Many forms of racism are shown in both books, and the analysis of Figures 1 to 6 goes into greater detail about the skill with which Yang displays these experiences to white readers and Asian American readers alike. The deployment of relatively neutral characters in Ligne Claire style seats the high school age readers in the life and struggles of a non-white character, encouraging what Wang et al. (as cited in Brock-Petroshius et al., 2023, p. 348) defines as ethnocultural empathy, “the ability to take the perspective of and vicariously share the feelings of someone of a different race experiencing racism.” Furthermore, these books do important work supporting an anti-racist future, as “the majority of psychological interventions aiming to change racist attitudes have focused on increasing White empathy for people of color” (Paluck & Green, as cited in Brock-Petroshius et al., 2023, p. 348). Yang’s works achieve this exact goal.

Dragon Hoops (2020) is a multi-genre graphic novel containing both biographical and educational/informational content. It follows Mr. Yang through his journey as a creatively blocked comic creator, teacher and parent, tracing his personal history with sports as he connects with the O’Dowd High basketball team. The book is delivered in chapters which emulate the serialist nature of comics and has a postmodern meta-fiction aspect, especially in scenes where Mr. Yang’s wife morphs into a representation of himself and he addresses the readers (Ward, 2011). The scene where Jeevin asks to be drawn differently is another example of this postmodern approach.

Each chapter covers a specific character and delves into the history of basketball, with Yang sharing the racism each character faces alongside their sporting and personal challenges. Mr. Yang uses the trials of the characters as inspiration to commit to the comic writing process wholeheartedly. He also undergoes an identity shift from feeling ‘other than’ the basketball community to becoming a raging fan, giving him empathy for his brother-in-law. This journey gives a reader reference for moving from white supremacy denial to empathy.

American Born Chinese (2006) shares three converging narratives, the Monkey King, Jin, and the Danny/Cousin Chin-Kee characters, a truth only revealed at the end. The Monkey King tale has a mythological feel, sharing the story of a monkey king rejected from a dinner party gathering for all the kings and deities. This rejection makes him aware of his own monkey nature and leads him to reject these qualities. He endeavors to improve himself and become elevated from his monkey nature, thwarted in parallel with Jin’s denial of his Asian-ness.

Jin is a high school student who has moved schools. The story shows his teacher’s micro-aggression as he is introduced as Chinese even though he was born in San Francisco. We also see the mistreatment he receives regarding his food and playground isolation. When a new Asian student arrives, the dynamic mirrors the Monkey King. Jin’s internalized racism plays out with the new female Japanese classmate and his friend Wei-Chen, wanting to avoid or act violently toward them.

The third narrative thread follows Danny and his cousin Chin-Kee. Wanzo (2020, p. 84) states that “the behavior from Chin-Kee replicates every western stereotype of Chinese boys and men.” We later learn that Chin-Kee is the Monkey King in disguise, and Danny is Jin, having become the transformer he always wished to be, against the warning of the old lady counting on an abacus. She had warned he could transform only at the expense of his soul, again in step with the plight of the Monkey King.

Both titles use colour and the Ligne Claire style. The colours are tonal and mostly use a black outline, with the use of brown outline to denote time in Dragon Hoops (2020) explained in detail below. They have white borders which Sipe (2014) asserts “always gives a feeling of distance, whereas illustrations that bleed to the edge of the page give us a sense of involvement and engagement.” This could be seen to emulate the distance the characters feel from the white supremacist culture they are immersed in. The borders in American Born Chinese (2006) are wider than those in Dragon Hoops (2020), as racism and internalized racism are not the singular focus, others include the history of basketball and Yang’s creative process.

The narrative text is enclosed in a rectangular box in both books, though the background colour differs: American Born Chinese (2006) uses white whereas Dragon Hoops (2020) employs yellow. The use of fonts also differs, American Born Chinese (2006) uses all capital letters in a hand drawn style, while Dragon Hoops (2020) uses a softened typewriter script for narration and a hand drawn style for captions.

In Dragon Hoops (2020), prior to Figure 1, the author has explained the social groups at school and his personal history with sports, establishing that he does not feel a sense of belonging among sporty people.

This 3-tier page is the first in the book where Yang uses the “Step” panel, a close-up of the character’s feet and lower legs stepping over a line of one kind or another. It uses a “variation in lettering style” (McCloud, 1994) to emphasize the transition, with a heavier font connoting the weight of the act. The font colour is a brighter hue of yellow than the dominant yellow used throughout, drawing attention to the character stepping into new territory. From being a “nerdy” teacher, he will become involved in the sporting community of his school.

This page is the pressure point following tension built around the author’s longing for a new story. The top tier is a single image panel which creates a temporal extension (Sipe, 2009), zoomed out to show the character on what the reader might assume is the school grounds. The side the teacher stands on has green-coloured trees and shrubbery. The other side is barren and devoid of colour, with a fence marked by scuff marks before a row of trees and a blue sky. The reader understands this is not a favourable direction.

The second tier is a 3-panel strip of the exact same image, the character contemplatively looking slightly downwards and towards the other side, zoomed in so only the face and background are visible. The background is dark with scuff marks, and a horizontal line runs around the eye and ear height of the character, dividing the image similarly to the two sides of the road. The repetition simulates heartbeats or the tick of a clock before the “Step” of the third tier.

