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People who understand football think you're exagerrating, but you're not. I regarded football as something boring my Dad watched that prevented interesting shows from starting on time. In junior high, the first time we were supposed to play football in P.E., I was given the ball and told I'd be a good quarterback because I was smart. I asked what a quarterback did. No one then, or at any time, answered me. I still don't know. I was supposed to know without instruction. We played football every fall and I never learned a single rule.

The QB throws the ball to the players on his/her team (NOT the players on the other team... that is the "interception" Sachar is talking about), and is the leader for the offense. Think of it this way... if the kids in Frindle (first book that came into my head) were a football team, Nick would be the quarterback.

I once heard a Human Resources trainer conduct a mandatory hour-long session on diversity, sensitivity to differences, and women in the work place -- entirely in football metaphors. It was like a Saturday Night Live sketch starring Chris Farley, and keeping a straight face through the whole thing was one of the biggest career challenges I've had to date.

Peni, you're absolutely right--in high school gym I was always told to "block" but who? How? Why? From what?

And Schmoil. you're not helping. Sachar doesn't mention a quarterback--is that who would intercept the pass? And you say he or she would throw the ball to other players, but Sachar says "runs it back for a touchdown." So is the QB running or throwing? Who makes the touchdown?

Love the Bill Cosby reference. I checked out Why Is There Air every other trip to the Edwardsburg (Mich) Public library in elementary school. On alternate weeks it was Wonderfulness (Go, Chicken Heart, scare me to death.) Or Lady and the Tramp. Good times.

These were LPs. "Long-Playing records" for those of you too young to remember them...or Chicken Heart.

I'm not confused! I play chess and bridge! So, now I know that intercepting a pass and running it back for a touchdown must be a pretty good thing.

Don't you love learning backwards from books? It reminds me of all those didactic little picturebooks on manners and fairness that teach little kids how to spit, pick their noses and hate girls. Because if a book says not to do it, it must be exactly what all your friends think you *should* be doing.

Roger,
No offense, but if you go to a movie about the development of a football player, you can't be offended because the director doesn't explain football. I'm also guessing you're not exactly the target audience for Sachar's book. If you've identified a lacuna in your education, rather than taking offense at others who know more, wouldn't a more productive response be to educate yourself in that area? There are plenty of books that explain football.

I'm not offended, David, just interested in the idea that football can be considered a go-to metaphor so widely understood that it can be ground zero for a comparison. But if you think The Blind Side is a movie about a football player, you missed the scene where Sandra Bullock's character says, no, it's all about her. ;-)

Roger, I feel the same way about poker. I've never played it, don't understand the rules and don't particularly care to. But I'm fine with not understanding the meaning of life, according to Kenny Rogers.

Roger, the important thing to know about watching football is that you should wake up in time for the halftime show. And even then, you should have a book ready to read.

Hmmm--as a Person who went to a high school with a football team (and who dated a member of the team--don't ask), I managed to learn early and often about the sport. Ditto basketball. As a mother who had two boys on basketball and soccer teams, I learned that, too. And a daughter who was a gymnast and cheerleader. Yes and yes. As the wife to a man who skied and golfed. Yup. Also I was captain of the girl's basketball team and a fencer in college. My grandchildren swim, do martial arts, dance ballet, fence. More learning.

Do I LOOK like a jock? No. Can I read like one? Yes.

Be ready for that grandchild of yours to want to talk to you about sports, Roger. Learn a metaphor or two.

Jane

The quarterback wouldn't intercept the ball. The offense of one team is on the field with the defense of the other team. Therefore, the QB (an offensive player -- the guys who are trying to score) throws the ball to the intended receiver, and a defensive player from the OTHER TEAM intercepts it.

But I know what you mean. A few years ago, I was asked to write a short story about poker, for Pete Hautman's anthology, Full House. Since I don't play poker, I learned it first, then explained the rules in my story. I was told that I had done an excellent job of explaining the game, for readers who didn't know it. I'm going to guess all the other authors in the anthology actually did understand poker and thus, did not feel the need to explain.

That said, I agree with David that people who know absolutely nothing about a particular sport/game are probably not the target audience for a movie about it. To have a long explanation of football would be akin to what happens when authors try to recap the plot of the previous 6 books in the series, in the 7th installment. It's redundant and boring to those (the majority) who already knew that stuff and, therefore, must be kept to a bare minimum.

Data point: my son Adam had a story in the poker anthology and he TEACHES poker. So I get you, Alex!

Jane

Jane, I was a last minute fill-in for that poker anthology (I have actually been in 4 different anthologies, because one of the originally-requested authors flaked or wrote an unacceptable story -- I must have a rep for being able to write a decent story in a few days), so probably Pete's first choices were people who knew the difference between Omaha and Everest.

Ooh, ooh! A grammar knot I can untangle with confidence! Who is the subject, whom is the object. When in doubt, I reword the sentence to use "him" to double check. Who will read about him? If him works, you need that pesky 'm.'

I am here revisiting your last post in which someone asserted Liar and the second cover controversy book would never have been published had they been written by people of color. Why the heck not?! Back to comment surfing.

I think that question's spot-on; in fact, that's basically what I just finished blogging about here: http://trac-changes.blogspot.com/2010/02/we-arent-as-pretty-or-interesting-why.html

There probably is some conservatism from publishing houses that really is affecting the whitewashing of covers. After all, with the economy looking bad and aspects of the book industry looking even worse, publishers aren't going to take risks if they're not sure what readers will buy.

But there's also probably a reason they're not sure: because some prejudice still exists in readers, too.

Thanks for the post!

What seems to be missing from both Bell's post and Colleen Mondor's many posts is that publishers, for forty years, have conditioned us to believe that any book with a minority on the cover is going to be about racism and it's going to be grim. No surprise that they can't sell books with minorities on the front of them! And it may not be racism. It may be there just isn't a big market for books that make you feel bad.

I think at a rate of about 25 to 1, I prefer more cheerful stuff.

Finally, publishers have stories like Magic Under Glass to print, but they can't produce accurate cover art for it, for fear I will look at it, think "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry," and move on.

Publishers have marketed themselves into a corner and they are going to have to figure out how to market themselves back out.

I'm posting here because I'm wondering if I am just 180 degrees wrong about this and I can rely on you guys to set me straight.

kiest

Saying that “publishers…have conditioned us to believe” suggests that publishers have acted on a plan, or at least knowingly. But what about those market forces, kiest? Perhaps book consumers have been far more willing to buy books with black faces on their covers if they’re serious stories about racism.

I think you’ll find black children on a variety of books that aren’t about racism, such as Ezra Jack Keats’s Hi, Cat!, Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, and my own Soap Science. There are different reasons for those choices: inclusiveness in a group, an African setting, etc.

Certainly books about racism in America (or, in some cases, about poverty arising in large part from racism) have more black characters than other fiction. Equally, almost any historical fiction about African-Americans, and a fair amount of contemporary fiction, has to tackle racism in some way to be accurate. And if that topic’s a focus of a book, its publisher will signal that on the cover in order to attract the most likely buyers.

But does addressing racism make a book necessarily “grim”? Are Christopher Paul Curtis’s novels grim, for example? Are the Pleasant Company’s Addy books? I think different people have different interest or tolerance for serious topics, or reminders of inequalities in our society. Do such books all “make you feel bad,” or do they make you feel bad?

I think we’re in agreement that “cheerful,” even escapist, books do tend to have a lot of white main characters. In historical fiction we readers are supposed to experience how another person would have lived. Escapist fiction aims to let us imagine ourselves in other situations. Readers seeking escapism might prefer books in which they can see themselves most easily, without having to jump over our culture’s barriers of race, gender, etc.

Roger - first I really don't think I ever said that publishers were evil or librarians ignorant. In fact I went out of my way to say all publishers were not evil and I went out of my way to obtain a quote from Tim at Dutton on the great job he did with Flygirl. I was, in fact, trying to push back against the prevailing notion in the blogosphere that pubs are to blame for anything and everything.

I included a lot of quotes from authors to show the many ways in which the issue of diversity in kidlit is perceived and I tried to let them speak for themselves as much as possible. But I think I was pretty balanced. I'll say it here though to be perfectly clear - I don't think any publisher is evil and I sure don't think librarians are ignorant.

I personally think however there is a disconnect in terms of race that occurs at some point after picture book phase - multicultural pbs are not uncommon or unpopular and yet when you move into MG there are fewer Kids of Color and then into YA there are fewer still. Alot of authors think this is the publishers or librarians/booksellers faults. I don't know whose fault it is - I'd love it to be somebody's fault so we could change their mind and move on. I just know how it is because of the many many books i receive. And if indeed Caucasian teenagers just flat won't read books with Afr American protagonists then that is something that needs to be changed.

Because it is wrong.

So no, I'm not blaming anyone. I didn't blame anyone in my article. I don't think millions of White kids are waiting for a book with Black hero and being prevented from that moment by pubs or librarians. However - I do have to note that for all the years of guarding against change, Disney learned that millions of girls of every race were perfectly happy with a new Black princess.

And if that's not escapist fiction, I don't know what is.

Colleen, I wasn't referring in particular to anything you wrote, instead commenting on the general feeling among the bloggers (it seems to me) that the reason covers get whitewashed and people of color marginalized is prejudiced or obtuse adults--if adults didn't get in the way, young readers in large numbers would welcome books and covers of all covers. I hear Rousseau talking! (And not the one from Lost)

The bone I have to pick with you is your call for reviewers to constantly seek out and announce what used to be called "racism by omission," that ism pointing out where a character could just as well have been a POC as a white girl (like Meyer's Bella). I don't think it's a reviewer's job to knock a book for not being about something else.

I think Anon above has a point, J.L.'s hairsplitting notwithstanding. Whether consciously or not, book covers with black characters DO tend more often than not to be on stories about the difficulties of surviving as a POC in a world dominated by whites (for fiction; picture books work very differently, with black people on the cover most often signalling racial pride and harmony). Yes, it is completely racist that most readers are going to think that Liar, with its newly more accurate cover, is going to more-than-incidently be about "being" a POC, but it's publishing history as much as the reader's own institutionalized racism that causes that to be so.

that should be, in the first paragraph, " . . .covers of all COLORS." I'll drink my coffee first next time.

You know, as a reader, I care less about "whitewashed" covers and more about the range of published authors -- most American authors and publishing people and librarians are Very White. I'd love to learn more about what's happening in other countries where the racial balance is different.

As for bloggers: they love to be self-righteous and make mountains out of molehills. They need hits and material and it's a lot easier to get outraged and blog than actually do something in the real world. And please note how few of them are published authors and how many of them want to be.

Sorry for the screed, but I am sick and tired of blogging outrage.

Roger - I certainly don't think that Bella should have been anything other than what she is. (Well, other than SLIGHTLY LESS PASSIVE!! ha) I'm not demanding we write Meyer nastygrams demanding to know why Bella isn't Af American or Asian, etc. My point in that post is that the default, in a book completely not about race, is White. Bella could have been Black and the story would have been same. She could have been Native Americ and it would have been the same, etc.

I'm not picking a race fight with Meyer at all. I just used Bella to make that point because everybody knows who Bella is. (Same reason I used Percy Jackson in that comparison.) Is it wrong that they are White? Please. No. I just think it's wrong that characters like them (meaning characters in general titles) are White 99% of the time. And based on all those conversations with authors I had during putting that Bookslut piece together, I really think it is because there is an outdated notion that Kids of Color can not sell a general readership book.

Can you see what I mean?

So it's not about Bella or the other White characters that are out there. It's about all the Kids of Color in books that aren't getting published.

(And please note my columns - I've never gone after an author for not including Kids of Color in a book - I've just tried to include great books that do.)

I don’t think it’s “hair-splitting” to question a blanket statement like, “any book with a minority on the cover is going to be about racism and it's going to be grim.” That seems like the sort of prejudicial statement we should avoid.

We’re on more solid ground starting with your observation that ”book covers with black characters DO tend more often than not to be on stories about the difficulties of surviving as a POC in a world dominated by whites (for fiction; picture books work very differently, with black people on the cover most often signalling racial pride and harmony).”

I still question the linkage between “stories about the difficulties of surviving as a POC in a world dominated by whites” and books that are “grim.” Some books on that topic offer humor and adventure as well. And if the protagonist succeeds in surviving or better, why can’t all readers enjoy that success the same way we enjoy the success of protagonists in other environments?

For a number of reasons, of course. One is that Serious Issues are, well, serious. Another is that a lot of historical fiction about Serious Issues avoids broad humor to avoid making light of said issues. And I also wonder if some white readers feel that books about racism are accusing them, if not for past racism than for benefiting from the effects of past racism today.

Colleen, I was referring to these comments from a January 4 post of yours:
"The next time you review a coming-of-age story with all Caucasian characters make a point of writing what you think of that and if it could have worked just well with a more diverse cast.

The next time you review a mystery with a Caucasian protagonist lament the fact that just because Nancy Drew was White why does it seem that nearly every girl who has followed in her footsteps has to be as well.

And do the same thing for thrillers and adventure and books about vampires and fairies and ghosts and the girl whose mother just died and is very depressed. Do it for all of them."

To "lament" a problem you and I agree is real at the expense of a book in hand is unfair. I also think it is over-blithe to suggest that you can easily change the color of character--it's disrespectful of both the author's work and of the ethnicity you might have preferred to see. I'm reminded of a board book edition of Blanche Fisher Wright's old Mother Goose, wherein roughly one out of six of the children's faces in the illustrations had been overlaid with medium-brown to make the book look "diverse." To review, for example, a Sammy Keyes book, and say "this is great but it would have been better if Sammy had been Latina" is to dismiss the integrity of the author's work and to assume it's both easy and good for an author to write from the point of view of a cultural identity about which she may know nothing.

"I also think it is over-blithe to suggest that you can easily change the color of character--it's disrespectful of both the author's work and of the ethnicity you might have preferred to see."

I don't think that was what *I* read into her comments. I could be wrong, but I very much read it as: We see the 'default character' in children's lit as white. There is no reason why a different character (in similar stories) as the protagonist can't be a POC, and have it still be a good story.

There would be nothing lost is Nancy Drew was not a blue eyed, blonde girl, and instead African American, Asian, or Hispanic.I don't know that there's always a case of needing to change things based on ethnicity- It's been a while since I've read Nancy drew, but I don't remember her being specifically sweedish, or italian, or german, and so on; I don't remember anything with specific cultural siginifcance beyond Christmas. So I don't think everyone has to have cultural traditions written into the story- and if it doesn't, I don't see why some characters, characters we consider the default, can't be pocs. We don't have to replace the white characters, we could just stand to have more not-white ones too.

"and to assume it's both easy and good for an author to write from the point of view of a cultural identity about which she may know nothing."

It may not always be easy, but since when has writing been easy? It's quite possible to research the culture you plan to write about, and not doing it is worse than doing it. It ends up smacking of Stephenie Meyer's research laziness. But doing the research? That's great.

And to assume author's can't write from different perspectives is to tell me that J.K. Rowling didn't write a young boy named Harry Potter, or that all numbers of men didn't write little girls, or that every Royal Diaries book was written by a person in which the princess was from (France for Marie Antoinette, Korea for Sondok, and so on, and so forth.)

It's entirely possible. You just have to put forth effort.

Turtle, can you write a mystery story similar to the Nancy Drew series and have the heroine be black? Absolutely, and what a great idea. But it wouldn't-couldn't-shouldn't be the same story. I would suggest that Nancy Drew has more cultural markers of white middle-classdom than most of us even notice because we are so in the thick of them ourselves.

The choice of a protagonist's ethnicity is more than hard work, and if that work begins with a goal of social progress--"the world NEEDS a book with a black girl detective, and, by golly, I'm gonna write it"--you've started the wrong way. For me, this is not a question of who-can-write-about who, it's instead about characters and story growing organically from each other, and both born from the writer's imagination, not his or her good intentions.

Turtle, I am not sure Roger conveyed how offensive the book produced by your philosophy can be. An African-American Nancy Drew would be wonderful. A white Nancy Drew described as having brown skin, but without real racial characterization, is just about the worst thing ever. When we read something that feels forced, we don't just think it's bad writing, we feel manipulated, cheated and lied to. So when you write a book with a character of color in it, you don't get any credit for "trying." You are taking on a huge responsibility to not let your good intentions wound a vulnerable reader, especially when you know your reader is a child.

Which is why, when we have real stories, with real characters of color, it is so important to support them. That is why I pointed out the high correlation between POC on the cover and very serious stories, J.L.'s exceptions notwithstanding. I think that publishers, if they are going to sell books with POC on the covers, have to break our habit of assumptions about the contents of those books. On a personal level, I think we could make a promise to pick up and read the jacket copy of every book we see with a minority character on the cover whether we think we'll be interested in it or not. Just to break any unconscious habits we might have.

kiest

Turtle, I got a little preachy there, sorry. I try not to do that.

kiest

Great questions--can't wait to see some responses. I don think the boycott call was a bit premature. If there was evidence that people contacted the publisher and were blown off I might think differently but as soon as it got around the book bloggers I heard the news the were changing the cover. Yes, they should have been aware BEFORE publishing the book--especially after Liar, but a boycott? Seemed a bit rash to me.

And yes, I'm glad these books are getting published! Thanks.

[This comment has been deleted by the author and rewritten because, wow, had she gone off the diving board into the deep end]

I think it is fabulous that Magic Under Glass, Liar and When You Reach Me, are stories where race is mentioned and significant and still not the defining feature of characters or the raison d'etre of the book. I've been waiting for this for twenty-five years.

dolle
I think the covers are trivial in comparison.

But then, I wonder. . . Something so trivial, why couldn't they have gotten it right? Why?

It's not "trivial" and it wasn't simply an oversight. Whitewashing book covers is systemic within the children's publishing industry--the fact that it was done TWICE by the same publisher within one year tells you just how much Bloomsbury cares about the effect whitewashing has on young readers--especially those of color. If you didn't already read Ari's letter, you really should:

http://blackteensread2.blogspot.com/2010/01/open-letter-to-bloomsbury-kids-usa.html

I’ve worked with children and teens for a long time, and I know that every day kids of color have to actively work against a slew of media messages that misrepresent them and distort their realities. I’ve also seen the delight in a child’s eyes when s/he sees my book and knows—“That’s for me!” So when a publisher deliberately and repeatedly puts a white person on a book about a child of color, I consider that a personal and political assault on the most vulnerable members of my community. I also think it’s an insult to white readers—the publisher is basically assuming that whites are so racist they’ll be utterly repulsed by a book cover that shows a person of color. We have a black First Family living in the White House; the Obamas represent ALL Americans—they are “the face of America.” And I know that a lot of people still haven’t accepted that fact, but catering to their bigotry and intolerance is not the way forward—and that’s just what publishers are doing when they whitewash books.

As for the "two more things", are you suggesting that passably written books by non-white writers are being published instead of better written works by white authors? Does the historical record and the current state of the industry reflect that, all other things being equal, publishers are far less likely to publish non-white writers than white writers? I would be shocked to learn that you have genuinely concluded that even a handful of presses can be accused of having published non-white writers because of their racial identity. It would seem far closer to the truth to posit that it stubbornly remains the case that non-white writers are published in spite of their race.

Keep talking, but I'm also looking for covers that have worked.

No, Joe, I'm thinking something quite different--that it is easier for white writers to publish books about nonwhites than it is for nonwhite writers to write about whites--in fact I think it is easier for white writers to get published, period. Also, had a black writer written either of the books in question, there would not have been a white girl on either cover.

"Also, had a black writer written either of the books in question, there would not have been a white girl on either cover."

Really? I'm not so sure.

Anonish

There IS pressure to put very fair or ambiguously raced models on the cover of books about people of color (PoC)--particularly in the sci-fi/fantasy genres (it was done to Octavia Butler, who was African American, and to Ursula Le Guin, who is white). Black-authored books that are intended for a black audience MUST have a visibly black model on the cover in order to forge that immediate connection between consumer and book (this is what I take to be the industry's way of thinking). But a book that a publisher believes has the potential to sell to a larger white audience will likely NOT feature a person of color on the cover in order to ensure white consumers will pick up the book.

