Mrs. Lumpee (I swear it’s a real name) was my eighth grade English teacher at Bowie Junior High School in Odessa, Texas.  I remember Mrs. Lumpee for several reasons. I have a yearbook with her name and picture.  She was a  tough, no-nonsense teacher.  However, the most important reason behind my ability to remember Janet Lumpee is because she was the first person who encouraged me in my dream of being a writer.  I’ve always wanted to be a writer, even as a child.  In junior high, I was shy, quiet, and always, always, always reading.  I loved British writers:  C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and later, Barbara Cartland, the Queen of British Romance.  A love of reading aside, I think, at the time, a part of me didn’t believe that my becoming a writer was possible.  I submitted an application for the junior high newspaper staff three years in a row and was denied each year.  Beyond that painful dismissal, however, was an innate understanding that, if there were no books featuring black characters, and no books written by black authors that were aimed toward my age group, it meant that I could not be a writer, no matter how much I wished to be one.  I don’t think I held this prohibitive belief in a blatant way.

As a young woman growing up, I really never even thought about reading books written by black authors.  I thought about why Cover Girl didn’t offer makeup in my skin tone (they still don’t).  I thought about why there were no black models in Seventeen Magazine (boy, has that changed!).  I thought a lot of things about race and culture, and why I, as a young, black woman, did not seem welcome in many instances.  Yet, here was Mrs. Lumpee looking at me and saying that I had talent.  She encouraged me to dream.  Mrs. Lumpee passed away in 2009. I honor her memory, because she, like so many educators, spend their days looking into the eyes of children and seeing a future that these children might not see for themselves.  Unfortunately, the efforts of Mrs. Lumpee, and others like her, are dismantled by systemic, institutionalized racism.  I went to junior high school in the late 70′s.  Yet, racism still prevents too many dreams from being realized.  You can talk all you want about people of color doing what they need to do to be successful, and you would be right.  However, institutions, especially venerable and celebrated institutions such as publishing, and other media, do not only act as reflectors of culture, they are creators of culture.  Many a black lawyer or doctor will tell you, if it wasn’t for the Cosby Show, they might not have pushed toward their personal dream.  A cursory, or even in-depth, look at the product of American media, including publishing, reveals a world that is determinedly homogeneous and white.  While right-wing, public policy makers bemoan the Latin Americanization of the United States, and while birthrates of non-white Americans continue to outstrip that of white Americans,  the American  media seem to want to anesthetize white Americans, alternately telling them that they will prevail against the browning of America, and that the browning of America is really just a  fantastic mistake by demographers.  1,000 years from now, when archaeologists study the America of today, what will they see in this culture, and in this determination of white America to ignore the others of us who live and work, and yes, dream alongside them?  When they make in-depth studies of marketing and see all the smiling whiteness and the, often negative, imagery used to portray non-whiteness, will they blame non-whites, or will they assume that the off-spring of the “greatest generation