The first half of the page carries the most text, two captions in the first tier and one between the first and second tier. The second and third tiers have no narrative captions other than the bold “Step.” This allows the reader to create their own story about the character’s decision-making, and as McCloud (1994, p. 145) asserts, generates space for the “invisible treasures, senses, emotion…” (Sipe, 2009). The narrative captions in the first panel work in a duo-specific way “in which both words and pictures send essentially the same message” (McCloud, 1994, pp. 153–155), whereas the caption between tier one and tier two is interdependent, conveying part of the story the images alone could not express.

Figure 2 is a single page from Dragon Hoops (2020) where the narrator is getting to know Coach Lou, who has just taken his own “Step.” The top tier full-width panel gives the reader release from the tension just built around Coach Lou’s resistance to attending O’Dowd. Although Lou appears alone in a zoomed-out image including the school’s trees and buildings, the caption reads “Best decision she ever made”, working in an interdependent combination to convey that, despite his reluctance, it works out well.

The second tier takes up the remaining two-thirds of the page. Half its width is dedicated to a labelled diagram of Coach Lou with a narrative caption working in an additive combination. The labels: “Baby Afro, Big glasses, Baby Face, Skinny Legs, 5’4, 110lbs”, challenge any preconception that a great player always showed early potential. This panel is also in the style of the past, with a brown outline.

The top of the second column switches between present and past. The outline and text of the narrative caption and panel images are black as the story returns to the present, while the bottom panel resumes the brown outline for the past.

While McCloud (1994) asserts that comics readers can be “left with a vague sense that our eyes are moving through space, they are also moving through time,” Yang makes easy work of this passage for his readers. Throughout Dragon Hoops (2020), panels set in history can be traced through time, with Yang mimicking the development of colour in photography or film, the further back in history, the less colour, with images resembling sepia tones. Figure 3, set in 1892, is exclusively in that scheme, while Figure 2’s use of black and brown is more distinct, conveying a journalistic, documentary feel.

Humour is another device Yang employs to loosen the grip of tension around racism for young readers, particularly in American Born Chinese (2006). Figure 4 details a scene from the Chin-Kee and Danny narrative thread. The use of humour to “challenge racism and racial ideology” (Perez, n.d., p. 935) has been acknowledged as a delicate balance, and dealing with younger readers, Yang manages it well.

Through Chin-Kee, Yang takes typical negative Asian male stereotypes and prompts the reader to question the humour of these historical jokes. The inclusion of prompted laughter, the words hahahahahaha in bold, capitalised, yellow text, gives a sitcom feeling to several scenes. Notably, many panels where this appears are not scenes where something funny has occurred, but where Danny is hurt or confused by Chin-Kee’s behaviour.

Colour also separates Chin-Kee from other Asian characters in the story. Chin-Kee’s yellow is substantially distinct from the colour used for Jin, Wei-Chen or the other children in Figure 5, and the general palette of Figure 4 is drab, beige, dark blue, black, grey and yellow.

The text employs eye dialect to expose the prejudices Chin-Kee embodies (Walpole, 1974), with stereotypical statements relating to food, gender, and cultural and religious traditions. There is little space for Danny to speak, with Chin-Kee dominating both visually and textually. This suffocating onslaught gives the reader a sense of the oppressive, seemingly inescapable nature of racial stereotypes.

Oh (2016, p. 23) asserts:

Laughing at Chin-Kee and being directed to laugh at him induces a violent crisis of representation that makes us critically reflect on what we laugh at and why we laugh at them…..and instils possible changes in the ways we think about fixed notions of race and identity.

Yang has taken a cluster of racial biases and shown readers the discomfort of living with them in a few frames. The top tier of Figure 4 includes the sound effect of Brring using similar capitalisation to the Step in Dragon Hoops (2020) emphasised text as an additive device to amplify the jarring bell (McCloud, 1994). In the second panel, the text is part of the image, a montage displaying a detention note for Danny (McCloud, 1994). The third panel begins Chin-Kee’s tirade and the bombarding sensation akin to another day in a racist enclosure like a high school, with the bottom tier continuing this discomfort. Empathy for a person of colour living with the daily tyranny of racial biases is cultivated in the reader through this sequence.

As a writer in the youth fiction market, Gene Luen Yang has created books which both “encourage positive racial identity development but also mitigate the impact of stereotypes” (Hughes-Hassell & Cox, 2010, p. 212). As well as positively influencing “children’s beliefs about themselves and others, their effort, and their learning” (Adukia et al., 2023, p. 2232), these books radically decenter white supremacy and move us towards an anti-racist future with kindness and humour.

Figure 1. Gene Luen Yang, Dragon Hoops. 2020.

Figure 2. Gene Luen Yang, Dragon Hoops. 2020.

Figure 3. Gene Luen Yang, Dragon Hoops. 2020.

Figure 4. Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese. 2020.

Figure 5. Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese. 2020.

This paper was edited with the assistance of Claude to reduce word count (accessed March 2026). I have critically assessed and validated any generated feedback. The final version of the paper is my own creation.

This paper was planned and reviewed with the assistance of Studiosity+ (accessed March 2026). I have critically assessed and applied the feedback provided to improve my work. The final version of this paper is my own creation.

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