And Joe--you should check out the CCBC stats that show how PoC are hardly published at all, and are even published less frequently than whites who write about PoC.

http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/books/pcstats.asp

(And as an aside, you might be from the UK, in which case I understand your choice of term, but I'm a woman--not "non-male," and I'm a person of color are not "non-white")

I just interviewed a ton of authors, etc on this issue for an article to appear in Bookslut and what I found was that although non Caucasian authors have certainly had issues with their covers (from not liking them, to not being asked about them, etc), thus far the only time we have seen dark skinned characters portrayed as white skinned on the cover is with Caucasian authors. (And if I'm missing something, please let me know.)

You also need to see Trenton Lee Stewart's Mysterious Benedict Society books where it is done three times (each book in the series) with the character of "Sticky". (Leila just found this last week at Bookshelves of Doom.)

I have no idea why this only happens with Caucasian authors - I'm sure it has nothing to do with them personally but a perception might exist that they will go along with it more than a non Caucasian. Honestly, who knows. (I can' stress enough how I have NO IDEA why this is so.)

I do think the cover is important when it is a lie of this magnitude - slap a nonphoto cover on there, and it's not so important. Doing this though, putting these covers on these books, negates anything Bloomsbury might have tried to accomplish with the books in the first place.

I did a short response to this post on my blog earlier today, but wanted to pop in and say that I agree with you, Roger: had the books mentioned been authored by PoC, I'm not sure if they would have a) been published, and (b) if they had, whether they would have featured PoC on the covers.

I also want to say (which I mentioned in my post) that I resent the implication that PoC ought to be "grateful" for publishers who publish books with characters of colour, and white authors who write characters of colour. It baffles me to think that I ought to be grateful to someone for doing something as simple as offering an accurate depiction of the real world that we all live in. After all, I write white characters in my novels all the time, but no one congratulates me, thanks me, or applauds me for it. It is simply expected.

I'm not sure why Roger's post makes you feel pressured to be grateful. I certainly don't feel grateful to Bloomsbury. Pleased, yes. Grateful, no. There are stories in my past that I have been deeply grateful to the author for writing and to the publisher for publishing, so it's not impossible that I would be grateful for these. But I am not likely to jump directly to that emotion just because I hear they have characters of color in them.

I think we should be grateful for great writing. For example, if Shine Coconut Moon moves me, I will be indebted to you for writing it, no matter what color your characters are.

Anon: Won't you kindly step out of the dark so I can see who I am addressing? Talking about race is fraught with high emotions and tension for all of us. Those of us commenting under our real names are taking a risk by stating our true thoughts and opinions. If you want to challenge an opinion, criticize someone's stance, or simply ask a commenter a question, why not do it "face to face"? We won't bite, I promise!

Anon,

I think Neesha was responding to Roger's question: "Doesn't anyone think it's great that Bloomsbury is actually publishing books about kids of color where the color is not exactly the main thing?" The implication is that we should somehow take a moment to celebrate Bloomsbury's decision to publish stories about PoC even if they have, or even as we critique, a whitewashed cover. Over 30% of the US population consists of people of color, yet less than 5% of all books published for children are by or about PoC. I'll think it's great when those numbers start to match up. Bloomsbury and other publishers have an ethical obligation to serve ALL the children in this country, and they don't deserve a pat on the back (or our gratitude) for doing what they ought to do...

Two points (maybe three), though, Zetta--I wasn't praising Bloomsbury for publishing books about POC, I was praising them for publishing books about POC without the usual requirement that a book with a POC protagonist must be about the social or historical experience of what it means to be a POC. That's still unusual, and welcome.

And remember that a large number of books for children and teens aren't about people at all. They are about bugs, the rain forest, talking hippos. I am also sure that you would agree with me that a book about white children doesn't mean it can't be profitably read by children of color, just as white children should read about people who don't look like themselves.

I think the problem I'm having here is context...b/c I do agree, Roger, that all children can find meaning in books about different people, cultures, countries, etc. You'd have to check with KT Horning on just how many books are actually about bugs...

It's the fact that you paired a very serious critique with a completely different issue. Yes, many of us have been asking for stories where race is not figured as a central conflict in the book. But Bloomsbury actually worked to CONCEAL the truth of the story by whitewashing the cover. The question isn't why READERS don't think it's great to have a story about "ordinary" PoC--the question is, why doesn't the PUBLISHER think it's great enough to warrant a truthful cover? Pairing the cover and content issues makes it seem like you're suggesting they somehow balance each other out--bad cover, great content, it's a draw. It's not...

Neesha Meminger,

I understand why you want me to identify myself. I hope you can understand why I won't. I believe that anonymity is crucial for the free exchange of ideas and I want my comments read for what they say, not for who said them. This isn't the first time I've said this on Roger's site. So long as he allows anonymous commenting, I will continue to be anonymous.

Have you noticed how often Roger has tried to start this conversation only to have it stalled because no one will speak? How many times has he pointed the finger at Nikki Grimes article in the Horn Book and heard *crickets* back?

I understand there are trolls. If I offended you with my comment, I apologize sincerely. I will respect your wishes and drop out of this conversation, but I would argue that calling people out for anonymity has become a way to stifle any dissent in an online conversation. Call people out for being rude. Call them out for being wrong. But I don't think anyone should be discouraged from speaking because they are anonymous. The alternative is words of wisdom from the heavyweights that no one will contradict. Or, no conversation at all.

Anon 10:39

Oh, dear. Anon, I wasn't trying to stifle your expression. I just prefer to know who(m?) I am addressing. Certainly feel free to continue commenting! I'm not sure which Nikki Grimes article you are referring to, and this is one of my few visits to this blog, quite frankly. Not for any other reason than I just don't have as much time as I'd like to peruse all the wonderful, insightful blogs there are out there.

However, I think Zetta addressed where I was coming from quite well. There was no pressure from Roger to feel grateful. There have, however, been comments and posts on the blogosphere along the lines of, "Well, at least the publisher is releasing books about PoC! We should give them kudos for that." This is a sentiment I don't particularly agree with, and Roger's first point reminded me of it. So, I chose to address it by expressing my opinion, and my opinion only. I hope that clarifies.

Also, just want to quickly point out that there are publishers like Little Brown, FSG, Candlewick, and others who consistently release books by authors of colour about kids/teens of colour, with covers that (in most cases) accurately depict these characters. And these publishers are not praised, thanked, or congratulated for what they've been doing all along.

One thing I AM grateful for is that the unrelenting pressure from young readers and bloggers has resulted in some very important changes!

Neesha is challenging me to use my comment-linking skills!

Neesha Meminger,

No worries, then.
: )

Zetta, I think the fact that Bloomsbury is doing with one hand something I applaud and with the other something I condemn is worth discussing. How can these two things go together and how can we act to squash the one without undermining the other?

Worst case scenario: Bloomsbury goes back to publishing all white people all the time and voila, no more misleading covers. It's not an ethical solution, but it might be a business-like one, if they thought readers would let them get away with it.

Anon 10:39

Hi Anon 10:39,

I'm not sure if you mean that readers shouldn't challenge publishers regarding cover whitewashing because it might cause them to cease publishing books about people of colour in general. If that's the case, I think that the risk of the worst case scenario you bring up is one certainly worth taking -- I think that the notions that
1) readers find PoC on covers unappealing
and
2) if that's so, that's OK

must be addressed, and I'm grateful for the readers and bloggers who speak up. And if a publisher is thoughtful about decisions to publish books by and about PoC, then I'd hope they'd be able to take the opportunity to make changes that reflect authentic representations. And if they're not thoughtful about about it now, then perhaps they will be.

Nick Burd is African American yet there is a white boy on the cover of THE VAST FIELDS OF ORDINARY. I just started the book and as of yet there is no mention of whether Dade is a member of any particular race (that may be forthcoming so someone who has finished the book, please feel free to jump in with specific quotes), but in that absence of that kind of information does Dade default to white because of the boy on the cover or to black because of the race of the author?

Jonathan

Olugbemisola (Mrs. Pilkington),

I think that any action can have unintended consequences. I think the best way to combat those unintended consequences is with follow up discussions, which is why I am so pleased to see the new site devoted to combating white washing covers. But I don't think it is enough to just focus on white washing. We should continue to talk point out who is publishing stories with people of color, and who isn't. Like Roger, I think we should be asking, Would these books have been published if their authors weren't white? If so, how can we encourage publishers to publish stories written by as well as about people of color?

What I want most is to break the habit that says that any cover with a poc on it must be on a downer book. Where is my black Ramona Quimby, indeed.

Anon 10:39

Jonathan, in THE VAST FIELDS OF ORDINARY, Dade is never identified as black, white, or biracial (like the author) as I recall, so I think the publisher defaulted to white. The book's not without racial or class awareness, however, as one of his boyfriends is Latino, and another is working class.

As a reader, I assumed he was white, and it hadn't occurred to me that that may have been due to the cover art alone. But I think I also made that assumption because the author was so specific about race and class otherwise, and since the character talked a lot about other identity issues in such detail, I think if he'd been black or biracial, living in a small Iowan city, we'd have heard about it.

KT, I had just *barely* started the novel when I read this thread. I've still only read the prologue and the first chapter, but the mother is mentioned as having sandy, brown hair so it seems that Dade is white, and your reasoning seems to support this. I will keep an eye on it, however.

Jonathan

Good discussion. I don't think Liar or Magic Under Glass would have been published if they were by a poc.

I agree with zetta, the question is why do publishers think they can't put a POC on a cover? or publish more stories about them. At least we're having this discussion and I'm grateful for gorups like RAWW that will be watching out for these things.

I didn't know the author of the Vast Fieldso of Ordinary was black. I knew the mc's boyfriend was Latino (I haven't read the book yet but I really want to0 but I assumed he was white based on the cover. And in my mind, if a character's race is not identified, I assume he's white. Sad but true

Another aspect of this conversation... what about stereotypes on covers?

Noble Indians sell quite well, as demonstrated by BROTHER EAGLE SISTER SKY.

Course, the Indians in that book (like the speech itself) are best-labeled "the white man's Indian" (images developed by people who aren't Native). Borrowing "white man's Indian" from the groundbreaking book by Robert F. Berkhofer.

Think, too, of INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD... There are other examples.

Good point, Debbie. I think a lot of this comes down to the lack of diversity within the industry--it seems there are very few PoC editors and perhaps even fewer PoC cover designers...Tarie over at Into the Wardrobe brought this problematic cover to our attention:

http://peteredmundlucy7.blogspot.com/2010/01/dragons-can-be-whitewashed-too.html

100 percent agreed! I loved it!

I'm excited to see this and, yes, to see some good hand-drawn animation. But I will say in Pixar's defense I feel that they almost never wink at the adults. Sometimes maybe the Pixar writers take it to an adult level, but they never wink. Maybe you were thinking of Dreamworks? Winking is all I think they really know how to do.

Liz Lemon? Now that's a mother I want to see! (Versus Tina Fey in those credit card commercials.) Seriously, you make me more interested now in seeing this.

I loved this movie. Themes were so well layered, yet non-intrusive. And the characters were terrific, especially the Ponyo and Sosuke.

I saw it with my middle schooler, and we talked about it for a long time afterward.

I totally agree. When I went to see if there were some adults in the theater who were clearly disappointed, because I think they were hoping for something more like Miyazaki's adult stuff. But I felt that was one of the most toddler-appropriate movies I've ever seen, with, as you say, minimal winking to adults. (I wouldn't say no winking to adults; I burst out laughing every time they played "Ride of the Valkyries.")

But yes, both Ponyo and Sosuke were very very young, and realistically so, and I loved how very safe the whole conflict felt.

I loved it too. Miyazaki always knocks me out with his mix of honesty and fantasy. Grown-ups are moody, not everything works right, and babies have snot running down their faces. Yet the world is an awesome place to be.

I saw a subtitled version of Ponyo back in the Spring and thought it was outstanding. I have to admit I'm apprehensive about the voice talent Disney has employed for the US version. As much as I admire Blanchett, Fey, Neeson et. al, familiar actors sometimes creates a certain detachment. (for example hearing Phil Hartman's voice in Kiki's Delivery Service always weirds me out) I also worry when I see that Disney has used a Cyrus and a Jonas to fill lead roles. This is the type of synergy that is not exactly Ars gratia artis.

For those who've seen the film, did you find any of the voice talent distracting, or gimmicky?

Eric, I thought the voices were great, especially Ponyo's. I didn't know who the talent was until the credits rolled at the beginning, and even then I was so swept up in the film that I forgot all about the celebrity cast until after the movie was over.

Miley's sister and the "bonus Jonas" turned in shockingly good performances, imo. Tina Fey was great, too, but I don't think her role called for as many dimensions as the kids' did. I felt the only sour or 'meh' casting note was Liam Neeson.

It's a real treat -- a home run for just about all kids from 3-8, I think.

I love his movies - can hardly wait for it to arrive upstate.

Probably one of the only recent films that managed to enthrall all three of my children at the exact same time. They're aged two, four, and six, and I relished this small miracle and was able to actually watch and enjoy the film myself!

One of the things I appreciate about Miyazaki's films is a lack of a villain in the story. There may be antagonists, but they usually prove themselves quite sympathetic towards the end -- in the case of Ponyo, it's an evil wizard who is eventually revealed to be more of an overprotecive father with a seriously bad case of Anime Hair. Love it.

Roger, I was so focussed on the Wagner I didn't even notice The Magic Flute...but of course it's all there as well. And how wonderful to have such a complex movie that's truly for LITTLE kids. Just goes on to prove what a genius he is...

Brooke, that's the Magic Flute thing--Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, the parental figures to the young heroine Pamina, are scary and powerful but only ambiguously at cross-purposes, and once Tamino proves his love (in a test very much like the scene in Ponyo where the two kids walk through the tunnel) all is well. The friend who came with us pointed out that this dynamic is at work in The Golden Compass, too.

The Wagner allusions are neat--Brunnhilde (whose famous Ride is quoted wittily in the Ponyo score) is the daughter of Wotan, the king of the gods, and Erda, goddess of the earth, who dumped his sorry ass before the opera begins. That Brunnhilde also has a gaggle of sisters. Things do not end happily for her, however.

I adored Ponyo, and had a special appreciation for the sheer amount of responsibility he had, and how his mother trusted him enough to talk to him as a person.

I think the problem I had with the Where the Wild Things Are trailer is not the stilted dialogue, but that the voices lacked a resonance that I would expect from a large creature. The sound was...flat? Maybe that's it.

Anecdotally, from my classroom: Kids who are already readers will read any book in which they can find themselves or the ideas that interest them. But kids who aren't readers yet are much, much more likely to begin finding pleasure in (in our case) a story about a black city kid trying to grow up well than anywhere else.

No matter how many times I watch it happen it never fails to take my breath away, that several-week sequence by which a formerly reluctant reader loves one book and then a second and then a series and then, with bemused delight, the act of reading.

Maybe they wouldn't know to seek these books out on their own -- but for those of us who spend all day walking backwards and gesticulating down the path to readerliness, books that make finding yourself easy matter a great deal.

Specifically, and for example: The novel KENDRA, by Coe Booth, has magic power in my school. I have never ever ever had a child start and not finish it. It came out something like a year ago and it's been the First Book I Really Loved for at least a dozen newly minted readers.

Lelac,

I didn't comment on the post because I am feeling discouraged and very like a troll today. Your comment is a much appreciated pick-me-up. I wanted to say thank you.

That is indeed heartening, and Coe Booth is one of the most exciting writers to come on the scene in recent years.

Roger,

You stated: "I'm not sure that translates to wanting to read books "about people like me." It's more about being able to see yourself in circumstances unlike your own."

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree.

But the problem, if I can put in my two cents as a mom and reading addict, is that when the books are so overwhelmingly one sided in terms of their depiction of race, the kids get the subtle message "not you."

"You" can't be a prince or princess. "All" great fairytales and lores are European. You'll never have an epic adventure. And - if you look at some of the bestselling books - you won't be in the "inner circle."

Some -- perhaps many -- children need to see their experiences addressed in books but I'm I see a broader need. Books that feature children of color (all colors) doing ordinary and extraordinary things not tied to their race or some tired stereotype.

So the question I ask is why is the "default" position always "white child as hero?"

Years ago a wonderful editor pulled me aside at a national writing conference and told me what the score really was. That was 2000 - and not much has changed since then. Sigh. African American, Asian and Latino authors still get push back when they try to write outside of a narrow boundary.

There was once a great call from parents, teacher and librarians for more books about the "Black experience". Kudos - but in some perverse way that has lead to an over saturation of civil rights, slavery, ghetto and poverty stories, enhanced with a smattering of jazz and a rare middle class kid. It's the sameness of it all that leaves my kids screaming away and towards "mainstream" books and "translating."

Books serve multiple purposes - escapism but also clues to what goes on in a broader world. For every kid who wants to see "themselves" in a "realistic" situation, I'll show you 3 others who read those books only because a teacher required it, but are reading non-required texts on the school ride home - for instance - the Black Panther comic book series where the lead is African American, king of a mythical African country, and has a multicultural cast of friends.

So let me put my marketing hat on - Everywhere I go I get pleas from teachers about the need for a broader selection of books depicting people of color. But if publishing - and sales and marketing in particular - believe that those books have no profitability - they don't get published. That's a lot of money left on the table.

And if a publisher puts a book out and then buries it (no marketing or co-op dollars) then a public - already trained not to look for such titles - doesn't. To which sales and marketing proclaims "See - no market for them."

Catch 22 - can't buy what is hard to find (even if in print).

Until then, my kids are stuck with clumsy loner and her impossibly beautiful, dazzling pale white love interest, a orphaned wizard and all the other trade books that make their own needs and desires invisible (unless they translate).

Bella's problems aren't because she's white - it's because she's Bella. So why, if publishing turned Bella into an ethnic girl, would that suddenly make the book unmarketable or - worse - a "ethnic interest" book - which is considered the kiss of death for a book?

Publishing strikes me as wholly inefficient because the decision makers spend a lot of time pleasing adults in the system and next to no time getting intimate with the very population we ultimately claim to write and publish for.

What other industry works that way and succeeds?

"Although I do believe that readers, at least in part, read for "the shock of recognition" Richard Peck talks about, I'm not sure that translates to wanting to read books "about people like me." It's more about being able to see yourself in circumstances unlike your own."

Yes, though I think it's often both ideas working at the same time, and not in contradiction; it's about wanting to see how someone you can recognize as in some ways like yourself handles a situation you don't recognize.

I love Booth's novel and I always enjoy introducing customers to her books.

Though I believe the fact that Booth's name always seems to come up when there's talk about the lack of Color within children's and YA books, proves one of the points Zetta was making.

As much as I enjoy Booth's writing when this discussion comes up again I would loved to see more authors of color mentioned. Including Booth of course. I would simply like to see more authors of color recognized

I love and agree with everything Christine said.

"Catch 22 - can't buy what is hard to find (even if in print)."

I loved Charles R. Smith Jr's O8 YA release Chameleon. Set in 80's featuring four Black male protagonists. Its their summer before freshman year. Its one of the best YA novels, no one talks about, no one knows about, so no one can buy

Zetta's post, and the responses to this post on Hornbook, focus on the publishing industry. As usual, I would just like to point out that the publishing industry is still hog-tied by Barnes & Noble. But the resurgent growth of independent bookselling can shift this power balance, providing outlets for a wider variety of literature.

We independent children's booksellers are quite concerned to carry a robust, diverse selection--it's a critical competitive opportunity for us, since our key customers are teachers. There used to be 400 of us nationwide and now there are about 100. But we're headed into a baby boom in this country, and I feel confident that more indie children's bookstores will be opening in coming years. They can help break this logjam by proving to publishers there's a channel to distribute more diverse titles.

I also agree with Christine. I think that genre fiction, especially, needs to get over the white-default thing. I think that there are plenty of kids, as Roger points out, who are looking for books about kids in similar circumstances. But I became a genre reader because I was *tired* of reading about kids in my circumstance.

Most of the YA available to me when I was a teen were problem novels: abused kids, kids from divorced homes, etc. etc. I was a child of divorce in an abusive home, and I wanted something *different* from my circumstances to read about. Reading The Chocolate War was sheer torture to me as a high school freshman, for example--it was so utterly hopeless and depressing. I wanted something adventurous, magical, hopeful. Something transcending my own circumstances (which were nothing like that in The Chocolate War, either, so perhaps that undermines my point).

