Spouting Off While White

I was just getting ready to turn in last night when I began to see a new fury erupt on Twitter. First there were subtweets flying back and forth among people I follow. Apparently some unnamed author had made a comment saying we don't need diverse books because kids of color can find themselves in newspapers, on television, and in movies. It was such a bizarre statement that I wanted to know where it came from. I needed context.

Unfortunately, many people were complaining but they weren't naming names or providing links.

But my Twitter feed was lighting up with outrage. I noticed a reference to queer Black boys, and knowing how few children's or young adult books are out there about queer Black boys,  I figured the anonymous author who started it all must have been referring to a new picture book called Large Fears by Myles E. Johnson and Kendrick Daye. It had been featured on Huffington Post a few days before in an article called "This Book Is Creating a Space for Queer Black Boys."  I had found out about the book from Edi Campbell, who had posted a link to the Huff Po article on Facebook.

And sure enough, a few minutes later, a link came up from Edi's Twitter account that referred to a blog post she had just made in response to the author who had made the outrageous claim. And Edi had the courage to name her by including a screen shot of the Facebook post that started it all.

It was Printz Award winner Meg Rosoff who had made the comment. Her claims are ridiculous, showing just how out of touch she is with children's and young adult literature. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that there are not  "hundreds and ... thousands" of books about kids of color, certainly not Black boys, and even less so about queer Black boys. In fact, the only one I can think of Finlater by Shawn Stewart Ruff. And now, of course, Large Fears.  Both books were self-published. What does this say about there being space for queer Black boys in the book industry?

So what Rosoff must really be saying is that "marginalized young people," including queer Black boys, should find themselves in White narratives. That is the epitomy of White privilege -- the notion that White perspectives are not only universal but should be. And she makes it even worse when she goes on to suggest that if queer Black boys want a mirror, they should turn to newspapers, magazines, and movies. Where... what? They'll see themselves bullied and brutalized at school? They'll see other Black boys being shot and killed by policemen? They'll see ordinary young Black men getting killed on the streets?  Has Meg Rosoff  been keeping up with current events?

Thanks to Edi Campbell for being courageous enough to name names in her swift response. And to author Justine Larbalestier, too, for calling out a fellow White author on Twitter. And to Ceilidh, co-editor of Bibliodaze, for responding this morning with her essay "The Unbearable Whiteness of Meg Rosoff." And to Debbie Reese for keeping us all up to date with the latest developments.

I wish I could say this was an isolated case, but it isn't. There are plenty of White authors, teachers, and librarians out there who spout off like this in private or even in public when there are only other White people around. It's time for White people to stand up to them whenever we hear comments like this -- not to shut them down necessarily but to engage them in discourse. They may not be open to listening, but there are likely others in the group who will be.

Meg Rosoff don't need our protection. She needs to be challenged, as editor Laura Atkins did so well in the Facebook exchange shown above.  Too often we are willing to allow bigots to remain anonymous, or to write such comments off with "Well, you're entitled to your point of view." And that's that. Let's move on to talk about something else.

No, let's not change the topic. Let's talk about this now. And let's keep talking about it until there are so many books about queer Black boys that such conversations become unnecessary.

Update: Check out these great open letters to Meg Rosoff from Linda Sue Park, Kaye, and  Sarah Hannah Gomez. And this insightful essay from Camryn Garrett.
Also, Edi has made the whole ongoing Facebook post that started it all public. 

Reviewing While White: Jump Back, Paul

Welcome to “Reviewing While White,” an occasional series of reviews by our core contributors.  Some of our reviews will seek to spotlight positive examples of books to which we wish to draw attention. In the spirit of Debbie Reese’s charge, others will criticize books which we believe perpetuate White dominance.

All Reading While White core contributors stand behind the reviews published under the Reading While White byline. Reviews reflect our individual positions, not those of our employer, or other reviewing bodies or committees to which we contribute. 

by Nina Lindsay

I have not read much of, or about, Paul Laurence Dunbar.  So when I received Jump Back, Paul: the Life and Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Sally Derby, with illustrations by Sean Qualls, published by Candlewick Press, I dug right in.   