I'm positive that there are kids of all races that feel this same way, who want to see themselves in extraordinary circumstances--to be able to see themselves in a Harry Potter or a Bella--and I think that fantasy can and should be able to do that for them.

I went to the bookstore earlier today, and I was on the hunt for fantasy featuring characters of color. I'm happy to say I found more this visit than I've been able to find before, and I think it's getting better. But it's only in small increments.

(It probably also doesn't help that I'm going to a bookstore in the middle of Utah, one of the whitest places in North America, yet even here I walk through the bookstore and see Latinos and Asians and Middle Easterners and it seems to me that it's also partly the assumptions of booksellers and librarians about the communities they serve--even the whitest places in North America have a significant number of people of color shopping in those bookstores and frequenting the libraries, so it seems to me those kids should be able to feel like they can walk into a bookstore and find books featuring people like themselves, too. This is like Christine's Catch 22--I hear from local book people that their audience is "mostly people like [me]" yet it makes me wonder if that's because what gets ordered to be sold in the shops are books tailored for white Mormons.)

So while I know there are many kids out there looking for similarities in circumstances, there are just as many or more kids looking for different circumstances, and I think that's part of the appeal of speculative fiction. Even realistic problem novels, though, tend to attract as many readers who aren't in those circumstances who are looking to read about extraordinary-to-them circumstances.

So I think both sides of the coin are right--it's *both* the similarities and differences that draw us to read, depending on the interests and desires of the reader at any given moment.

This also ties into how afraid publishers are about printing covers with a black person, or indeed a person of any ethnicity, on the cover. Remember that debacle about LeGuin's book Powers, and Liar by ... oh drat, I can't remember her name. But both books had protagonists with brown skin, and the early covers used a white person. Insane!

Not to mention that I think it helps against racism if more whites see more races. I grew up in a lily-white town, and when I was a kid we took a trip to Mississippi, where I was suddenly surrounded by blacks. I became even shyer than usual, more deferential, going down the road nodding my head to every black person I saw. Yeah, I was kind of a goof.
My daughter's generation is far more multi-racial than mine, even in my old elementary school, which helps. But whites need to keep re-examining our own attitudes and keep learning. This goes for literature especially.

I believe that young readers (including teenagers) read to get a handle on who they are. They read to see what the characters in books do in challenging circumstances, and then ask themselves whether they would do the same thing, or something different. Kids and teens who already love to read willingly read about characters like themselves and unlike themselves, making friends with the characters and then approving or disapproving of their decisions at the climax. With each critical evaluation, they are shaping the person they are growing into.

But kids who are not willing readers find it harder to submerge themselves in the world of a book, any book, until they find a doorway inviting them in. They want to find a friend in the book's cast of characters, and they want to measure their own feelings and judgment against that character's, but difficulties in the act of reading, and a story situation that they can't imagine themselves into, can throw up barriers. If the book makes its world welcoming to less willing readers, perhaps they will put in the extra effort to read it, and once they discover the thrill of vicariously sharing the main character's journey, they'll be more willing to try the next book and the next - until they're stretching to read books about characters very different from themselves, and feeling confident about evaluating those characters' decisions in terms of what they as readers would do.

To my mind, books that reflect the worlds of unwilling readers aren't the end of the publishing and librarian's journey to create more readers - they're the beginning of the reader's journey to discover the power of a book to show them themselves.

Brilliant and good comments, too. Thanks for sharing.

As someone who was once looking for that very same doorway - I worry that will only encourage publishers to continue feeding into a market over saturated with a one-size-fits-all view of ethnicity. This is not a mutually exclusive argument - if you have "B" you can no longer have "A".

Why does every "doorway" have to lead to a slave ship, a plantation, a treeless brownstone lined street, a missing parent, a welfare check, or a civil rights icon with a smattering of jazz, and a live-in grandmother complete with quilt thrown in for happiness.

I grew up disadvantaged in an impoverished urban area and those books still don't describe anything remotely like my life. Those were books I ran away from - too oppressive even with their happy endings. I didn't want to read about someone's fictitious version of "my life." I wanted to test roles that occurred outside of it.

Why don't those books sell well? Because, outside of a school or library, consumers don't want them and our kids won't read them. They certainly aren't clamoring for them at book fairs. And when I'm doing school visits the kids don't want to talk about them. I sometimes do a reading from books selected by the school (almost always mundane or civil rights) - then I sneak in MASTER MAN and NANTA'S LION to much better results)

Kids need the space to create their own heros in their own ways. Instead we keep feeding them bland leftovers from our own angst filled pasts.

Not all reluctant readers are born that way - sometimes, by the lack of options - we create them.

My thinking isn't that I'm looking for me (or my children) to be reflected in the books I read. Rather, it's the opposite. I want my children exposed to different families, ethnicities, religions, etc. which is why I seek out these books for my child and myself.

Since the time marketing and sales took over the power place of editorial and art, the business has been slowly sinking into the mindset of the status quo oriented. I was once blamed by the publisher in front of the editors that my book wasn't selling. This was many years ago. Now I am more savvy. I'd say "Where's your marketing dept? That's *their* job, not mine". Marketing and sales want the creatives to do their jobs (for free) while they get away with book murder and a salary. They have all the control and they know it. AND are not that great at their jobs or there would be no need for this discussion. Too many of them are yakking it up on Facebook when they should be out selling our books.

I grow positively orc-like when people point the finger at the marketing department-- like they have some sort of magic marketing bullet they are selfishly refusing to fire. Sure--because they have this amazing track record for making all the very best books also the very best sellers. Not.

Why do I picture anon 8:16 and anon 12:13 commenting from adjoining cubicles like Dwight and Jim?

This is such a rich area for contemplation and debate that I am only going to attempt to chew off a tiny piece of it here. Or maybe two pieces.

Anonymous 8:16, I really enjoyed your rant! Though since I may well be the industry's #1 time waster on facebook (and am by your definition, one of the "creatives") I can't say I agree with it. Though I do agree that the question of how much influence sales and marketing has on what gets published is a very interesting one.

I wanted to say something to Christine's first comment, above. I no longer agree that it's true, as it may well have been in 2000, that "African American, Asian and Latino authors still get push back when they try to write outside of a narrow boundary." Au contraire. I am a bit sorry to sound so tactical, but most editors and publishers are thrilled to get Latino and African American writers on their lists who write about "non urban, non poor" subjects. We do want "regular" books about "regular" kids and families by writers and artists of all enthnicities. I promise you.

But we can't solve the problem by simply changing the skin color on a picture book character or by making a white character black. I will tell you that I have had both suggested to me by bosses at previous jobs, and I shuddered. Bella Swan is white because, I assert, that's what the author knew (she lives in Utah!) and that was the character who came to her--built out of her own subconscious. Some writers can convincingly write multiple enthnicities, and some cannot.

I think two things are going to be positive forces for change in this area. I follow a lot of teenagers' blogs and twitter accounts, and I spend a lot of time in the YA section of stores. I see a lot of African American and Latino kids blogging about and reading and buying books, and they are about to become our new generation of writers.

Also, I published a fantasy about an African American hero when I was at Simon and Schuster, and it was by an African American author. It sold ok. But when the business has a big hit with a paranormal romance or fantasy and the protagonist is African American or Latino, you can bet we'll see a lot more of those lead characters. I'm sorry that that's the way things work, but everybody loves to jump on a successful bandwagon.

I think the goal is to publish a list of books that, hopefully, speaks to lots of different children about things they recognize and some things they don't. And then blow the horn for those books as loud as we can.

back in the day there WERE the kind of books we now miss - e.g. HIS OWN WHERE, by June Jordan, and some publishers welcomed them. but now sociology seems to have taken over (more grant-worthy? easier to catalog?) and we complain of what the institutions have given us

I posted basically this comment earlier, on another blog, but since it seems on point I'll work up the idea again here:

I heard an interview on Fresh Air with Robert Siegel, the director of Big Fan. He talked about the importance of casting. He felt that the studio approach — of which he was critical — was not to find the right actor for the part, but to find the most bankable star who wouldn’t be totally crushingly wrong for the part.

That struck me as relevant to publishing. Publishers, authors, illustrators, often look for the character that will be most easily identified with by the largest possible swath of the book-buying public, who won’t be totally wrong for the book. Simple demographics state that that character is usually white; of a vague ethnic background; of no discernible religious tradition or habits (unless he/she observes a secularized holiday); and the kid doesn't live anywhere in particular, either, with the possible exception of New York. Preferably Brooklyn.

Of course, there are some books in which the subject demands a Jewish protagonist, or an African-American protagonist, or Latino, and so on — books that deal with experiences unique to those peoples. So books with Jewish characters skew toward the Holocaust, and books with blacks skew toward slavery and civil rights, and so on.

I’m not saying that racism, subtle and otherwise, isn’t alive and well. But this other simple yet subtle dynamic does a lot to give us the publishing world we have, I think.

Elizabeth - we need to talk. YOU do have authors of color on your list and I've never found you lacking in candor.

However, publishing in general is not as even tempered as you may suggest. The problem has gotten so bad that we had to form an organization for authors of color (mostly published) so we could compare notes in private.

Trust me when I say I am speaking from the experiences of many - some of whom are now publishing under pseudonyms to get past the problem.

I'll send you a dm on twitter.

btw - thank you for that stance about changing color - a lot of us are in agreement with you. Bella wouldn't work as a black girl (frankly - my daughters devoured the series despite constantly screaming she was too stupid to live.) The point of many authors is not to change the skin color and keep every other element the same, but to allow a character to be someone of color and have their ethnicity be relevant without it being the source of the "problem."

Does that make sense?

I have to say that Lelac totally lost me in the last paragraph.

Being disappointed in a bunch of little kids (because, yes, 5th graders are still little kids at heart) because they want the bad guy to get their just desserts and the good guy to prosper seems pretty mean-spirited. Is real life that simple? Of course not. But wouldn't it be nice if it were? Wouldn't it be nice to escape to a universe where that's the case? Say, in a book that you curl up in under the covers after a hard day at school?

I can't remember any of the titles, but the genre of white kids dealing with major life problems was certainly prolific enough when I was a kid. I personally didn't like them, but they were certainly hot and they certainly won all the major awards. I remember endless books showing up at the library about teen pregnancy (the older sister, as the protagonist would be younger), drug abuse and alcoholism, sexual molestation, severely broken families, homelessness, death. This would have been in the late 80's, and my understanding from my younger sister is that [white] children's literature got even more dire in the 90's. I think the past decade has seen a backlash to those uber-real books in all the fantasy books.

So maybe the books she's talking about are just a decade behind the trend, but to claim that no such books exist with white protagonists is just bizarre! They might not be popular with her kids, or with the kids at the elite private school, but they do exist.

I would bet almost anything that if Almagor pushes too hard in her direction, she's just going to teach her students that the only books worth reading are the really "thought provoking" ones, and if you're not going to read those and mull endlessly over nuance, then don't even bother reading anything.

I guess I should mention that I haven't actually read any of the books being discussed, but it very interesting to read both sides of the debate here. Thank you for publishing both. And congratulations on the grandson!

I recently rewatched all episodes of MAPP & LUCIA, and I vowed to start saying "au reservoir" in that weird fabulous Lucia-ish voice - but then I forgot. Thanks for reminding me!

First, I'm glad Almagor is not teaching my child. Second, I am sad that she is teaching somebody else's.

I am thankful for Ms. Flake's response. She got it right. And apparently, my kids know she gets it, too, because her work is always disappearing from our library.

Author, Neesha Meminger wrote recently that people of color know white people than we know ourselves because we are always bombarded with your perspectives, your images, your standards.
Whites on the other hand assume they know us. Newsflash: You don't. And don't talk to me about your experiences because Ms. Alamgor's assessments prove that even with exposure you still get it wrong.

If Almagor doesn't know where to find the diversity she thinks our children deserve, here's a suggestion: Ask a person of color. I could give her list that would take her more than a year to get through.

As an African American parent who is a voracious reader I have lost patience with the complaint about the quality and availability of good literature featuring people of color. Ask us.

If you want more options then start demanding that publishers stop pigeon-holing, rejecting and under-representing our writers. Start reading our literature and promoting it. And by the way, while I love the established writers she mentioned, we have more than a dozen, quality writers. Make a greater effort to find us. Of course, you could ask us and finding us would be easier then.

As people of color, we know all your popular writers. We read many of them, too. We can't walk into a bookstore or read a blog without seeing you. When will you be able to say the same?

I'm annoyed. We are not invisible. We are here just as plain as the nose on your face. The next time you decide to tell us about who we are, you might think to ask us first if you're on mark. Most times, you not even close to the target.

While I talked about quality and availability, I failed to address the teacher's specific complaint about the type of stories with POC characters. POC writers do write fantasy, sci-fi, adventure, romance and dystopia. The problem is most publishers insist that black writers can only write historical fiction, urban fiction that focuses on poverty or dysfunction and christian lit.

Additionally, our writers don't always write about poor urban youth who come from broken homes. How can she mention Woodson and not acknowledge this writer creates characters who have stable families and different economic backgrounds? Johnson's, First Part Last is not the stereotypical ghetto drama. Both kids come from stable, middle-class families. And do check out Paula Chase Hyman. Her characters are well-adjusted teens going through the same drama as white teens.

There are many things in this article I could comment about but I will foucs on this,

"About the most popular novel in this category is Sharon Flake’s The Skin I’m In, which won the CSK John Steptoe New Talent Award in 1999 and which sometimes makes the summer reading list even at majority-white schools such as the one at which I used to teach."

Its the end that gets me, "sometimes makes the summer reading list even at majority white schools"

Why such surprise? Sharon Flake is a well established award winning author. Her books have something to offer all students. As do the works of other authors of color.

Should schools with a White majority only have books with White protagonist on their summer reading list?

The next White person who wants to dissect Black children's authors please bring some new names to the table. I am tired of seeing the same authors being criticized or praised.

And Coe Booth's abilites have been well established and documented. So if that's the first name that comes to mind, you need to think a little harder.

How about -
Traci L. Jones or Tonya C Hemgmin
or G. Neri

I'm a little confused as to why people are seeing Lelac's essay as an attack on modern black YA fiction. It seems more like she's found this interesting difference between YA books by white authors featuring white protagonists and YA books by black authors featuring black protagonists, and she's trying to explore that and guess about it. She's basically saying, "hey, I've noticed this thing about goodness and badness, and it's interesting, and I don't at all push my students away from these books, in fact, I buy them new copies every year, but I wonder what it is about these books that makes them reject morally ambiguous books like Make Lemonade and demand books like Skin I'm In." I don't see any criticism of modern black literature, I certainly don't see anywhere in the text where she's taking away books from children. In fact, she fondly and charmingly describes how her students love Skin I'm In, etc., so much that she buys them NEW HARDCOVER COPIES EVERY YEAR: "These are the books that get reread twice before they are relinquished; the books that never get checked in, only passed to the next child in line; the books I must buy new and in hardcover every quarter in order to keep up with backpack-related wear and tear."

When she says "I do want to push them toward a richer matrix of options," I don't think she's saying "I want to stop them from reading this." Every good teacher sees a child reading one book and says, "oh, you like that one? you might like this one too!" Yet she also seeks to put herself in her students shoes and asks WHY they choose they didactic books: "But I believe that the purpose of story is to help us explain our lives to ourselves; and these are the stories they are choosing."

The last line is especially telling: "Go ahead and call me a hopelessly unliterary child person: if this is what my children choose to read, I have to entertain the possibility that this is what they need to be reading." Here, Almagor reveals that it is not LITERARY QUALITY that is most important to her, but her students' love of books. She is saying, "I have to put myself in their shoes and understand why they love these books."

Last point--I really don't think she is in ANY way saying that white YA lit is better than black YA lit. I think we can all agree that there are MORE books written by white YA authors, and, as such, there are more TYPES of white YA books--and one of those types is the individual child adventure novel where the child (perhaps unrealistically, perhaps not) saves the day and typically saves the antagonist to boot (or defeats the monster/dragon/witch/or at least recognizably non-human). She provides Harry Potter as an EXAMPLE--Harry is able to save himself, save the day, and even save Draco Malfoy. She certainly isn't saying HP is BETTER than popular black YA; she's saying it's different. What is wrong with recognizing difference?

Almagor seems to me like the type of teacher who actually (a) considers and reflects upon why her students love to read certain books and reject others (b) encourages them to read and buys them new books (c) has a true love of children and combines that with her love for teaching reading. That's a heck of a lot better than a lot of teachers I can think of.

Please don't get mired down in Flake's ad hominem attacks and misreading of Almagor's essay.

Roger, back me up here. Does a CLOSE reading of Almagor's essay REALLY show that she "hates" black literature and is a "terrible" teacher as the commenters above suggest? I think not.

CloseReadingRock,

Why is it we are always misreading whites?

Where do we argue that she has said white literature is better? My problem is her limited knowledge of the breadth of black literature and therefore her skewered conclusions.

No one has said or implied hate and I'm surprised you didn't accuse us of implying racism. Honestly, your response and her essay are so predictable it would be funny if it didn't have the negative impact it does.

My issue with her essay is that it demonstrates a misreading of our work. And I am tired of white teachers, readers, publishers and bookstores harping on the same notes. Almagor's essay perpetuates narrow definitions of our experiences and the work written by black authors.

Woodson for example. What a poor choice for her to use. If you know Woodson's work (22+ titles), you know that Woodson writes characters across social-economic class,traditional and nontraditional family units and varying themes. Woodson writes affirming work that while it tackles complex issues, does not paint poc characters as one dimensional, sympathetic characters. Almagor ignores this as reduces us to familiar, archetype. That is my problem with Almagor's essay.

My problem is her comparing our work to white writers. Has she not read enough black literature to compare black writers with other black writers? Why is white the benchmark? The point isn't that there are more white writers rather the issue is that Almagor hasn't read enough to know black literature like black people are diverse. We are not monolithic. Stop assuming you know my experience. Stop implying that to be urban means poor and black and downtrodden. What white people don't live in cities and none are poor? Read Lena by Jacqueline Woodson.

I run a library. We have fantasy and sci-fi. I keep up with trends and what moves. My kids don't read it. But I make it available. I'll say it again, my perspective is broad. I read multicultural literature. I introduce my kids to writers who look like them and whose experiences mirror their own. I also teach them the world is bigger than than what they know and in my library, people of color means inclusion. The world isn't black and white- it's colored.

CloseReadingRocks,

When I speak, I don't hide and I have a name. Feel free to address me and Doret directly. I'm not 'some people.' We posted using our active, linked accounts. If I'm going to engage, I don't hide behind anonymity- another common behavior among readers who quickly jump in to defend.

Have you considered that Doret, Flake and I make any valid points?

Color Online,

Thank you for your interesting reading of my comment--I had never thought someone could see it as racially-charged and motivated, but now I will be more cautious. (It was really just about the text.) And I am sorry for saying that commenters thought Almagor hated black literature and was a terrible teacher; I was exaggerating. What one commenter really said was that Almagor is "mean-spirited," and another said, "First, I'm glad Almagor is not teaching my child. Second, I am sad that she is teaching somebody else's." I think the second does IMPLY that the commenter thinks Almagor is a bad teacher, though I don't know if that means a terrible one. Not my call, so I shouldn't have said anything.

As to why I don't post using an account and my real name, that's because I am still in school and choose not to splash my name across the internet until I am an adult. When I'm all grown like you, I'll make that decision.

Thanks again for your time,

CloseReadingRocks

What ClosingReading Rock said gave me a lot to think about and it helps me see how others may interrupt this article. So thank you for that.

Things will change when we start understanding each other better.
As much as I disagree with Almagor's article at least its getting people to talk.

It also lead to Flake's wonderful response that should not be ignored.

It's good that Almagor's and Flake's articles will forever be linked. They provide a good balance, which will hopefully encourage more disscussions.

Color Online asks, quite reasonably, why white literature is the benchmark. And it is a fair question - why.

What does not seem to me fair is to ask whether it is the benchmark. To wit, and there are dozens of other ways to go about this: In 2009, there have been five films based on children's books released: Hotel for Dogs, Coraline, Race to Witch Mountain, Harry Potter, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Upcoming are Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Out of those seven, not a one features a black main character. And as far as I can tell, not one is by a black author.

And I'm not endorsing that status quo. But it is the status quo, and I don't think that the status quo can be grappled with unless it's at least accepted as the status quo.

And I, at least, am troubled by the idea - which Almagor seems to me to compellingly present - that the books featuring black characters deal more heavily with characters who are on the problem end of systemic social problems.

Especially given that children are not stupid. They are well aware that the entire culture is put together in a way that screams at them that stories with white characters are the norm. And so when all of the books that feature characters that look like them are visibly different - and more troubled - than the "normal" books.

Is this a problem? I can't see how one could seriously argue that it isn't. If the books about black kids are heavily - not even exclusively, but heavily - about trouble, and the books about white kids are adventure stories that get made into hit movies, that's a problem.

Ditto to what Phil says.

Are the books flying off the shelves in the library - yes. Because they are assigned by teachers as class assignment or suggested by librarians. I went to the local library a few years ago and asked for books outside the stereotype and was given selections that still felt didactic, preachy, and message filled in a way that mainstream books are not. They feel more like lectures than stories my daughters can immerse in.

I remember giving a book, written by a well-known author to my daughter. When it was time to return it to the library I found it buried in the laundry. She tried to BS her way through a synopsis to prove she read it until I finally said, "thats okay - I didn't like it either." I was at her dance rehearsal and a young man had the same book. I asked him how he liked it and his eyes lit up and he gave me a generic synopsis that told me right away he didn't read it but was trying to please me. I finally said, "I didn't think it was very interesting" and suddenly all of the children - mostly African American - chimed in on how much they hated the book and how boring it was. But I can't tell you how often I hear an adult say the "love" the book and flock to booksignings by the author.

See - that's the problem. The "gatekeepers" decide what is an authentic voice and the adults revel in the cause - but no one - let me repeat NO ONE is really having an honest talk with the target audience which continues to hide the books, puts off reading them, and cries when we push them to finish the assignment(s) but is passing along Harry Potter and Twilight and Artemis Fowl to their friends. No one captured them in B&N pre-ordering the graphic novel version of Artemis Fowl.

I will tell you - after about a hundred school visits in the last few years where I often substitute mainstream fantasies, and adventures for the didactic civil right or poverty filled works the school selects (I do read the school selection first) - the kids prefer my selection based on the expression and the questions asked and the request for other titles like those.

That's not to say there aren't works outside the mainstream that are good and joyful and that children will read for pleasure outside of a school assignment. Elizabeth Bluemle is compiling a list of everything she can find (didactic or not) So far she is up to 500 titles. But if that 500 is out of a total of 25,000 trade books produced over the last five years - we have a lot of work to do.

Richard Peck once said we write for children we never were. I'll add to that. We write for children we don't take the time to get to know then wonder why they enter High School with a third grade reading level.

As a former adult literacy educator I worry that we are so busy shoving books down the throats of kids that we like, that we don't take the time to ask them - or excite them - by providing more of what they gravitate on their own.

And there's the rub.

One only needs to look at sales figures to realize there is a correlation. Which creates a catch-22. If ethnic books don't sell, don't take a risk on those that are outside the box. Only - that creates a death spiral for the "genre."

As Phil said - my kids want Coraline and Harry Potter and Graveyard Shift and Twilight and . . . ( apparently so do the kids I interview for college).

What children want is an adventure or a dramatic story in which their color is not the central theme and where adversity is about just being a kids - not being a "Black kid."

Me - I'm going off to tutor my non-pregnant, non-ebonics speaking, debate team, tennis team, second chair flute kid who is working on her Latin and Geometry homework from her "deep in the inner city" public school. Something you won't find in a book because - according to gate keepers, kids like her and her classmates aren't "authentic."

Phil said ... "Is this a problem? I can't see how one could seriously argue that it isn't. If the books about black kids are heavily - not even exclusively, but heavily - about trouble, and the books about white kids are adventure stories that get made into hit movies, that's a problem."

Phil - my daughters are reading over my shoulder and send you a hug with two snaps up. Your message was right on time.

If we were discussing a literary world that harbored as many African American YA authors as there were white YA authors this conversation would be clear.

If we were discussing an atmosphere where publishing houses actually put copious amounts of marketing money behind African American YA writers this discussion would be clearer still.

And If we were discussing a true understanding of writer's creative processes and that black author's creativity shouldn't be dictated by a culture that has had centuries of writing books that would be considered the "norm" when mainstream African American children's literature is barely forty years old--- this conversation would be more balanced.


But for Christine to say that children just want books about adventure or just being a kid is an oversimplification of what children truly want.
Not all children want adventure. And yes there are actually large numbers of black children who want to read books about people who look like them as there are many white kids who will read those same books and vice versa. And again-- to oversimplify all the books mentioned ( and not mentioned) as preachy, stereotypical and filled with ebonics, is truly offensive. . . And ethnic books?! Is that how you see books written with black children in them?
Sad. How about books with Hispanic or Asian children?

I suppose we've dismissed the myriad of books written by white authors who write stories with teen pregnancy, rape, bulimia, drugs, broken homes, alcohol addiction and violence coursing through their pages. They don't seem to stand out because hundreds of books by white YA authors are written each year while there are only a handful of YA books written by black authors.

Maybe when the scales are more evenly weighted (and I don't think that will be happening anytime soon) I could find my way to at least trying to understand Ms. Almagor's "unliterary"-- and seemingly reluctant championing of those books that her students love to read.

Leota2, is anyone in this conversation suggesting anything other than that we would like to see more books written by black authors?

That, I think, is the point we all agree on.

I feel like we're talking past each other here - nobody, so far as I can tell, has accused Flake's writing of being "preachy, stereotypical, and filed with ebonics." I don't think anyone has even accused Flake's book of being bad as such.

What has been criticized - and what I take Almagor to be criticizing when she says that she wants to "push them toward a richer matrix of options" that includes books that "complicate these very questions of goodness" is that she is frustrated by the degree to which a particular genre of book is largely (not exclusively, but largely) coincidental with black YA literature. She is frustrated that black YA literature can, to any extent, be characterized as a genre.

It’s not that African American writers only write certain stories it more a matter that the predominately white publishing industry will only publish what they want about us.

I am African American writer of fantasy or speculative fiction whose first novel will be out in 2011. What I can tell you is that most publishers, editors and agents (the gatekeeper of traditional publishing) do insist that African American writers can only write historical fiction (slavery and civil right era only ), urban lit that focuses only on poverty or dysfunction, romance, erotica and Christian lit. Send out stories or novels where the black protagonist in either a present,future or an alternative world is a powerful hero on an authentic hero’s journey such as Harry Potter’s and you can’t believe how fast those manuscripts get kicked back in your face with all manner of insulting comments, from “black people don’t read fantasy to white people wouldn’t read book with black people as hero’s in them.” Writers of color and those white writers, who know the score, talk about this issue all the time but we’re not holding our breaths that traditional publishing is going to change anytime soon.

Also I will challenge the statement that “What children want is an adventure or a dramatic story in which their color is not the central theme and where adversity is about just being a kids - not being a "Black kid.” If this is the case then we could just leave thing as they are now by slapping some color on a white character in a book and be good to go. However, as a writer this is what I know, the full range of the culture and history of characters has to come through in the writing or the story or novel becomes a wall that hems readers in, not a window where readers can see a bigger, wider world. Or worse yet, the story or novel becomes this dead thing that insults readers by adding to a growing pile of stinking stereotypes and lies.

Most young people I have talked to, especially black young people interested in Harry Potter, Twilight and Artemis Fowl, are thirsting for adventure or dramatic stories that portrays young African American people and other people of color dealing with the issues in their lives (including the problems of racism and violence.) from the most powerful, positive and mystical aspects of their cultures. I and other writers of color are working very hard to write these kinds of stories, now if only the publishing industry would let more of us in.

As Ms. Sharon G. Flake states:

“ The world isn’t simply white or black, nor are the messages in black young adult literature. Like our white counterparts, our work is rich and diverse, complicated and funny, tragic and heartwarming. The boxes black authors sometimes find themselves in aren’t so much of our own making, but often put there by people who think they know us and like to tell us who they think we are. All authors worth their salt want to be analyzed, critiqued, and studied — it means people think your work has value. But we hope the critics get it right when they write about us and the children we create for the world. And we hope they let our readers — both black and white — fly, even if the route they take is not across the ages or on the wings of a dragon, or even if it is. If people will let us be free to be the storytellers that our readers know us to be, they will see we have no limits, nor place any on our characters.”

Thanks

Leota2

I didn't say those children ONLY wanted scifi and fantasy. That seems to be an excuse to dismiss the central message so eloquently reiterated by Phil and LaFreya - that ethnic children want what other children want. They want what other children have. But they don't want it wrapped in an environment that is constantly telling them they can't aspire to be part of that world.

An "adventure" can occur in one's own backyard without fantastical elements. But what is happening is there is a mind-numbing sameness to the small percentage of literature featuring children of color (any color). And publishers seem more interested in catering to adults than the end user - the child who should be learning to read for pleasure (rather than to please a parent or teacher).

Amazon suggested an interesting option when I was searching for a book mentioned above. It was "Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading . . . " by Kelly Gallagher.

One of the comments posted cites excerpts similar to what many of us are trying to get across and could easily be applied to the choices - or lack thereof -provided by publishers:

"....The flow I want my students to experience in their reading lives was first described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihalyi describes the flow as 'the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for th sheer sake of doing it.' (1990, 4). The flow is where we want all our students to be when they read, the place Nancie Atwell, in The Reading Zone, describes as the place where young readers have to 'come up for air' (2007, 12)."

Students, asserts Gallagher, should spend at least 50 percent of their school-based language arts time engaging with self-selected texts.

...Action continues, however, by becoming unyielding advocates for reading. "When the decisions upstairs play a role in permanently damaging the literacy development of our children, " Gallagher writes, "it is time for us to take a stand...Make a stink. Make it happen. Of all the battles we face, this is the one worth falling on your sword for. If none of the above steps [to providing students with access to books] work, go teach somewhere else. No one should consciously be a part of a system that ensures that kids fail. That's unconscionable." (Gallagher, p. 46)

Amen.

At the risk of turning on people who are mostly agreeing with me...

I have made no claim that black students or any other sort of student (I prefer this to the term ethnic, since it seems like every student has some ethnicity) want, and I would be floored if it turned out that all black students want the same things.

I have said that I think it unfortunate that the world of black YA literature is a more narrow than the world of mainstream YA literature, where mainstream, we have to be honest with ourselves, is largely a product of and for white middle class culture.

Should Sharon Flake be tossed out of the library? God no. Clearly she's a sharp, moving writer who writes books that motivate kids to read. Are her books perfect? No. Are they good? Yes. Are they enough? No.

Christine, I wish you would tell us what the book is which "all of the children - mostly African American - chimed in on how much they hated the book and how boring it was. But I can't tell you how often I hear an adult say the "love" the book and flock to booksignings by the author." I'm guessing you don't want this discussion to be derailed into debating a particular book, but as a white school librarian (who works with many black students), I'm wondering if I'm one of those adults. I'll take your point and be sure to ask and listen to the kids about their own opinions.

Christine said what I meant to say so much better than I said it. I agree with her completely. (I'm also curious as to what the book was!)

Christine,

"Mind numbing sameness." Wow. I suppose the writers should pack up their laptops and become welders. Sorry I'm so flip--not the forum for that.
I guess I find some of your judgements pointed and a bit hostile. I don't need to be agreed with so I have no problem acknowledging that.

I was not totally dismissing your basic premise about adventure and fantasy. But of course children are not cookie cutters and economic differences, social norms and peer pressure all come into play when children are choosing what they like to read. I believe adults give themselves too much credit for influencing children's likes and dislike--even in literature.

I've done story times in the burbs where children thought animorphisized animal stories were wonderful--and so did I; but the same stories fell flat in the inner city. What does that say? Nothing much. Maybe kids in apartments have less dealings with pets and don't thrill over them as much as children who have yards. Maybe another group of kids on the next block would have loved the animal
stories.

I have been in classrooms for many years and I will agree that adults can project their worship of a certain author or book on children. But of course in MANY situations they are the only adults talking to these children at all about literature. And I think we need to admit through all this talk about reaching other environs--- that not everyone goes home to bookshelves full of books. I deal with kids on a daily basis with not one book in their home.

Ultimately, I am not worried that these kids can't get into Narnia. I just want them to open up a book and read it and want more. That in itself will change their life. A true reader will read and discover more. This is not supposed to be social engineering.

Truly, I cannot believe that any of the books mentioned in Ms. Almagor's article deem to preempt African American children from joining
--what world? Are their worlds lacking somehow?
We are just talking about books here--right?

I'm sorry, it seems that everything that you say hits me in all sorts of wrong places. But passion is passion--on both our parts.

Namaste.

Roger, I am intrigued by this discussion, and hope that Sharon's thoughtful and passionate response will be included in a future issue of Horn Book.

This debate reminds me of those in the 1980s about adult fiction by African American authors. At the time, the critique was that African American female authors were portraying African American men in a negative fashion. From my professors at Michigan, I gather that the debates were very intense indeed.

My response to this debate about Black YA fiction is analogous to my response to that long-ago debate about gender in Black fiction that happened when I was a child: the very fact that we are having these debate shows that the range of publications featuring characters of color is still far too limited, almost 10 years into the 21st century.

We ought to freely and readily acknowledge that YA fiction is not divorced from the context of a society where race matters, where Black people have been historically caricaturized in American life and letters, and where Black literacy was met with severe punishment during much of our nation's early history. It makes sense that the first century or so of Black publishing should have been concerned with this legacy, and that post-Civil Rights authors of Black fiction for children, teens, and adults tend to still deal with the real conditions of our circumstances. I absolutely love Sharon Flake's work because I KNOW people like that. Growing up in inner-city Detroit, I KNEW people like that. I can attest that my students in Detroit kept taking her books and not returning them. Her book, *Who Am I Without Him?*, may have saved the lives of girls who are in abusive relationships in a sociocultural milieu where they do not often receive affirmation in language and stories that they can related to. These middle and high school girls need not only books that will stimulate their imagination, but that will help to underscore the reality of their environments.

As I read Lelac's article, I was reminded of one of the most famous Black characters in all of American literature - Bigger Thomas. For many years, I was angry at Richard Wright for creating such a monster. I agreed with James Baldwin's critiques of Wright's *Native Son*. Yet as I grew up and began to experience this extraordinary yet confounding country of ours a bit more, I understood that Bigger was less of a commentary on Black manhood than he was an indictment of the society who created him... Mary Shelley had the same impulses more than a century before. Perhaps we ought to read these characters in YA fiction whose badness seems inherent as part and parcel of our literary tradition.

I am thankful for Black authors like Sharon Flake, Walter Dean Myers, and Angela Johnson. I'm also thankful for Tanita S. Davis, Sharon Draper, Martin Mordecai, Virginia Hamilton, and dozens of others who were not mentioned. May many others follow in their footsteps.

--Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Ms. Thomas,

Thank you. I'm in Detroit. I wish you had an active account. I do. Please contact me.

I've followed the entire Almagor-Flake conversation with great interest; i didn't realize til i clicked through that almagor had responded. I get the feeling that a lot of people haven't seen it, are you gonna post that separately?

Thanks for the wonderfully instructive stuff.

So you've turned your cell phone off, have no crying baby (in this theater, at least, as there seems to be a signifcant one farther west), and will be a dutifully quiet movie goer?

Oh, absolutely.

I think many could have predicted it, but you precipitated it by offering popcorn. I'm waiting.

I just think that the Venn diagram of who-you-gotta-be and what-you-gotta-write-about can exclude some books that exemplify why we wanted a CSK Award in the first place.

Roger, to me, this is the crux of the issue. There's more than one "us" inside that "we." To people who find the criteria too narrow, your statement makes sense, and all the books you're talking about should be included; but to other people -- including the writers of the CSK criteria! -- the criteria is written correctly for the goal.

African American artists/authors, and books about African American content, get profoundly short shrift in our society. If you feel that the CSK criteria is too narrow, would you conside advocating for two more awards, one about African American content (written by anyone), the other by African American creators (about any content)? It's not as if any of the three categories are in any danger of getting too much cultural attention.

Roger,

That was me with the push-pulling. I didn't mean to accuse you of being devious. I always assume your provocations are flagrant and good clean fun. I was referring to the two options you offered. Either say that is doesn't matter that these books are excluded, or say that the committee has been "painted into a corner." It's not a neutral presentation. But then I don't come to your blog for neutral.

I thought about your suggestion for additional awards, Rebecca, but I think that would only marginalize or even obliterate the CSK, making those awards automatically second class (because everything eligible for the CSK would by necessity be eligible for either one or the other of the new and more competitive awards). One thing this latest discussion has made me realize is that the combination of identity and content insulates the CSK Awards from being second class stepchildren to the Newbery or Caldecott. But an award for "Best Book by a Black Person" could sting (given the presence of a Best Book by Anybody American, the Newbery), and in its turn call the status of Best Book by a Black Person About Black People (the CSK) into question.

That's the best argument I have heard yet for not changing the criteria.

Anyone caught this new book yet, called "Pulse," by Jeremy Robinson? It's about soldiers being able to regenerate and never dying. An evil scientist has found the key to living forever. Sounds interesting. I usually don't do posts like this, but this one caught my eye.

http://www.jeremyrobinsononline.com

Huh, Roger? Pasted below is something you wrote in January during an earlier round of CSK musing. It seems at odds with what you're posting now.

"There have always been book awards that combine criteria for the book and the recipient, like the U.K.'s Orange Prize, for best novel by a woman, or the Newbery Medal, for best children's book written by an author or--hi Neil--resident of the U.S.

My thinking on the CSK used to be lot like Marc and Esme's but now it is more aligned with Andrea Pinkney and Jackie's. If you want to give an award for best book about African American life, or, social justice, go for it. There are already book awards out there that address those themes, and there's always room for another. Why should the CSK have to change just so that white people can win more awards?

I have enough trust in the people who administer and judge the CSK to let them decide, for these circumstances, who is black. The problem with self-definition is that it lets in the wannabes (Debbie Reese can give you an earful on this) but I don't think blood-quantum is the actual problem here: it's white people who want to win a prize given to black people."

Roger,

Based on Anonymous' quoting of you, I think January-You is thinking through this more thoughtfully than November-You. "It's white people who want to win a prize given to black people" is exactly the issue, not "the award that was designed to bring about more books by black people and about black culture."

There is no shortage in the world of white people talking ABOUT black people. We really don't need to give awards for it. White people talking about black people (and writing about black people, and getting paid to talk about and write about black people, and teaching black people, and pontificating upon the solutions to all of black people's problem, and getting paid and rewarded for doing all of these things while black people can't get published because some publisher's list already has a black author) is really not something we need to be encouraging with an award that is intended to go to a black author writing about black culture.|

I'm interested that Pinckney's Lion and Mouse book is being automatically excluded from consideration as representing authentic black experience. (In casual conversation, anyway. I don't know about the committee). Who decides which black experience is "authentic?" I think it is originally from Aesop but I'm not 100% on that. Even if we assume the originator of the fable is not black, haven't black children and adults been experiencing this fable for generations? Who does the story belong to after all these years? I thought the award was supposed to recognize the breadth of black experience, not merely afro-centric culture.

It irks me that these conversations always go back to the kneejerk, "Oh you just want white people to be eligible to win this award" response. Roger said nothing of the sort. He is not advocating that Hoose be eligible for this one, merely pondering whether the award's criteria always further its cause. It's also odd when people speak of the award's "self-stated purpose." The award doesn't speak. The criteria were created by a committee, right? Thinking evolves. It is a cheap (and usually unwarranted) shot to accuse all critics of suffering from white privilege.

- Hope

Let me add, Hope, that I assumed Lion & Mouse's ineligibility all on my own. The committee could interpret the rules differently. I am also bothered that any discussion of possible failings of the CSK is viewed by some people as a betrayal of The Cause. ( People get this way about the Newbery and Caldecott, too.). But It's when nobody is complaining about your award that you know it's in trouble.