The biographical narrative (interspersed with Dunbar’s poems) is presented by a fictional narrator in a “Grandma” voice, which felt awkward to me at first, though I tried to go with it, noting that Derby cites this voice as the inspiration that shaped the narrative.  Derby grew up in Dunbar’s home town of Dayton Ohio, had a lifelong admiration for him, and expresses the hope that her book “will restore some of the recognition Dunbar deserves,”  while acknowledging “it is always somewhat risky to write about someone whose culture is not your own.” (p.119)   

I moved ahead, marking questions about where Derby was heading with her arguments, so that I could check back at the end to see if they were resolved.  But then I read, on page 10, in regards to rough treatment from Paul’s father Joshua: “It wasn’t like Joshua was heartless. I’m not excusing the beating, but life had treated Joshua rough.  Raised a slave, how could he know what family life could be like?”  In case you didn’t catch the microaggression: in that last sentence, whether intended consciously or not, Derby suggests that Black people born into slavery could have had no concept of family life.   

Sucker-punched, I read on through to the end, marking even more questions for follow up, and finding none of them answered in Derby’s text or aftermatter. So I gave myself a mini crash-course in Dunbar, reading through the sources that Derby indicates she consulted the most. I was surprised to feel I was reading about a completely different Dunbar than the one Derby presented.   

Dunbar was born in 1872, to parents who were formerly enslaved.  Derby relates his parents’ story and his early life. “His mama, now, she liked telling about life in the slave cabins--everyday goings-on, especially the funny ones. Even when Paul was grown, he liked to listen to old folks talking about their lives, and sometimes he’d turn their memories into poems.”  (p.4) This becomes an opportunity to share some of Dunbar’s famous poetry in dialect.  But by repeatedly interspersing these with stories of his childhood, drawing direct comparisons with the subject matter, and including suggestions such as “If you’re wondering what it was like growing up back then [during Paul’s childhood], you read Paul’s stories and poems, you’ll get a  good idea,” (p.15)  Derby lays a misleading suggestion that the experience of these poems came from Paul’s own childhood, rather than from stories told to him.  Paul’s childhood was a generation removed from the childhoods presented in his dialect poems, and it was a crucial generation, as it spanned Emancipation.

She moves on through his youth and young career to his success as a poet, and continues to include his poems both in dialect and in “formal” English. The difference in the reception of these two styles is the central argument of Dunbar’s work. His poetry in dialect (and his Broadway minstrel writing) was what made him famous in the White literary establishment, and this was a topic of debate among his peers, yet Derby only brings it up, late in the narrative, as a point of contention between Dunbar and his wife Alice (p.88-89), almost entirely avoiding it, and certainly marginalizing its prominence in his career. Why?

In her author’s note, she speaks to the Grandma voice that inspired her, and talks of how she argued with this voice. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know what to write here. Some experts think one thing and some think another.’ And she’d answer impatiently, ‘Those people wrote their own books. This one’s yours. You need to write what you think.’  So that’s what I did. With Grandma’s help.” (p.104)  Yet we’re never clear on what Derby thinks about Dunbar.  She doesn’t offer much in explanation of his poems, as if intending for Dunbar’s work to speak for itself.  In Chapter 6 she starts to get into Dunbar’s political commentary, and then excuses herself at the start of Chapter 7 “There, now, I guess I strayed away from my story a little bit, didn’t I?” (p.79).  In other words, his political views are not central to understanding him, in her estimation.

On page 98, Derby’s “Grandma” says, regarding Dunbar’s famous line “I know why the caged bird sings”: “You don’t have to be black to understand the longing in that poem, to feel its sadness.” (p.98).   Here Derby seems to be justifying herself, acknowledging that she can appreciate and understand Dunbar even though she’s White.  Does she also realize the many microaggressions that reverberate from this statement, stripping the very importance of Blackness from the appreciation of Dunbar’s poems?  Did she consider what a Black child reading this line would hear?

It’s as if Derby is hiding behind a fictional voice she hopes will lend credence to avoid writing about what she doesn’t want to touch. She avoids the uncomfortable questions regarding race, class, and White privilege in the literary establishment that were central to Dunbar’s story as a writer, and are not inaccessible to a young reader. We are left with what feels like a “White polite” version of Dunbar. That this was clearly thoroughly researched and painstakingly written, and that Derby clearly admires her subject, makes the whole endeavor even more frustrating to read.

Presenting While White

--by Angie Manfredi

For an extrovert like me, there is nothing quite like standing in front of a group of your peers and colleagues and presenting information.  Ever since I have been in library services, back to when I was a paraprofessional without a college degree, I have loved presenting and sharing information at workshops and conferences. Hard to believe, but I have been presenting for fourteen years.  I hope that over that time I have helped others learn and grow.  I know that, as a presenter, I am constantly learning and challenging myself.  I want to be better.  I want to be engaging.  I want to be constantly innovating.  