I got that, Roger. But others have said the same thing and I didn't give it a second thought til I came across this conversation. It reminded me of my friend who bemooans the lack of children's literature about upper middle class black families, since that is her children's (and was her own, and her parents') reality.

Hope,

1. I did not accuse Roger of "suffering from white privilege". Nor did I imply it in any way.

2. That being said, Roger benefits from white privelege. As do I. Those are not 'accusations', since there can be no blame attached to them. Those are merely facts. Neither of us "suffer" from white privilege, except inasmuch as a world with prevalent white privilege is a lesser place. I don't see this as being relevant to the discussion at hand, since it's a (cheap and unwarranted) straw man argument about something nobody here said, but denying Roger's white privilege would be nonsensical.

3. Roger's pondering as to whether the award's criteria always further its cause has not engaged the people who are disagreeing with him about what the purpose of the award IS. He continues to act as if the purpose of the award, don't we all agree, is "books by black people and about black culture".

Roger,

If you are interpreting anybody here as saying you are betraying The Cause (instead of misunderstanding the CSK), then you are reading words that nobody here has written.

Deborah, in your 6:44 post, you go on at length about [awards for] white people talking about black people. While you didn't use the words "white privilege," I inferred it from your examples and tone.

When I said "suffering" from white privilege, I didn't mean suffering as an antonym for benefitting, I meant someone afflicted by that particular blindspot. Duh.

In several of your comments you state that other poster's points are irrelevant -- Roger's initial question is not meaningful, my remark was not relevant to this discussion, and again, Roger has not engaged [the appropriate] people with his commentary. This is no way to have a conversation...a diatribe or good scolding, perhaps, but not a dialog that elucidates or illuminates anything.

It's not clear to me how your interpretation of the CSK objectives differ from Roger's.

You skipped over my remarks about defining what constitutes authenticity when discussing black experiences. These nuances are far more interesting to me than the stale old arguments about who has the right to challenge the status quo or parse award committee language. We all second-guess award committees, it's practically a sport.

The reason that talking about this award is difficult is because of the intersection at its heart. It's not for books about African Americans. It's not for books by African Americans. It's for books about African Americans by African Americans. I think everybody understands that, Deborah. The question is what J. L. Bell pointed out, whether or not the purpose of the award--"To encourage the artistic expression of the African American experience via literature and the graphic arts, including biographical, historical and social history treatments by African American authors and illustrators"--is addressed by the criteria of the award, which state that any contender "must be written/illustrated by a African American" and "must portray some aspect of the African American experience, past, present, or future." Hoose's book is an "artistic expression of the African American experience" by virtue of its subject. Pinkney's is the same, by virtue of its creator. No one is arguing that these two books fit the criteria, but that they suit the purpose. Admirably.

Don't worry so much, Roger. At least Hoose and Pinkney still have a chance at the consolation prizes -- Newbery and Caldecott.

Touché, Gultiveg!

I am tempted to let the conversation drop there, but I am too curious. If Pinkney had illustrated B'rer Rabbit, would it have been eligible?

He has--beautifully--for at least one collection of Bre'r Rabbit stories by Julius Lester, which won a CSK Honor for the author.

I have difficulty with understanding why the fable "The Lion and the Mouse" does not apply to the Black American experience. In fact it seems to me that its "Power of the Weak" lesson does apply, and very powerfully so.

According to Tom Feelings, in "Tommy Traveller in the World of Black History" (depressingly once again out of print), Aesop was a Black African. Thus at least according to an Afrocentric interpretation of literary history, Pinkney's co-author was Black.

Is "The Lion and the Mouse" a fable that is ABSENT from the Black folkloric experience in America?

Since none of the animal characters in the book can be identified with any specific race, I would say that it is the race of the reader of the book, individual by individual, that is projected onto the book. That is: if Black Americans read the fable, and interpret it through the lens of their lives, then it is about their experience.

So I would say that it is indeed eligible for the Coretta Scott King Award.

how about cutting the Gordian Knot and excluding ALL retellings and reillustration of traditional material (at least after the fifth instance) from prize competition? of course there would be no restriction on publication so publishers wouldn't be deprived of this "valuable" resource

Would you revoke the Caldecott from Paul Zelinsky for "Rapunzel"?

no, of course not! Zelinsky muzst be excempt. I was talking about FUTURE books,

Well, I was thinking about shopping around a toddlers' version of "The Book of Job"--so I definitely do not approve of your proposal.

I don't know about yall but I'm just waiting for an African American illustrator (minus Leo Dillon) to win the Caldecott! Maybe this will be Pinkney? -ksl

Don't get me started, Roger. It would take pages. But then again, you know my position on this.

And I love you for keeping it part of the public discourse because, frankly, the black on black thing is quietly influencing how some publishing decisions are being made.

Oh heck, I couldn't stop at one post. As an African American I've heard (directly) and through other authors that eligibility for a CSK is sometimes a litmus test for how books are acquired. We seem more interested in regurgitating many of the same civil rights stories. The Claudette Colvin story is stunning in it's willingness to peek behind the curtain. Many African Americans have quietly bemoaned the tendency for black leaders to "pick our heroes" for us (Rosa for instance). Leave it to the NAACP to decide a light skinned woman is a better test case (which is reminiscent of Bloomsbury's decision to replace the LIAR cover with a light skinned woman).

But a lot of us knew that if we wrote about Claudette, being an AA author would relegate the topic to a black interest book rather than a mainstream addition to the literary stream.

I've heard on more than one occasion when inquiring about a concept for a fantasy series that "Black books" don't sell.

So it is not surprising that when an author who is not of the culture writes about a topic, it is seen in a different light - as more of a mainstream book.

And there's the rub. CSK created an opportunity to put more AA authors and/or stories into the mix, and attempted to remedy a common complaint about "authentic voice" but now limits those authors to a narrow subject area. For instance, I can't write about an African subject, even if it's my heritage, and be eligible.

But to be fair, Hoose should be applauded for his work AND it should be acknowledged that he is eligible for mainstream awards. A quick look at the mock lists suggests AA authors in the CSK category aren't. Some on this blog will balk - but in comparing the books in each category - there's a stark disparity in quality, marketing, editorial support, etc.

And if anyone needs to talk about "privilege" one need only examine the American Book Awards where the "white guys" ruled the day in all categories.

So your question is valid. And I disagree with the person who said that you are writing from "white privilege." You've been writing from my perspective for years and I'm an uppity middle class AA woman with a prep school upbringing who married her children's father before they were conceived (not as rare as people think unless we're talking about literature - sigh).

Of course I'm also ranting because this year's holiday movie offerings about people of color feature an morbidly obese woman impregnated (twice) by her father and a morbidly obese football player adopted by a upper middle class white family. And the world sees nothing of the richness of the life I lead or present to my own children.


But - like I said, an author of my acquaintance wrote a book I loved and I cringed when one of the editors said "she's white so she isn't eligible for a CSK" then proceeded to market her future books featuring mostly white characters. Not much has changed since then. Which is why - may be the question should be - why aren't more people of color considered for mainstream - none color-based awards?

And why do we rejoice and reward books about the black experience mostly when they are written by someone who is not?

You're right! It goes for librarians too, I keep thinking why isn't anyone talking about our Mock Newbery winner The Year the Swallows Came Early? Or our honor book Faith Hope and Ivy June? Although the blame game can feel good in the moment it usually doesn't lead to success, so I like how she also says "you can't get all crazy twisted over it," too. Who knew I'd ever feel like I have something in common with J. Lo?

I read this quote to a group of writers at Hamline University in Minnesota on Sunday, and they laughed with self-recognition. And what do you think was on TV when I got back to my hotel room that night? The Wedding Planner. So I watched it in honor of JLo. It wasn't bad.

Thanks for mentioning how you shared that at Hamline. It was nice to remember how the room sounds when everybody laughs.

Aha--I will be at Hamline to give the graduation speech this Sunday, instead of being in Boston obsessing about the awards. I obsess even when I have no dogs in the hunt. We all do.

The one year I didn't obsess--thinking a friend had the frontrunner and hoping for his success--OWL MOON won the Caldecott. Go figure.

Of course, even being in Minneapolis,I will stayed glue to my computer doing announcement time.

Jane

And then there was the year when I actually did have a book in contention -- and I got four phone calls early that Monday Morning. None of which were from any of the award committees.

She's on to something. If nothing else, CRAZY TWISTED sounds like a good middle grade title.

Laurie Halse Anderson beat you to the Twisted part. Bummer.

Jane, you will love Hamline. The folks are so nice and so driven, the faculty is amazing. The dining hall is meh, but I understand they keep the faculty lounge well-stocked. Bring Thinsulate mittens and enjoy!

Melinda--Kate DiCamillo kept warning me about the cold but it was warmer than Boston. Punks. What I did find odd in such a wintry climate was the slipshod plowing and ice removal. The children's lit conference took place in the Hamline law school, whose sidewalks were a lawsuit waiting to happen!

JLo grew up on Blackrock Ave in the S.Bronx. So did I; a few years apart (being nice to myself here). I call myself MelLo from down the block ;-)

Recently met for drinks and one of the designers from a big publishing company adult's department said this of the children's book people, "They think their s*** doesn't stink". Tee-hee.

All the horse racing on the internet, esp. of those not in the race, makes it worse for us author-illustrators. For me, it brings up too much competition with people I know and like. I just stay out of the betting and applaud the winner. More time for creative work.

I'm going to Minnesota next weekend for the Art Shanty Festival on a frozen lake. How crazy am I?

There's definitely some wisdom in this: "Things will happen when they’re supposed to happen. I have the utmost faith and no doubt that it will one day, when and if it’s supposed to. You can’t get all crazy twisted over it."

Oh, yes. I was in the public library looking for a book for my son's science project and the boy behind me asked his mother if she could check out a book (one of mine). It was by the same author as another book they had both liked. No, it isn't, his mother said. Yes, it is. No, it isn't.

Yes, really, it is, I said.

One of my secret fantasies is to catch a teen reading one of my books on a plane or in an airport, so when we're traveling and I see a girl around 14 lost in a novel, I wander as close as I possibly can without scaring her (with my teen sons murmuring "Mom the predator" in the background).

Alas, my dream has never come true, but at least if the reader looks up startled I can tell her that I, too, enjoyed Sarah Dessen's LOCK AND KEY, Laurie Halse Anderson's PROM, or Shannon Hale's BOOK OF A THOUSAND DAYS.

I heard John Irving tell a story once about seeing a reader on an airplane throw down The Hotel New Hampshire in disgust--possibly even tearing it in two? And then, some time later, faced with the tedium of a long flight, dig it out and resignedly start reading again.

I went into a well-known children's bookstore two years ago and had a conversation with the owner. After the owner had stepped out of the shop, the store manager approached and asked if I was the guy who had written the book she was secretly reading in her spare instants, and which she was keeping stashed in her purse, so the store's owner couldn't see her reading it?! (Thus the owners wouldn't realize that she was herself planning to quit and open her own children's bookstore...)

When I first started writing reviews for an alternative weekly paper, I was always trying to discern whether people I saw reading the paper were reading my reviews. Later I started writing a column for the same paper, and then people came up to me on the street, said, "You're Laura Crossett, aren't you?" and proceeded to tell me their thoughts. These were sometimes good thoughts, but not always. I think that sort of encounter is probably always a mixed blessing.

After years of looking at the books being read by kids in airport waiting rooms, it finally happened - I saw someone reading one of my books. The reader wasn't a youngster, though. She was a school librarian, and she seemed as pleased to meet me as I was to find her reading my book. It was the highlight of my trip.

In Portland, stopped in a children's bookstore in time to hear a mother asking whether they had a children's novel where at a Jewish holiday, a girl goes back in time.

The store owner, my husband, and I said simultaneously, "DEVIL'S ARITHMETIC" and the woman said, "Yes, that's it! Do you have it?"

And I got to do the Big Reveal, which was great fun.

But except for one other time, that's been it.

Jane

I was at the library Information Desk one day when a boy came up with my biography of George Washington in his hands. Is this any good, he asked? "Oh yes," I said. "I know the author." He went happily away, never suspecting that I WAS the author. _wendieO

Just heard Walter Dean Myers accepting the Kerlan Award in Minneapolis and he told a story of seeing a young woman reading MONSTER in the subway in NYC. He said she looked up for a moment from reading, staring off into space, and he felt very strongly that, at that moment, they were "inhabiting the same world."

I did just catch a girl in the Union Square Barnes and Noble reading my latest release, Violet by Design, while sipping Starbucks by the window. She turned out to be a teen model (like my protagonist) and we spent an hour chatting. It was just perfect timing and it made both of our days!

I had a funny experience in church, whereby a little girl was climbing on the pew in front of me with a coloring book I had illustrated for Golden Books years ago. Truly unexpected. I didn't say anything- you're not supposed to talk in church. That didn't stop the little girl, though!

Finding your book in the hands of an actual person is way more fun than finding it at a yard sale or flea market...

Thanks for bringing this up. I grew up a few minutes from this umbrella village. I am anxious to read this book, and then maybe I can comment on your question.

Marcie
World of Words
http://marcieaf.blogspot.com

GREAT MacLeod essay. Thanks for posting it.

Roger,

Thank you for the link to the MacLeod essay. Brilliant indeed.

MacLeod points out the weaknesses in Cushman's Catherine Called Birdy--

"They evade the common realities of the societies they write about. In the case of novels about girls or women, authors want to give their heroines freer choices than their cultures would in fact have offered. To do that, they set aside the social mores of the past as though they were minor afflictions, small obstacles, easy — and painless — for an independent mind to overcome."

These books do get the period details correct and the historical events and so I think offer value to the reader--at a certain stage of development. I like to contrast Catherine Called Birdy with A True and Faithful Narrative by Katherine Sturtevant.

Sturtevant's Meg is a product of her time. She has all the sense of filial responsibility the Birdy does not. She struggles with her desire to do something she believes her father will not approve of and her prejudices are overcome slowly; they don't evaporate in a blaze of Enlightenment. She thinks very differently from a modern girl of her age.

But I am not sure that the reader who loves Birdy would understand Meg. "Why doesn't she just write if she wants to?" they might ask. The reader has to be able to understand that people in the past really were different and I think that is a developmental stage we need to move children towards. You can be able to read all the words in ATAFN and still not able to understand the story.

I wish every child who read Catherine Called Birdy at eleven, could be offered A True and Faithful Narrative at thirteen. I think Sturtevant proved that you can have a great story and historical integrity. I only wish it had gotten the Newbery recognition it deserved.

I'm with you, anonymous, on the Sturtevant book. And with you, Roger, about Macleod's excellent essay.
I've noticed too the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) ways some American stories about other cultures and/or people of other cultures emphasize particular American cultural attributes, say the individual over the group, that aren't part of the other cultures at all. In Sierra Leone I taught art for a year in a primary school. (Not my idea, but the head teacher thought it would make her school look more impressive.) I had one particularly talented 5th grader. However, when his parents came to see the teachers, they had absolutely no interest in seeing me. They cared about academics for their son. Talent in drawing and painting (what the head teacher insisted I teach) meant nothing to them. That he did well reading, writing, history, maths, etc did. There were no artists there as we think of them. Plenty of art being done among crafts folk, but the parents did not want that for their son. The whole concept of artist was very different there. Art functioned differently. This was thirty years ago, but I had a number of experiences to reinforced this impression.

And even in True and Faithful Narrative, we're meant to root for the heroine's liberation; we're there, really, in order to critique the contemporary values, not inhabit them for a while.

lelac,

I was the first anonymous, and I've already been waay to pedantic on Roger's blog, but I have to say I disagree. Meg struggles to find happiness entirely within the limits of the choices available to a woman of her time. Yes, she's a woman writing, but historically, that's unusual, not preposterous. She's not throwing off the chains of her sex. On the contrary, she is soberly deciding who she will marry for the best advantage. She might be pushing the envelope by writing without her father's knowledge, but she always means to show her work to him. She sees him as the ultimate judge of the rightness or wrongness of her actions. Meg's father recognizes her talent and approves her writing because he's a good man and because Sturtevant *doesn't* take the line that anyone who actually believes in those old patriarchal principles must be either weak, as is Birdy's mother, or like a her father, a bastard.

One wishes that the writers of these books would go back to the literature of Thailand, or medieval England, or wherever, where the stories aren't about 'Oh, my society, it's so repressive!" - and find other sources for conflict.

good to be reminded of that excellent McLeod article! it should be reprinted every couple of years!

"'Hola, Juan!' exclaimed the friendly bear to the venal brown-eyed and chubby-cheeked squirrel, 'Hello.'"

I'm sure Cesar Millan would also have a problem with one of his clients using "virtue or venality" to describe one of their pack. (Butch, I mean, Lucy is neither, by the way.)

Yes, but "deadly" doesn't necessarily mean evil and cruel. They kill stuff. It's a fact.

Sure, but so does everything else. Yet there's a shortage of books on Deadly Dolphins and Deadly Pandas and Deadly Bunnies.

"Oh, no!" cried the bamboo. "Here comes the Deadly Panda, alas."

Whereas a praying mantis will eat its siblings as they emerge from the egg sac, and they will grab bugs and devour them ALIVE, so yeah, I think "hungry" and "deadly" are fitting attributes for mantises.

True, but having worked at Penguin around the time of Rushdie, I can say it is no picnic walking into a building where you don't feel safe. Even years afterward there were bomb sniffing dogs in the lobby. I am sure it was worse for some of the booksellers.

What's ironic is that Denise Spellberg, who "warned" Muslims (and Random House) about the book, promotes the idea that offended Muslims are dangerous Muslims. And then she does her best to make sure they're offended. Wackjob.

Ballantine=the Spain of publishing.

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/crying-censorship/index.html

I like Stanley Fish but in this instance I think he raises a point that is beside the point. So this isn't censorship. Granted and he's exactly right, but who cares? The point is that a major American publisher is giving a gang of murderous, medieval-minded, fanatics veto power over what they will publish.

I would put a finer point on the last Anon's pencil: the gang of murderous fanatics was in this case one non-Muslim academic from Texas.

In a sense, yes. But Ballantine wasn’t worried about Denise Spellberg driving up from Austin in a rage. They were worried because (to quote the Random House e-mail quoted in the WSJ piece):

"She thinks there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence," Ms. Garrett wrote. "Denise says it is 'a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue.' Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. Does not know if the author and Ballantine folks are clueless or calculating, but thinks the book should be withdrawn ASAP."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121797979078815073.html

Denise’s predictive abilities are of course anyone’s guess. But she was never the threat.

If Party A tells me Party B is going to blow me up unless I do what Party A wants (and then goes and tells Party B to blow me up) I'm gonna worry about A.

Oh for the good old days when you could tell sex and color by a character's name! As a young editor, I once had a terrible time with a new writer whose heroine - a white girl - was named Jaime. (Pronounced Jaymee by author, Hymie by me. Utter chaos!)

If race is not a core issue of the book, but can be cited without bashing someone over the head with it, then by all means have at it. It is, after all, a distinguishing characteristic.

That said, the reader will interpret away whatever the author writes. For example, in my novel MILLICENT MIN, GIRL GENIUS the protagonist and her family are Chinese Americans. This is fairly obvious. However, my husband and I were discussing the book a couple years after it came out and he was SHOCKED that Millicent's father was Chinese. "I thought he was white," he told me. (My husband is white, or rather "European American.")

Even tougher than everyday stories and picture books, what do you do with Science Fiction? Do they care about skin color out there in the future or on Space Opera-World? If they don't, why would you make a point of mentioning it? If you don't mention it, won't most readers default to an all-white cast for your story?

Some people, arguably most in North America, might default as you describe, but when a sci fi or fantasy author doesn't define race, readers are given a chance to let the imagination control the casting, and therefore the latter kind of book crosses borders differently than a book where the author defines the race.

I read Tolkien's trilogy for the first time as a teenager on a trip to Calcutta, and my dream Aragorn was a swarthy hero, nothing like Viggo Mortenson. My dream Hobbits had skin like leather or bark, not translucent like Elijah Wood's. What a shock to see the screen version!

even kids read the flap copy and a deft copywriter can establish race on the front flap

But I think Mitali's point is that you might not always want them to--sometimes you can leave it up to the reader to imagine whatever ethnicity the reader needs the characters to be.

Mitali,

I am not sure. This question has been the subject of some heated debate in the blogs of several Science Fiction writers including John Scalzi. I was surprised myself by the argument that the white-default is ingrained by pop-culture, even in people who are non-white, and that it is so omnipresent. But the arguments were made by people whose work I respect, and I find it hard to dismiss them.


Anon 6:10

Roger, the question is, do you leave it up to the reader's imagination when you think they are pre-conditioned to get it wrong?

I think, I would, even knowing the risks, because I think it's squicky when the author says to the reader "let me do your thinking for you."

On the other hand . . .
If I write my space opera and I know that most people will think of the characters as white, am I not writing a lily white future for the human race and participating in an icky cultural construction?

I hope you can see, I'm uncomfortable with all the choices here, in the abstract. I do better when I stick to my story and let it determine what needs to be said, specifically in the interest of the story.

6:10

Instead of leaving all my thoughts in a trail of blog comments, I summed them up here:

Ten Tips on Writing Race

Thanks.

I think we can also extend this to a discussion about movies and plays based on books. Sometimes I wish the authors or screenwriters would get more creative and demand that the screen version include characters of color, whether or not they described them as such in the book. For instance, I love Lois Lowry's Gossamer. They recently did a play and when I saw the flyer I was a bit disappointed. Aren't there enough movies, plays and even books with blond blue-eyed main characters? I'm hoping that the Percy Jackson movies will think of diversity.

I've just read Gaiman's marvellous (i)The Graveyard Book(/i). In Scarlett's second appearance, there's a narrative comment that another character has even darker skin than Scarlett. I thought this was deftly done, and it also served to set me back on my heels and think, wow—I just assumed she was white, because I wasn't given any other information to the contrary. Nicely done, Mr Gaiman!

Sometimes I deliberately call the white people white, because the other way, um, pisses me off. "In line were a firefighter, a skater boi, a black stockbroker, and a mom with a teeny little toddler."

Try reading the crime log in your local paper, and notice if they only use race descriptors when it comes to somebody who is not white. My town, Newton, changed a few years ago to describing everybody's race when it comes to crime, but it's always the number one descriptor after gender. Why?

My son was three. HE WAS HORRIFIED.

oops.

My three children and I have watched this video many, many times. The music is especially beautiful, transcendent. No problems here. But we live in the Northeast, and deal with snow as a winter reality. It melts. We get it. As for Frosty, I reserve a special dislike for that video -- just the worst thing ever.

Both of my children, one extremely sensitive, one a steamroller, loved and love this movie. I can't remember exactly when my sensitive 10 year old first saw it, but she was certainly not more than three. My wild child five-year-old was, I believe, one and a half or two at first viewing.

Neither of them were/are traumatized by the ending. I am not sure that they have ever interpreted the melting as a truly final death. Partly because very young children don't get the permanence of death the way grown ups do. Partly because the snowman is so inherently magical.

We watch this at least a few times every year and it always leaves us in something of a reverie. I have, however, found it best not to pay too much attention to some of the lyrics, which seem rather, well, let's just say, uninventive. The angelic voice sings something on the order of: "We're flying way up high...the earth is way down there, below..." Such beautiful music! Such quotidian verse!

ifahren

Great observation about the lyrics, idharen. Now that you mention it, I remember. You reminded me of the Literal Music Videos that are all over Youtube these days. Hysterical.

James Preller

Every time I watch it with children, they're bemused when I cry.

But I would have cried when I was a child. I cried at Frosty. I cried during Rudolph (when the snow monster lost his teeth). "The Little Drummer Boy" sent me into hysterics.

And don't forget the "Lonely Beach" song in Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. Sob!

My boys used to love that video. I think they felt, as others have said, that the Snowman didn't die, but was transformed. However, they tried to watch it once with a friend who wouldn't sit still for it. He liked his cartoons *with* talking.

My comment on facebook, quoted in Roger's blog post, referred to a TV roundup show that was on late night television in London. It was called "The 25 greatest tearjerkers of all time" or something like that. The Snowman and Watership Down were both in the top 7 (evidently the animated Watership Down is a childhood staple in Britian), It's a Wonderful Life was #3 and ET was #1. I can't remember what talking head pointed out that of course in America, our snowman would have to come back to life.

And out of curiosity, any opinions on why don't we know the movie of Watership Down better over here, when every British kid has seen it? Do you think it's possible, as that commentator suggested, that in America we don't want our children to have to watch a main character die?

(Actually, I'm more interested in "the curse of Watership Down." I read on someone's blog that a lot of the voiceover actors for that movie died in their 40s and 50s. Hmmm...)

In the U.S., Watership Down was published as an adult book and was hugely successful as such, but I wonder if that worked against its fortunes as an animated movie.

I remember seeing the Watership Down movie when I was a kid--more than 25 years ago, perhaps. The one scene I remember vividly is near the beginning: Fiver's vision of the hills and fields turning to blood. It haunted me for years. What a great book--one of the best--but it's not light-hearted fare for the usual Disney movie crowd :) That must be part of the reason why it never quite caught on over here. I'd like to see it again, though, to see if I would still be haunted. I'm a bit stronger now.

--sarah

My little brother used to put his head under the couch cushion and sob everytime at the end of The Snowman...but we still watched it every Christmas, so I supposed its redeeming factors (particularly the snowman shin-dig at the north pole) outweighed the annual trauma. I just gave the book to a child at my library yesterday, and it remains a family favorite.

I watched the animated version of Watership Down every single day when I was a very small child. I even named my toy bunnies Fiver and Hazel. But I rewatched the movie when I was in college, after I had read and loved the book, and I was totally freaked out.

I also remember watching Watership Down as a kid and being very traumatized by it. Any details have faded from my memory, but I've never been able to read the book, though I have had it sitting on my bookshelf for years. Maybe someday...I don't think I'm strong enough yet!

I just ordered The Snowman from Amazon-I'm not sure that I've ever seen it, but now I must (and my small kiddos too)!

I too was haunted for years as a child by the field of blood in Watership Down. That's still all I remember of the movie.

But then, I was also deeply disturbed by the animated version of the Phantom Tollbooth, and it wasn't until I was an adult that I could bring myself to read it. Go figure.

I have never seen the movie of Watership Down, though I read the book to my son when he was about 10. He wasn't scared of it. I always called him Hlao Roo after that. As for the Snowman, my 2nd graders have watched it and with no tears!

The boy who sang The Snowman is Aled Jones, now in his 30s. In the early 90s he dated the housemate of my then-boyfriend and it was quite bizarre when he told me, when refering to bosoms, that "more than a handful is a waste". I couldn't quite wrap my mind round the fact that he was once the boy with the angelic voice.

Aled Jones did make a recording of the solo, but the singer in the original soundtrack is Peter Auty.

Don't you love that gravelly voice of Raymond Briggs at the beginning of the film? (Roger -- correct me if it's not Raymond Briggs.) My daughter, now 15 and apparently well-adjusted, watched The Snowman countless times as a very young child and understood that the snowman melted. It was the Mary Martin Peter Pan that devastated her.

Is it my imagination or does this article imply that Sherman Alexie won the Newbery Medal for ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY rather than the National Book Award?

Jonathan

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=5&q=http://latinalista.net/op-eds/Diversity%2520in%2520Newbery%2520Children%27s%2520Literature%2520-%2520AEJMC.doc&ei=dJdfSbvhEYi08ASl5L2IDQ&sig2=oruSJ-96il9NPigKjurzrQ&usg=AFQjCNGoFAsjvA01-LlqfA4F-gQztoe7bA

I found this link to a copy of the BYU paper cited in the article.

I found it interesting that the author cites "Tale of Despereaux" as a winner featuring an ethnically diverse protagonist.

The paper doesnt not include the "coding" for each title so we dont know how specific titles were classified.

Anonymous, I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering about that one! Not only that, but I wouldn't classify Alexie's book as potential Newbery material - potential Printz material, definitely.

Eric,

Thank you so much for the link. I'm posting it to the child_lit list as others were trying to find it unsuccessfully.

I do wonder about how he figured that for Tale of Despereaux. What strikes me most of all is that he has relatively positive conclusions from his study while the Bloomberg reporter used them very differently.

The Bloomberg piece and the NY Times piece based on it are wrong on two out of three counts: gender and family structure. They're wrong on gender because the reporter was careless. The study she used shows 14 girls and 12 boys as protagonists in the period from 1980-2007.

The study is wrong on family structure because the author makes careless mistakes in his underlying data, which he sent me.

I went into some detail about this on the Child Lit listserve.

Well, I think that this article, appearing as it does in Bloomberg, is quite delightful because of the political inversion. I mean, ever since the election of Ronald Reagan and the elevation of William Bennett's perspective, which attacked "tenured radicals," this effort to make children's literature more inclusive has felt like a rearguard battle -- fought while executing a strategic retreat and regrouping. I mean, the American Library Association is an organization that fights censorship, and is subject to ATTACKS for its defense of diversity and also controversy in books. Didn't a Newbery winning book just a year or two ago engender fierce attacks on ALA -- Susan Patron's book with the famous dog scrotum? And now, this is an article essentially saying that ALA is too conservative?? And the article isn't appearing in The Progressive or The Nation, but -- on Bloomberg.org??

It seems the Neo-Cons have well and truly lost the culture war! We have won! Huzzah!

And what of Ms. Garza's assumption that the Newbery Award goes to a novel? I suppose it's easy enough to determine the ethnicity of the protagonist of The Voice that Challenged a Nation, but what about Joyful Noise? or The Great Fire?

And if we're preoccupying ourselves with underrepresentation, what of all the kids with gender issues, of their own or of their friends and families? The last time a GLBTQ-themed book was recognized by the Newbery award was when?

Or maybe Despereaux was non-white and gay.

Kathleen, on the gender thing, the article only sort of implies that protagonists are increasingly likely to be male; it states first just that they ARE more likely to be male, which is true. Looking at the entire list since 1922, there are more male protagonists than female. (Then, of course, it says "increasingly", which is where the error comes in.)

Sorry, Thommy, Despereaux was definitely not gay, though I guess trans-species love isn't exactly "straight"...

Have there been more Dog Newbery Medal winners or Cat Newbery Medal Winners? (LOL)

How long has it been since a picture book was even a Newbery Honor? (Too Long!)

May the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children be honored.

I know what I would choose!

I would guess Horses! (tongue firmly in cheek.)

Show Way,a picture book received a Newbery Honor in 2006.

I haven't read this particular book, but I get similarly bugged by arguments that try to make us all feel good about each other by pointing out the one thing everyone has in common. Because, as you point out, there's always someone who doesn't fit in, no matter how general you try to get. So what then? If a baby has twelve toes, or doesn't have fingers, then it's okay to think of them as Other?

So many of the reviews emphasize the "obvious" reason to celebrate this book: that these are things "babies everywhere have in common". We know it isn't so. Sobering but true. You have a very good idea about why it bugs you -- and thanks for saying so.

I thought about that too, when reading it to my nephew. He has all ten fingers and toes, but sometimes because the fingers and toes are so tiny, you can do a quick look and it looks like there are more than ten... Anyway, it's interesting that no one has mentioned this issue in a review.

I love the Cuffie awards. Although it does make the booksellers seem much more fun than the librarians- we take our Newbery SO seriously!

I think it might bother you because it stresses what is normal. I have to admit I haven't read it. I think in picture book I look for what is different and distinctive. People are all different, unique in themelves so a book that stresses where we are supposedly all the same does not draw me.

I have been selling the Peter Spier book "People" for decades. It's quite a standard. And about once a year someone calls me on the carpet for selling it. These "People"-Haters are quite energetic.

Recall that "People" is a big book jammed with teensy pictures that do an anthropology-like survey of world habits and appearances and fashions and foods and customs, with each page captioned something like "We all love to eat, but we do it in different ways." The book's comedy often comes from juxtaposing "normal" foods with "strange" 'indigenous' foods from various cultures.

"People"-Haters of course object to the stereotyping.

"People"-Lovers (of which there are many more, since it's a longtime bestseller), say that it gives kids a multicultural introduction to diversity.

"People"-Haters respond that it ignores individual variation that occurs WITHIN the world of cultural difference.

Anyway, I suspect that this lovely All Have Ten Toes book will similarly send a couple of customers every year into exclamations of irritation. Fortunately I can simply fall back on the First Amendment and profess no opinion.

One problem people have with People is the line that runs along something like "Most people are good . . . but some people are bad" and shows a man in jail--I remember Ginny Moore Kruse wondering what that image might say to a child whose parent was in prison.

But, Andy, as far as Ten Fingers goes you are dodging the question, save for your implication that people who might have a problem with it are tedious irritants. No one is talking about not selling it (or not buying it). Just that its theme might be contradicted by its conceit, which mightn't seem so bad had the book not been so damned virtuous.

Extra digits aren't actually all that rare, and they occur much more often in the US in black children than white children. Some food for thought?

This hadn't occurred to me, Roger, but I'm grateful that it occurred to you. Thanks for the insight.

Well, I think I do understand your idea: you're saying that the "theme" is Universalist and yet there's something importantly Intolerant in the "conceit"... Intolerant of physical difference?

And I'm agreeing with you. But maybe -- speaking as a bookseller -- in bringing up my experiences selling "People" I was making a sort of relativist argument.

Universalism is intolerant of intolerant people. This is a very big issue. Universalists do not like bigots. They can talk about loving all neighbors, so maybe they say "we don't HATE bigots, we simply want to ensure that people don't get hurt by bigots". So, for instance, Universalists would like to halt genocides. And that means that Universalism includes a form of Intolerance. Intolerance of social injustice. Intolerance towards dangerously harmful intolerant others.

So, I think you are making this point. You are aligned with Universalism. The book is Universalist. And, speaking as a Universalist, you are questioning a line of subtle intolerance in the book's Universalism. You are being intolerant of intolerance. And you know the authors of the book, who are also Universalists, would be dismayed to think of the intolerant aspect of their Universalist message.

However, I, as a bookseller, do sell all manner of books, including imperfectly and incompletely Universalist books. And so I'm constantly feeling compromised, and I frequently point out the flaws and special issues and subtle inconsistencies in books. Today I had a woman who needed books for a bi-racial couple. Her (white) daughter is married to a West African man. I recommended "Black Is Brown Is Tan" (imperfect because the races/genders of the depicted parents are opposite those in the customer's daughter's family) and "More, More, More Said The Baby" (I specifically showed her the white grandma and the black grandchild)...I showed her the Susan Kuklin book "Families".. I showed her "Everywhere Babies"...and I TALKED to her the whole time. I explained the way each book did or did not pertain to her situation.

(She ultimately purchased "The Grouchy Ladybug" in the Arabic language edition.)

This is why it's good to have professionals engaging with adults who are choosing children's books. The "Ten Toes" book needs to be sold with care because there's an issue with (accidental) presentation of (implicit) intolerance towards babies without ten fingers and ten toes. This should be considered, when recommending and choosing this book.

However the book shouldn't be blamed for this fact. It simply is best when hand-sold.

No Universalist message will ever be wholly consistent, since Universalism contains that pesky strain of Intolerance, willy-nilly. (I personally, when checking out customers at the cash register who have selected this book, will deal with this problem by sometimes quietly mentioning this "diversity" problem with this book, in a friendly way.)

I really like this book (as a bookseller and a mom), but it's the end that really bugs me. Why does the final mother and baby have to be white? Aren't there enough precious baby books featuring white people?

And, in fact, why does it have to be a mom at all? Aren't there enough precious baby books featuring moms?

Thanks, Roger. I thought I was the only person who didn't love this book. I think it's not so much showing children from all over with ten fingers and ten toes that's a problem, it's the refrain "as everyone knows" that makes such a sweeping generalization, over and over. I also hated the way it leads up to the "divine" little white child at the end. It reminded me of the Robert Louis Stevenson poem from "A Child's Garden of Verses" that ends "Don't you wish you were me?"

Roger, I had the same thoughts in the MIDDLE of reading the book during a baby storybook hour at the library! I had already perused the book and was excited about reading it, but as I looked around the room during the reading, I realized that I didn't know for sure if the babies (or adults, for that matter) present had ten fingers and ten toes. I finished the book, and it certainly remains on the shelf and available to kids, but I am not going to read it aloud again. There are so many wonderful read-alouds out there that I don't feel bad keeping this one out.

At storytime my regular gag is to do the rhyme "if you're wearing red today..." for a few rounds, then say, "Let me see if I can find something that EVERYONE is wearing. Hm. If you're wearing HAIR today..." ...and it always gets a laugh. But I always make myself check the audience first, and finish up by saying "I'm glad that one worked--not everyone has hair." I did catch myself once before it was too late--thank goodness.

My adorable niece has 12 toes, and so this book is quite irksome to me.

Ron Meshe, I think you might be missing the point of the RLS poem ("Foreign Children"), which I'm almost sure is a sardonic take on the attitudes of the fine Brits and Americans who traveled abroad at the time.

I don't think RS is saying that the book is intolerant. I think he's just saying that its internal logic is inconsistent.

Well the internal logic may be inconsistent, and the perception of some readers may as a consequence be that the book exudes a form of intolerance, but I will sell it anyway! This book is really very good compared to many other books which I comfortably sell. I could take you on a tour of my store and pull out many books and tell you what it is that irritates me about them.... I am personally extremely picky, and I allow my customers to drive my buying to a large degree. I sell more of what's selling. Evidently, what I like or accept about the books I stock is more important than what I dislike or cannot accept!

I simply think that this particular book has lovely pictures and a fun rhyme and a good message, and its problematic aspects aren't terribly problematic. If used at a storyhour, you can always start by having all present count their fingers and toes. If someone has an unusual number, you can celebrate, and change the text as read to "ten or twelve" as an act of empowerment for all present. Lots of books get edited by the storyteller during the reading, depending on who's in the audience.

being deaf, my pet peeve is this world is designed for hearing people :D oh well, that's life.

<<<<<"everyone has ten fingers and ten toes, and that while we celebrate each baby's uniqueness, isn't it great that they (and, by extension, we) have this particular array of anatomy in common? "And both of these babies, as everyone knows, had ten little fingers and ten little toes.">>>>>> it sounds to me that she is trying to explain how we are alike as human being. I remember watching Disney Jungle book where the mother gorilla told the human boy to listen to her heart... and told him that it beats the same as his.

other than that, she probably could have worded it better though

Everyone knows...
The first thing you do after your baby is born is to count their fingers and toes!

I love this book!

I don't think the book is so much intolerant as it is oblivious.

Last Anon, we count the fingers and toes of a new baby to make sure they're all there. As we know from countless heartwarming moments on TV, finger- and toe-counting is warm-and-fuzzy shorthand (heh) for "our baby is normal." And I'm asking: how would this book make a not-normal, digit-wise, child, or parent of a such a child, feel? LEFT OUT. Which is ironic, seeing that the theme of the book is "we're all in this together."

Universalists, Andy? Aren't those the people who pray To Whom It May Concern? ;-)

My small daughter thinks the most interesting thing about President Obama is that his Chief of Staff is missing one of his fingers.

I would add to some of the comments above that even if you went to far as to check everyone's fingers and toes at story hour, you don't know about the friends and family of those people. I'm not advocating oversensitivity, just saying that this book may not be as great as it seems.

There's also something I'm having trouble articulating about it being sort of weird in the first place to bring our human similarities down to a physical characteristic like that. It just doesn't seem that interesting.

Overall, this seems more like a book for adults (who are the ones obsessed with counting baby fingers and toes and want to feel good about Encouraging Diversity) than for kids--if you've seen a bunch of babies and toddlers from vastly different backgrounds interact with each other, you know that they recognize each other as equals immediately.

Gosh I am really confused at why this is so hard.