A few weeks ago, I traveled up to Wyoming to present at the Mountain Plains Library Association/Wyoming Library Association Conference.  (I have a personal goal to present at every state and Cheyenne is only a day’s drive from my home.) One of my presentations was about the We Need Diverse Books Campaign - helping recommend titles for librarians to add to their libraries.  But I also wanted to take this presentation to the next level and discuss what I feel is a fundamental duty for librarians and educators: demanding more from the literature we put on our shelves and asking hard questions about it.

I expected a few things out of this presentation.  I expected that my audience would be largely White and that turned out to be true.  I expected that the conversation would make some people uncomfortable, both in the books I was presenting and the statistics I was sharing.  I anticipated this and addressed it directly with my audience. Sure enough, I could see many people averting their eyes from my gaze and shifting in their seats.  At times, the discomfort in the room was almost palpable.

And, to be frank, I expected that there would be some people who walked out. That happened all right - but it happened at a rate I didn’t expect.  In all my years presenting I have never had as many people walk out as walked out during this presentation. I started with a room of about 30 people and by the time it was over, about half the crowd had walked out.  It was a distinctly jarring experience to watch so many people stream out of the room as I talked for two hours. I know that some of the people who walked out were tired of the conference (it was the last session) or just didn’t like my style of presentation.  There are always reasons for people to walk out and they always do.  But the sheer number of people in a mostly White crowd who walked out combined with the palpable discomfort in the room - what happened in that room was something bigger than the usual walk-outs.

It was the big, White elephant in the room - the unspoken and uncomfortable truth so many of librarians and educators live with.  There are more children’s books about elephants than there are children of color.  We all know this.  How can you not know this if you select children’s materials or if you work with them?  Surely you’ve noticed there are more books about teens with terminal illnesses than books about Muslim teens. We know it. We just pretend we don’t.  I, personally, am done with pretending.  

I have decided that I will start taking accountability for my Whiteness..  And one way I will do that is by using the opportunities I have to speak the truth.  If this means that half of the crowds I’m presenting in front of walk out, I can live with that.  I will talk about race and racism in our industry, I will call on other White people to do the same and to be accountable for their privileges and their mistakes  I will try to connect with and boost the voices of my peers of color and I will let them know that their voices count and they are not alone. As much as anything, this was my goal with my presentation at Mountain Plains Library Association/Wyoming Library Association Conference.  It was hard to see people walk out.  But it was also incredibly rewarding to have conversations with my peers of color afterwards and to see that I was getting through to some White people in the room, who were writing down my suggestions and nodding in agreement.

And maybe, just maybe, I gave the people who walked out a few things to think about.  Maybe they took one thing I said and it’s starting a thought inside them that will be hard to shake the next time they see another elephant book.  

I am here to have the hard conversations.  Are you?

Not a Contradiction

All of us working on Reading While White are active believers in and promoters of intellectual freedom. And none of us find it contradictory to suggest that librarians think about stereotyping and bias when they are doing the hard, essential work of collection management.

Because here’s the thing: for too long, selection decisions have been made with too little regard, and sometimes no regard, for stereotyping and bias. How do we begin to respond to that? How do we take responsibility for educating ourselves as a profession and as individuals to think critically about that aspect of the work we do in regard to book evaluation and collection management decisions?

There are a lot of things we can do, but one thing we must do is include statements in our professional guidelines that encourage and even demand we consider stereotyping and bias as part of what we look at when evaluating materials and making collection decisions. This is part of the broader framework of challenging racism across all aspects of our profession.

Will we eradicate stereotyping and bias in our collections if we do this?  Of course not. Will we be snatching books out of young reader’s hands? Please. Every librarian knows that collection development and weeding decisions are made taking multiple factors into account. Every librarian knows the collection they are managing is going to have things they and/or others find objectionable.

But every librarian charged with collection management also has a responsibility to evaluate and select materials and assess the collection thoughtfully, usually according to specific criteria outlined in their library (or school) policies and procedures. When we as a profession incorporate language that encourages us to consider stereotyping and bias as part of our decision-making, it does not suggest specific kinds of books be excluded. It simply codifies a criteria that will make us more responsible and responsive to everyone in the communities that we serve.

Acting on that responsibility demands more of us, as individuals and as a profession.  Where are we turning to for professional recommendations? Are those resources culturally competent? If they aren’t where else can we turn to find out more?

None of this is necessarily easy; not for the individual librarian making collection management decisions; not for reviewers and review journals, not for many award- and best-of-the-year list committees and others. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing to do. More important, it’s the necessary thing to do.