I just re-read the book and it certainly does not say that all children have ten fingers and ten toes! It says that everyone knows that the babies IN THE PICTURES IN THIS BOOK have ten fingers and ten toes. Everyone knows it because everyone reading the book knows how to count to ten. Count the fingers and toes of the babies in the pictures and those babies have ten of each. The book does not say that all children have ten fingers and ten toes, but that a counting reader knows how to count the fingers and toes presented in the pictures. All nine babies in the book have ten fingers and ten toes. Count for yourself! That is all the book says. It says nothing about "all children have ten fingers and ten toes". To assume that the book is making a blanket statement about all children in the entire world is a big extrapolation.

We are now overthinking this. Next topic!

Sorry for being overbearing in the previous post.

This whole kerfluffle reminds me of the way some people get upset about how in "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" the butterfly emerges from a cocoon, not a chrysalis. These people say that the book therefore teaches children something which is not scientifically true. I know that lots of teachers have to spend some extra time disabusing children of Eric Carle's version of events. The problem is big enough that there's a response to the complaint on the Eric Carle Studio website.
(www.eric-carle.com/q-cocoon.html -- The response points out that there is indeed a species of caterpillar that comes out of a cocoon, and then goes on to explain the metaphorical nature of the book's meaning.)

So -- should "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" be kept from children because it can be misinterpreted or is somewhat inaccurate? That's not the correct solution. It's simply a matter of mentioning at some appropriate point to the child -- at a teaching moment -- that "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" isn't, in all cases, entirely correct. And that's how the Ten Little Fingers book's issue might be approached.

I'm sort of at a loss. I think this is wonderful book, but I don't see it as story-time pick. Oxenbury's books have always seemed to me to be directed very strongly toward a one-on-one interaction between a loving adult and a single child. With their large simple pictures and their rhythmic rhyming language, they are like primers for how to cuddle a baby and share a book with a very small child.

If a book is not suitable for every audience and venue, I don't see that as a flaw. And I really don't see that the outcome of reading this book to your little one would be deleterious.

Cognitively, children are very busy sorting out what things have in common and when variations mean that an object fits into a different category-- this is a dog, this is a dog with three legs, this is not a dog. Telling them that everyone has ten little fingers and ten little toes is not going to make them see those who are different as "not real babies."

The emphasis on fingers and toes comes from our fascination with them, not just as because they are markers of "normal." Because they are darling. We play with them and we count them, long after we know how many of them there are, and kiss them, and send the little piggies to market over and over again.

So, no, don't read this one to a random sample in a story time. And for the same reason, when you are handselling the Oxenbury board books point out the one that says, "Wave to Daddy, Wave to Mum," just in case. Not everyone has a daddy and mum to wave to. There's nothing wrong with the book, it just might not fit the audience.

I'm sort of at a loss. I think this is wonderful book, but I don't see it as story-time pick. Oxenbury's books have always seemed to me to be directed very strongly toward a one-on-one interaction between a loving adult and a single child. With their large simple pictures and their rhythmic rhyming language, they are like primers for how to cuddle a baby and share a book with a very small child.

If a book is not suitable for every audience and venue, I don't see that as a flaw. And I really don't see that the outcome of reading this book to your little one would be deleterious.

Cognitively, children are very busy sorting out what things have in common and when variations mean that an object fits into a different category-- this is a dog, this is a dog with three legs, this is not a dog. Telling them that everyone has ten little fingers and ten little toes is not going to make them see those who are different as "not real babies."

The emphasis on fingers and toes comes from our fascination with them, not just as because they are markers of "normal." Because they are darling. We play with them and we count them, long after we know how many of them there are, and kiss them, and send the little piggies to market over and over again.

So, no, don't read this one to a random sample in a story time. And for the same reason, when you are handselling the Oxenbury board books point out the one that says, "Wave to Daddy, Wave to Mum," just in case. Not everyone has a daddy and mum to wave to. There's nothing wrong with the book, it just might not fit the audience.

My daughter received this book at Christmas. I had the exact same response and I, too, have a problem with over-sensitivity. Go figure.

I have to say that count their toes was not the first thing I did with my three children.

For the first one, it was revealed that he had a heart condition so the number of toes he had was really the least of my worries.

And for the other two, ensuring their hearts were ok also eclipsed the number of their toes and fingers.

I like the book but I shall be careful in read-aloud situations from now on. Thanks Roger for making me aware. - Daphne

I'm overwhelmed with over-sensitivity! What can I read at story time that WON'T offend someone, somewhere? :)

Sorry about the double post. I hit a glitch and wasn't sure if it had been sent or not.

All babies can breathe and swallow at the same time, which is something adults can't do.

If your child didn't have the required digits, you wouldn't read this book. You might also never be able to do 'this little piggy' if your child had one extra, or one less digit. But, you know what? If your child had extra/missing digits, you'd probably have a lot more on your mind that getting all heated up about a Mem Fox book.

(insert tongue in cheek) You know what bugs me? People who have ten fingers and ten toes, getting all affronted on behalf of people who don't.

I guess I maybe should keep my seeing-person's thoughts on The Black Book of Colors to myself! ;-)

my cousin lost one of his fingers when we were playing "roll down the hill in a barrel" as children. does anyone want me to email him?

b

Two absolutely amazing talents put out a book that can rival Goodnight Moon (or my lamented out-of-print favorite, Catch Me, Kiss Me, Say It Again) as a very first book. And it comes under fire because it's only 99 and 44/100ths percent universal.
Wow, talk about no good deed going unpunished!

"And it comes under fire because it's only 99 and 44/100ths percent universal. "

Actually, the percentage is much, much lower thanks to the white mom and baby at the end. Am I really the only one posting in this (admittedly out of control) thread who is bothered by that?

We have books about birthdays. There are children who are not allowed (religion) or who are never offered the chance to celebrate birthdays. There are books about hair (nappy and other types)...some kids have illnesses which cause baldness. Please. If you are concerned about your child reading a particular book, then don't read it.

I'm only going to make my point one more time. The theme of the book is that however different we are and wherever we may live, in one way we're all the same, and isn't that comforting? But, when it comes to fingers and toes, we aren't all the same. The moral is defeated by the metaphor.

Over and out.

This is one child who will probably not be getting that book for his birthday: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7870769.stm

I agree with CSK advocates that more awards give more kinds of writers a chance to win (the argument for the Sibert, for example). But in the Obama land of mixed, multi-, and "check all that apply" definitions of race, the categories themselves are in such flux that future CSK juries are likely to run into real difficulties. Who gets to decide who is black, or Hispanic (Pelpre)? The artist? The jury? After all there were those who argued Obama was not truly African-American, since he had no family history of American enslavement. I would love to see our awards embrace mixture, even as they support and encourage every variety of artist.

I've been thinking about this issue since I first came across Marc's piece just a few days ago, and I go back and forth on the race issue. I agree with Marc about the perils of having a committee decide who is black enough, who is Latino enough (someday, will they be deciding who's gay enough? is there already an award like that?); I also agree with Stickney's point that it's good to be able to see a CSK sticker and know "this is a great book by a black author".

But, Roger, I read the pieces you link to above, and I didn't find what I think you're saying, that people say these are supposed to be "uplifting" books. Stickney does mention that "these awards are meant to lift up, to inspire". I don't think she necessarily means that the stories themselves are meant to be "inspiring"; just that seeing books by black authors and illustrators is inspiring and uplifting--to children, to parents, to other authors.

I have a further question, though--what about the requirement that the book present some aspect of the African American experience? Is it the best thing to leave out books by African American authors that may be unrelated to that experience--books about science, for instance, or even books about Africa?

Wendy, I was working from the criteria, which include this directive: "The award (or awards) is given to an African American author and an African American illustrator for an outstandingly inspirational and educational contribution. The books promote understanding and appreciation of the culture of all peoples and their contribution to the realization of the American dream."

This is such a heart-rending and complex subject. In the anthology "Keats's Neighborhood," Anita Silvey's marvelous introduction tells of the pain Keats experienced in the 1960s when he was challenged about being a White person writing the Black experience. This pain came in part because he experienced Anti-Semitism in the 1930s to such a degree that in order to advance his career as an artist he felt compelled to hide his Jewish roots by changing his name from Jacob Katz to the non-ethnic sounding "Ezra Jack Keats." That is: his work in the 60s depicting the lives of Black children was socially conscious: an effort to battle unfair treatment of Black people...and yet he was challenged by the very adults he thought would appreciate his efforts.

I would say that the situation for people like Esme Codell is absolutely unchanged. I think she's doing the right thing to speak up about the unfairness of the exact situation she and many other White children's book writers and artists are in.

The question is simply whether the unfairness Esme confronts is equal to or greater than the unfairness Andrea Pinkney talks about in her essay. And Marc's point that it's a moving target, that society is shifting, is correct. Things are, thank goodness, shifting.

But the fact that Barack Obama has been elected president does not instantaneously undo all the centuries of oppression of Black people in this country.

So I don't know what action ALA should or shouldn't take, but my instinct is that it's not time to change the CSK Award criteria yet.

Maybe ten years from now?

Roger--
Where is that quotation from? I don't see it at the CSK website.

Forget it. I see it. I was looking at the actual criteria.

Roger/Marc, are Marc's original columns on the topic still available on line? Thanks!

Ignore me, I'm an idiot. Found the link in the actual post. D'oh!

Wow -- I feel like I went to sleep and woke up in a room with two elderly people saying the same things over and over. Feels like Groundhog Day around here. I mean -- didn't we have this discussion already. Hadn't we already ascertained the importance of an award that validates the work of a group of people whose work has historically been under-recognized -- and yes, even with a Black president -- continues to be so. We can count the Newbery gold medalists who are Black on one hand. Yes, many honors, few golds. Have we not already said that this is about young people being able to read a book by a Black person and say (as I did as a child) maybe I too can grow up and be a writer? I'm sorry, but it feels a little like hateration to me, like a huge pout because "I want one and can't have it." Yeah -- come to think of it, this dialogue does echo my six year old. I say, leave it alone. It's valid. It's necessary. It's important for the world to know Black writers -- how else will they come to know us? I am one of very few Black writers who has gotten Newbery Honor Awards and while I am very grateful each time, I know that there are MANY Black voices out there that are deserving. And if not for the CSK, they wouldn't be heard. I don't know what to say to Esme and Marc -- are you writing because you want these awards (then you're writing for the wrong reason) or are you writing to tell good stories that will make each reader sit up a little straighter and feel that much prouder. Don't hate on the CSK -- work to change the world by adding to it, not dissing it and trying to take away. C'mon! We've been here before. It's ridiculous. How about a celebration that something for people of color could survive for forty years! I don't get it. I really don't. It truly, truly saddens me.

It's infuriating that we're weighing injustices against each other, as Andy describes above.

Malcolm Gladwell in BLINK described how auditioning behind a screen made the selection process for symphonies and orchestras more diverse AND more just.

The screen prevented a bias that favored men from operating consciously and/or subconsciously, but it also helped promote the real goal of the audition: to pick the best performers so that an audience can delight in music.

I'm wracking my brain, but I can't come up with an equivalent correction in the children's book awards selection process that would correlate to a screen.

Warning: Bitchy rant post coming!
From Esme Codell's blog:
"As an author of several books that feature African American characters . . . I have to confess that I am deeply pained by the fact that my work would never be considered by a Coretta Scott King Award Committee."
My (snarky) response:
Oh, Esme, thank you so much for exercising your white privilege to speak for (read: appropriate the voices of) Black folks. I guess that the minority authors whose works have historically been overlooked by publishers have you to thank for making sure that children's literature is as multicultural as you want it to be. Who needs the CSK? As long as white folks can keep writing good stories about black folks and other historically disenfranchised people, why bother listening for any more voices?

Mitali, I wouldn't want to go too far with the orchestra-audition comparison. The point of these auditions is to find out how well you can follow directions (from the composer and conductor) and how well you will blend in with the people already playing. A great recipe for music-making but not for writers!

I am bugged by Jackie's post and that of anonymous. My goal in expressing views is to be fair -- fair when I point out that Israel is actually a multi-ethnic state that needs to focus on the needs of its Arab citizens (which inspired similar attacks on my motivations during a week of debate on the Jerusalem Post website), fair when I raise the question of how we can meaningfully define race. I don't raise questions so I can win a particular award myself -- I find that imputation offensive. Nor do I see why it is tired or old to ask how the mobility and flux in definitions of race which is beginning to take place nationally and internationaly affects how we think about and define race in books for younger readers. I would think that is a discussion those who value CSK would embrace, not treat as some expression of personal greed or malice.

Hey snarky anonymous person, you don't actually know who Esme is, so you shouldn't personalize your comments so much. But I know her personally, since she worked for me for two years at The Children's Bookstore in Chicago. She has lived her whole life in mixed (and substantially Black) neighborhoods in Chicago, and a number of times was the only White child in otherwise all-Black public school classrooms. And as a grown-up she taught in mostly-Black schools. She's actually a very unusual White voice as a channeller of Black childhood and her wish to be considered for the CSK Award is valid if the criterion is that the writer must have been immersed in Black culture.

HOWEVER the key point is that there does need to be an award specifically for Black authors and illustrators, even today, very much today, because of the historical injustice in American society.

So, Esme's problem is insoluble. As I was suggesting, it is definitely unfair that Ezra Jack Keats would have been ineligible for the CSK Award, but that unfairness is good policy, unfortunately.

Roger, for women in children's books the use-of-initials strategy has worked as a bit of a screen. Someone blogged about this recently but I can't remember where I saw it. For Asian American writers who don't want a "multicultural" label, an authorial name change is a tempting option. Keep your eye out for THE CALORMENE CHRONICLES by M.B. Perkins.

I am reminded of the dilemma of the White Jazz Musician, some of whom attained status of Honorary Black. (I think the premier example may be Charlie Hayden, the bassist for Ornette Coleman. No one even brings him up in such discussions, which reveals the completeness of his presence in Black music.) Consider, in reference to Marc Aronson's questioning of verifiability of ethnic bona fides, the case of brilliant and popular pianist Keith Jarrett. Here is the excerpt from his interview with Terri Gross, from NPR's radio show Fresh Air. (I don't know if Roger will let me put the whole excerpt up but it is simply wonderfully poignant when you consider the amazing public success Jarrett was attaining at the time he is speaking of in his career.)


GROSS: In the '70s, I think a lot of your fans debated with each other whether you were black or white.

MR. JARRETT: Yeah. Well, you know, at the same Heidelberg festival, there were some black musicians, or black audience members, trying to disrupt my performance because they claimed it wasn't black music. And, of course, it wasn't. One reason was that I wasn't black. But this was a jazz festival. They were claiming not only was it not black music, but it wasn't jazz and it shouldn't be at this festival. And this was, I guess, during the time when, you know, the Black Muslim thing was pretty big.

And I went backstage afterwards, and I was rather heartbroken because I thought, `Gee, these are fellow musicians or, like, people who like music, and why are they doing this?' And I was just sitting alone in my dressing room probably very upset, and a man and his daughter knocked on--a man knocked on the door, blacker than any of the guys who were trying to disrupt the stuff on stage, who was actually from central Africa. And he and his daughter came back and said, `Mr. Jarrett, we just want to say that that was so beautiful.' And I thought, `OK. Well, this is going to be just a political problem for me. It isn't the music, it's just the politics.'

GROSS: Did you think that a lot of people assumed you were African-American because your hair was really curly and looks like an Afro?

MR. JARRETT: Yeah. And a friend of my ex-wife's was arguing with me and her that I had to be black, no matter what I said. And once Ornette, backstage, said something...

GROSS: This is Ornette Coleman?

MR. JARRETT: Yeah, Ornette Coleman. One of the earliest times I was in the same room with him, he said something like, `Man, you've got to be black. You just have to be black.' I said, `I know. I know. I'm working on it. I'm...'

http://www.prohealth.com/library/showarticle.cfm?id=2811&t=CFIDS_FM

Well, I have to agree with Jackie's comments here. Given what I know about history,I would prefer to be beyond the "beginning" of an national and international change in understanding about race before removing the institutions that seek to support and strengthen the opportunities for African American writers. I must admit the idea of "fairness" gives me pause. Who gets to decide when underrepresented stories no longer need a place for recognition? Shouldn't the folks who were left out be the ones to decide? I'm just asking.

Instead of the weeping and wailing about why do we need the Coretta Scott King Awards, could some of the people who care so much about all children, use their influence to get somebody of any color to write books about kids of color beyond "boys in the hood" or a variation of "Roll of Thunder"? I mean, where are the books about girls like the new kids in the White House? Or their father when he was a teen, for that matter. We are lucky to get one or two a year.

I am sorry if some of my remarks were misconstrued. I am not at all against a Coretta Scott King Award. I am for clarifying the mission and criteria of the CSK so if it is an award that seeks to recognize authors and illustrators, it does that (as it does in the context of the John Steptoe Award), and if it is a book award, then the criteria is for the book, not the person. I'm only saying that I think it is odd to judge a _book_ on the race of the author or illustrator. The fact that other book awards that specifically celebrate race/creed/religious/ethnic backgrounds manage to meet their objectives without this contingency negates the argument of the necessity of a book creator's race to be a criteria in forwarding the cause of the group, unless one is willing to say that these other awards are not meeting their objectives, in which case I would reiterate, don't be hating.

I also don't like the business of assuming that when someone raises a question they are wholly "against" something, and assuming the questions won't make things better or stronger in the end. It kind of reminds me of the occasions when I questioned other things in my country over the past eight years and I was told if I didn't like it here, I could leave. I'd prefer to stay around and discuss things and I don't imagine I'll get tired of it, kind of like a six-year-old (or an American, depending). I think Andy Laties is right, maybe it's not the time to make these changes, and it's sure not my call. But I do think it's always time to discuss where we are and where we might be heading.

Yes, I have always supported and will continue to support excellent books by authors and illustrators of all races, backgrounds and ethnicities in my work as a reviewer and literacy advocate. They sure don't have me to thank, I support their work because I have a debt of gratitude to them, because when I look on the shelves yes, I sure do see the world as multicultural as I want it to be, and as a lot of other people want it to be. Yes, I agree absolutely, all children deserve to recognize themselves in literature, and they deserve to recognize diversity, too. And yes, oh yes you're right, I am sad because I want one and I can't have one. I wouldn't be making that point if it were the Jacqueline Woodson award. I am making the point because it is the Coretta Scott King award, and that name means something to all Americans, not just African Americans. I don't expect the world to be (or know the world to be) a fully pluralistic place, and I don't expect artists to be that way either, but I guess I do think of books that way.

I was nearly swayed by Andrea Pinkney's "Miss America" argument, except that we are talking about a children's book award given in cooperation with the ALA, representing a wide cultural cross-section of professionals and greatly impacting what educators decide kids will read all over the country, and since I have written children's books, yes, I'd like to be eligible. It's not so much about winning it. Realistically, I know it's not probable I'd beat the likes of Kadir Nelson or Karen English or Hope Anita Smith or Christopher Paul Curtis or many authors in such contests, not because they are African American, but because they are amazingly, bar-setting-ly talented. I was whipped by Kate DiCamillo for the Newbery the same darn way. But as a writer of books about urban situations and that feature African American characters (whether you like my books or not), and as a sporting soul, I'd welcome another opportunity to be beat out by the best.

http://www.planetesme.blogspot.com

Not to sound too much like those Freakeconomics boys, but hasn't there been enough time now to measure what effect CSK has had on children's book publishing? Were more books about children of color published in 2008 than in 1968? Does the award actually sell books? Has it launched important careers? Perhaps publishers can weigh in.

For me, it's more about the kids than about the stats.

I'll never forget the hordes of kids who browsed books at the Kennedy Center during a multicultural lit conference.

For once, ALL the covers featured kids who looked like them. I watched them look up from the books to check out the faces of the authors -- authors who mostly looked like them. Again, in the majority for once.

The reality is that racial classification still exists in the minds of kids and teens. And North American kids who consider themselves Latino and/or black are still dealing with white majority default most of the time.

That's why the CSK and the PB are still wonderful places to find (1) great stories ALL featuring kids like them, and (2) awe-inspiring famous authors who once were ALL kids like them.

That being said about WINNING, I'll fight to the end for NO APARTHEID in WRITING. So let the stories come, Esme and Jacqueline, and if you both want to write about a Bengali-American immigrant girl, I'll be the first one to celebrate it.

There seems to be some armchair philosophizing going on here. Anyone who has actually been to a CSK Breakfast at ALA Annual knows what a wonderful spirit of celebration it is, for works that may not have been recognized elsewhere. And look at the remarkable range of beautiful books that are CSK winners this year--the range of poetic writing, gorgeous art, the support for new talents through the Steptoe Award. Most of these works did not garner other awards, but they are truly worthy of celebration. There SHOULD be lots of awards; there are lots of great books out there beyond the handful that Newbery and Caldecott medals recognize.

Dean Schneider

I read Jackie's post to CCBC today about CSK and it had a beautiful sound of excitement to it. Just as, Deb knows, I am the biggest advocate of of more award winning books by artists of every color. Don Tate's post at "Devas T Rants and Raves" did not agree with me, but nicely captured the conflicting thoughts and feelings of an artist of color. So I get it, the CSK matters. But how about this, Dr. Ann Morning -- who is herself of mixed background -- is a professor at NYU. She points out that in some countries your census form asks you "what do you consider yourself" not "what are you." Could an award be for anyone who considers him or herself a member of an ethnic group? That way, no judge has to determine what you "are" only how you see yourself? I know of at least one author who, by family tree, could have qualifed for CSK but did not feel that was fair because that author does not, by sight, look African American and has never faced discrimination on that basis. The author felt it would be wrong to benefit from an award designed to help those who had faced discrimination, when the artist had never paid that price. I deeply admired that choice. So should we consider elective affinity as a standard, rather than being?

Forgive my fear of folks with "measuring sticks".

There have always been book awards that combine criteria for the book and the recipient, like the U.K.'s Orange Prize, for best novel by a woman, or the Newbery Medal, for best children's book written by an author or--hi Neil--resident of the U.S.

My thinking on the CSK used to be lot like Marc and Esme's but now it is more aligned with Andrea Pinkney and Jackie's. If you want to give an award for best book about African American life, or, social justice, go for it. There are already book awards out there that address those themes, and there's always room for another. Why should the CSK have to change just so that white people can win more awards?

I have enough trust in the people who administer and judge the CSK to let them decide, for these circumstances, who is black. The problem with self-definition is that it lets in the wannabes (Debbie Reese can give you an earful on this) but I don't think blood-quantum is the actual problem here: it's white people who want to win a prize given to black people.

I meant the Newbery goes to the best children's books by a CITIZEN or resident of the U.S., sorry.

I'm tempted to let Roger have the last word, b/c I think he's absolutely right--this is about WHITE PRIVILEGE rearing its ugly head once more--and just for the record, living in a black neighborhood, having black friends, teaching black kids, or writing books about black children doesn't make you IMMUNE to that overbearing sense of entitlement that tells you EVERYTHING within reach ought to be yours...according to the CCBC, less than 3% of children's books in 2007 were authored by black people. There's ONE major award out there to celebrate excellence in black-authored or illustrated kids books, and now white authors want a piece of that, too? Please...

NG just said (in the comments over on Fuse #8, on the 27th) he was NOT a citizen? So, ah, eh?

No, Gaiman is a resident, so he's fine, and we don't even need ALSC to re-adminster the oath ;-)

Susan Cooper was also a resident back when she won.

Hi, one last clarification: my blog post was not suggesting that White people wanted to take away the CSK award. I was saying that the literary criteria for the award was awesome and that *I* aspire to all of the the criteria that I can, within reason. I also named titles that I personally thought were excellent representations of other books that met the literary criteria, and that was also my opinion. I was confused by the use of the King name in an award that seemed segregated to me in comparison with other awards. I asked for clarification of the goal of the award, and I received it, and I thank you. Additionally, I have attended the CSK awards, and the spirit described by other posters is very true.

If I am representative of all White people, I have not received the phone call informing me of such. Please feel free to direct any criticism of feelings of entitlement, misplaced or otherwise, on me and not all authors who are not African American, who certainly may not have been as bothered by the criteria.

I am glad if this conversation has brought out some important points and information (Zetta's stats alone, I think, have made it worthwhile), and hopefully as it continues it can remain constructive. I felt very enlightened, especially, by Richard Michelson's comment on my blog. I can certainly appreciate if now is not the time, but I still (again, personally!) most closely embrace the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and the bravery of those children directly involved as emblematic of Civil Rights, and as such, I will always hope and work for desegregation and opportunity in all directions.

I am going to excuse myself entirely from this conversation here at Read Roger now, and get back to reviewing books on my own site. Thanks again.

Off topic, I'm reading this while watching Rachel Maddow. On screen is "GOP IN EXILE" and the image is an igloo.

Too tired.... can't recall the point I meant to contribute to this thread.

Oh yes, now I remember. Do go to the CCBC site and see the stats on identity of author and number of books published. Very sad. Numbers of Native authors decline, or are flat. But the pile of books filled with BS about American Indians grows and grows.

OK well can I just point out that we are in a period of mega-publishing corporations and mega-book-selling corporations and isn't it exactly what you'd expect from this hyper-consolidation of the book industry that the vast majority of books published would be "safely mainstream" because that's where the bulk of the spending is perceived by bean-counters at the top of the publishing-company food-chain to be likely to be found? (oooh very bad sentence, but it's late)

I am grateful also for the statistical corrective to this conversation, and am curious indeed to learn if the CSK Award contributes measurably to sales. As an indie bookseller I would certainly say that it does this very effectively in my own stores. What about nationally?

It's in the Bible: "Thou shalt not covet." Thy neighbor's CSK award. That's the easy part.

As for who can write what--first, we can't know each author's or illustrator's biography and heritage, so, as readers, we have to rely on the work itself. Is it well-informed, carefully researched, deeply imagined, written with care, and, I would add, with love?

As writers, when we take risks, we have to rely on the generosity and graciousness of our readers to forgive our inevitable mis-steps.

Is anyone, at least in America in this century, all one ethnic/religious/cultural heritage? Very few of our (at least my) social interactions are culturally one-dimensional. If we're going to portray characters and situations that reflect that joyful messiness, we have to be able to write both within and outside of our "own" literal experience.

Thanks to everyone for this conversation.

I disagree, Helen. There's a huge pile of books about American Indians that some would say are "well-informed, carefully researched, deeply imagined, written with care, and, I would add, with love."

My commitment is to the children who are misinformed by those books.

Writers are well-intentioned, but the problem is, with American Indian content, it is difficult to gain the insight to be able to critically select primary/secondary sources that will help the writer produce a book that will be well-received by a Native reader/critic/parent/teacher/librarian. Or, by non-Native readers/critics/parents/teachers/librarians who are aware of the bias and romanticizing that STILL gets into these books.

A lot of the material writers use comes from stories gathered by ethnographers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Thing is, by then, Native people were on to the game of exploitation and appropriation, and a lot of the "informants" told bogus stories to the ethnographers. Unless you (as a writer) or reviewer are reading journals in Native studies, or books in Native studies, you're not up-to-date on this work, and you just reproduce the same old junk that has been written forever.

Hi Debbie,
I didn't say it wasn't difficult.
The "huge pile of books" brings an image to mind:
1982, a small school in interior Alaska, I'd been to a workshop to help teachers in Native Alaskan schools learn to recognize stereotypical writing in books for children. When I came back to my classroom, I invited my five students (elementary) to see if they could find any such books in our school library (a one-teacher school, the library had been created by a number of different teachers through the years). Within ten minutes, they had a "huge pile of books" on a table--they knew immediately what these books were, and where to find them. Oddly enough, the books I thought they would find most offensive, they did not--a series of books about "Little Indian Two Feet" that they loved. The one they hated the most was a Laura Ingalls Wilder book--"this is the book that says 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian.'"

Research takes a lot of forms, the best of it, I would still say, integrated with life and love.

Helen,

Interesting vignette. I'd like to know more, if you're willing to share the additional information.

Once they had the pile of books, did you ask them to pick out the "most offensive" ones?

Had you worked with them on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE prior to their search of the shelves? If not, then how do you account for their ability to ferret out LHOP?

I guess I'd like to know more details about how you taught them to recognize stereotypes, what grade level they were, public/private school, etc.

After my earlier post, I received an email asking if I'd read your book yet. I did not realize you have written a book with a Native character. I have not read your book.

Debbie,
I just spent some time on your wonderful website. I wish I, and my fellow teachers in rural Alaska, had had such a resource in the 80's.
Interesting that you discuss so thoroughly the Laura Ingalls Wilder book that I mention above. It was so visceral, the child's comment, and my seeing so clearly in that moment that there was no context I could offer that would make his memory of hearing that anything but--the only word I can think of is "murderous." He'd come across it more than a year earlier, and remembered it precisely.

Like you, my commitment is to the children who are misinformed by books that fall short of what must be in place for a book to be worthy of their attention.

Thanks so much for all you do.

Hi Debbie,
Our last two posts were out of order--I mean I had not read your last post when I posted mine.

Thanks for letting me know that you haven't read DIAMOND WILLOW--it was hard for me to discern if "you" was personal or general, in your first post.

My experience in the Athabascan community was a three-year teaching job; I was the only teacher, the only non-native in a very small (20-25 people, 5-10 students) community. (The school was built in the 70's when the Molly Hooch Act was passed.) I had taken several courses in cross-cultural communication and education at the University of Alaska before I went there, which helped a lot.

I'd started reading Little House on the Prairie as a read-aloud, about a year before the thing I mentioned above. We had stopped reading when it became offensive--of course I had talked about that with my students, though I must not have removed it from the schoolroom. It is interesting how we can forget things from books we read as children, and how sharing books with children can alert us to stereotypes and insults.

The character in DIAMOND WILLOW is of mixed heritage. Her father is descended from Jeannie, a character in my earlier novel, THE BRAID, and her mother is descended from people who have lived in interior Alaska for many generations.

We could talk more after you've read it, if you'd like, though this very public forum makes me a little nervous, for a conversation that has become so personal. What I often realize is that living in that community changed me in ways that may not be apparent, and that show up in the ways I experience the world and the way my stories come to me--that's what I was trying to say in my first post.

I don't know if anyone is still reading this, but in reading comments I found myself thinking that any award that will help match a book to a reader is worth having.

Celebrate the CSK, start an award for Asian books/authors, rural books, urban books, humor books, graphic novels, whatever. We have selection lists in YALSA where literary merit is not a criteria, because once again it's all about connecting books and readers.

On the other side, given the number of teens here who are bi-racial, I do find my self wondering exactly what is the tipping point into being "African American".

Thanks so much for Catherine Gilbert Murdock's article on Mommy Buzzkill. Finally, a cogent answer to all those who (rather belligerently) ask me why mothers are always getting killed off in children's books.

Jeanne Birdsall

Italians often have record players but use them mainly for opera. Occasionally they will listen to other musical forms native to their region, but they are reluctant to listen to instructional recordings.

I do -- party at my house! But check your knitting books and salamis at the door.

Why not give these books and LPs to Simmons or Harvard for their rare book collections? They would be of interest for the change in interpretation of children's literature over time.

We are really going to town on this blog entry at my office, where we do occasionally have our own mildly embarrassing conversations, such as "If we only put a girl on the cover most boys won't read it" or "how do we keep this from looking *too* historical?"

Anyway, our editorial assistant, Alison, is a Sleepy Hollow native who also happens to be a young Jewish woman of German and Czech descent. As submissions came in late this afternoon we cheerfully called out "Here's another serious biographical craft book for Alison!"

By the way, if my colleague Regina Griffin and I ever write a book on "Why Children Read" for the ALA, we will be sure to title our chapter on romance for teens "It's All About the Yearning."

Those passages are similar to some I'm using in my dissertation, which focuses on literacy programs for immigrants in libraries during the teens and '20s. Here are links to a couple about gender and reading that I posted a while back. Post 1 and Post 2

In my research notes I have quite a few about ethnicity and supposed reading preferences - I just haven't gotten around to posting any of them yet. The will be in the dissertation. :-D
Post 2

I'm guessing that the last line "native American" doesn't mean American Indian.

And, FYI, I blogged again today about AMERICAN GIRL. Found a review of one of the stage shows. Gross.

Roger, this description makes me want to resubscribe (I let my subscription expire in a fit of frugality). But resubscribing wouldn't get me this issue, would it? Usually subscriptions start with the next issue? I would like to have this one if possible, as I have a special love for Joan Aiken.

We can start your subscription with whichever issue you wish! Just do it by phone (800-325-1170) rather than the website.

Can I buy just one? I don't have a subscription, but I'd love to order this issue.

~h

I didn't intend to say that NO white writer gets to write about black topics.
I have a lot of respect for your opinion, Roger, so I'll reflect on whether I'm nuts or not. And maybe (?) you're in a better position than I am to have a sense of how many white writers don't get to publish about black topics because the publisher is worried about "authenticity".

Why would Roger know this better than you? You're a children's book editor, aren't you? How often have YOU told a white author you couldn't publish his book about African Americans because you were worried about authenticity? How many stories have you heard from your peers in the industry that have led you to believe that this is a big problem?

Compare these numbers to the number of times you have told a white author you couldn't publish his book about white experience because it "didn't ring true."

Then reflect on why you feel it necessary to put the word "authenticity" in quotes.

You may find you have answered your own question.

You go Roger!

Should men not write stories about girls? Should women not write about boys?

This time through this conversation, it occurs to me that nothing in this world is perfect, that every prize has its down side, every organization is flawed. There are really great books that should receive the boost of the CSK, not so that their authors can bask in the glow, but so that more kids will benefit from reading them. But CSK can't be all things to all books. The Newbery is for the best contribution to children's literature, so it doesn't pick the book most likely to inspire non-readers. It can't be all things to all books either. It makes more sense to look at what good the organization does and weigh that in relation to its flaws than it does to complain only about what is wrong with things.

This time through this conversation, it occurs to me that nothing in this world is perfect, that every prize has its down side, every organization is flawed. There are really great books that should receive the boost of the CSK, not so that their authors can bask in the glow, but so that more kids will benefit from reading them. But CSK can't be all things to all books. The Newbery is for the best contribution to children's literature, so it doesn't pick the book most likely to inspire non-readers. It can't be all things to all books either. It makes more sense to look at what good the organization does and weigh that in relation to its flaws than it does to complain only about what is wrong with things.

I don't get why whites want to be included in the CSK awards. I mean, geez, whites are eligible for all the rest of the awards, and whites get them, too. Do we really have to take over EVERYTHING? Oh, wait, we already have.

I'm having trouble imagining the scenario of a book being turned down or accepted by a publisher on the basis of its perceived CSK chances. The last time an award was no surprise to anyone was when Sarah, Plain and Tall won the Newbery.

I think anyone should write about anything, but no one should expect an award. Nor, come to think of it, to be published.

And to add to your list of what not to expect, Roger: no one should expect to be praised for good intentions. I think that's what's at the heart of this argument. White people don't really want permission to write about blacks; they want blacks to love them for doing so.

Anon 10:38, you've hit the nail on the head. I've even caught myself feeling this way.

Roger, I am expecting stars and awards for everything I write, so by God you'd better deliver.

Hello,
I’m Diletta Colombo, I’m 28 years old and I work in an art bookshop in the centre of Milan. I’m really keen on children’s books and I organize a reading group of picture books with some illustrators, editors, graphics, librarians. I read your blog and I’d like to ask You a piece of an information to visit some good places where I can find children’s books in Boston and New York, because I’ll be going there from 22nd of June. I thank You for Your possible interest, I think it’s important to exchange information.

Sincerely Yours,
diletta

(Sorry if I wrote here but I don't know where I could send this request of help!)

Melinda,

I feel your white guilt. But I think the people who want the CSK to be open to all just want to be eligible, not automatically to win. There are good arguments pro and con but I think your characterization of motives is glib.

And I believe there are real live white people who want certain books to be eligible and to win, not because they wrote them, but because they want more kids to see them.

Sorry about the glib tone. I can see where the writers would want more kids to see the books they wrote by being eligible for the award. And I have used more multicultural characters in my novels, because I realized that my daughter's generation is a lot more diverse than mine was, and even my own family has become more diverse. I want to write books where all these kids can see themselves. It's only fair.

But at the same time, I don't want to be eligible for a CSK award. It's to encourage blacks and minorities to write good books. These guys barely have market share as it is. Look at your bookshelf: how many of those books have been written by minorities? How does that stack up against the books written by white authors?

I've been trying for the last 15 minutes to dump the entire racefail argument into two sentences, so I'd better knock it off.

Melinda,

I was being snarky and unclear. I meant that there are people who want books THAT THEY DIDN'T WRITE THEMSELVES to be eligible. The desire for change isn't all coming from self-interest. There really are people who want to get certain books in front of kids and they know that wining the CSK award would help.

That said, if I could wave my wand and change the rules, it wouldn't be to admit non-black authors. It would be to celebrate all black authors and illustrators for their work regardless of the subject. But that's just me.

I understand the impulse to make the wheel a little rounder, but really, I am happy to celebrate what the Coretta Scott King Award has brought us.

Anon 3:43

Oops. That should be "winning the CSK."

"Wining the CSK" --- if only you were eligible you would take the committee out for drinks.

Anon 3:43

Cara Diletta,

si trova libri buoni a New York a Books of Wonder, a 18 W. 18th St., e a Banks Street Bookstore, a 610 W 112th St. Anche io raccomando Curious George Goes To Wordsworth a Boston. È un libreria con un nome strano, ma con un selezione buono. La indirizzo è 1 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA. C'è anche Children's Book Shop a 237 Washington St. a Brookline, un quartiere di Boston.

Benvenuto e buon viaggio!

The whole concept of who is eligible to write about what has always troubled me. I am a woman, yet I write mostly books about boys. Should I be ineligible to do so because of my gender? Somehow the boys I write for don't seem to object.

I wrote a book set in El Salvador, A Bear for Miguel. My editor loved it, but she said she knew she was going to have trouble getting it through acquisitions because of authenticity. How could I, as a while American (she had met me in person), be expected to be able to write about El Salvador? I mentioned that my father had come to America from El Salvador. She relaxed visibly and assured me that, in that case, it would be no problem. Yet I have never been to El Salvador myself. Did my father's experience make my book more authentic?

I believe that an important part of the writer's job is to put herself (or himself) into another person's or character's soul. If we do our job well, it should not be an issue of how authentic we are in terms of sharing the same ethnic heritage, gender, or religion. The sole issue should be how compelling and believable that character is, and whether the reader accepts that character as being truthful in his or her thinking and behavior.

I am finishing work on a nonfiction book about a Jewish man on trial for murder in 1913 Georgia, An Unspeakable Crime. I am not Jewish, I am not a man, and I've only been to Georgia twice, but I do not think this makes me unfit for the job of writing this book, nor should it make the book ineligible for attention from Jewish, male or Georgia readers. Oh, wait - my mother was born in Georgia. Perhaps An Unspeakable Crime will be considered authentic thanks to her.

I think it's a mistake to think of the CSK Awards as meaning to provide any kind of rules in the who-can-write-what debates. Just as the Newbery was established to encourage more writers for adults to write for children, the CSK is designed to encourage black writers and illustrators to create books for children. More problematically, the CSK has the added requirement that such writers and illustrators only be encouraged, in this instance, to write about black subjects, which to my mind contradicts the criteria that winning books "promote understanding and appreciation of the culture of all peoples and their contribution to the realization of the American dream." Which ITSELF betrays a bias toward books about people. Thank goodness it doesn't seem to have stopped Donald Crews from illustrating trucks or Jerry Pinkney roosters!

I always look a bit askance at white authors writing about the black experience. And here's a question: how many black authors write about the white experience?

Oh that's an EASY question, Anonymous.

Not enough.

I really think the CSK awards were intended to encourage the publishing of books about the black experience by aunthentic voices. At the time of their origin there was a woeful lack of material. There still is. Having established a track record at doing one thing well, it seems NUTS to expect the award to do other things well. Other awards exist and their purpose is different. Roger if you think there should be an award that doesn't limit the subject matter for AA writers, then set it up. It's irritating to think that forty years down the pike we start criticizing an institution for not doing what we now htink it should do. Reminds me of those who think the Newbery should be popular. That's not the criteria, and it doesn't really matter what should be or shouldn't. My sister days, I'm not gonna should on myself today...