"The “diverse” books making it to the shelves aren’t very diverse at all. With few exceptions, the same stories are being told again and again, fed to children like some bowl of dry, lumpy oatmeal with just a sprinkle of brown sugar to make it go down a little easier.
The typical children’s picture books featuring black characters focus on the degradation and endurance of our people. You can fill nearly half the bookshelves in the Schomburg with children’s books about the civil rights movement, slavery, basketball players and musicians, and various “firsts.” These stories consistently paint African-Americans as the aggrieved and the conquerors, the agitators and the superheroes who fought for their right to be recognized as full human beings.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate those kinds of books; our history deserves an airing with all children. But I’m not trying to have my kid float off into dreamland with visions of helping runaway slaves to freedom, or marching through a parade of barking dogs and fire hoses, or the subject matter of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” — yes, there is a children’s book devoted to this song protesting lynching.
Meanwhile, stories about the everyday beauty of being a little human being of color are scarce."
! yes! When I was little, I was turned off by a book if there was a black person on the cover because I knew it was going to be boring. I knew what the plot was going to be, what the lesson was going to be, and I knew that it wasn't going to be joyful or fantastical like my other books.
And I think that contributed to my childhood desire to distance myself from blackness; as one of very, very few black families in my community, my primary exposure to other black people was through these kinds of books and I learned that black people were boring and struggling and stressful. If I wanted to access the depth and breadth of human experience that was reflected in my other books, I couldn't let myself be black.
It was the same thing with TV episodes that featured black people; outside of the Cosby Show, maybe the Pride Family, all of the shows I watched when I was growing up had mostly white casts and if a black person showed up it was going to be a boring, stressful plot.
I realize now that most of these books and TV shows were written by white people, for a white audience, and that is why they fundamentally didn't serve me. But at the time, it genuinely turned into years of my childhood avoiding content that included people who looked like me, because the lesson that media taught me was that my blackness condemned me to a sad and limited human experience.
FB: so important. Seriously, this is how I learned that race/blackness was boring and terrible and I wanted to avoid it. "Regardless of what the publishing industry seems to think, our babies don’t spend their days thinking about Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and black bodies swinging; they’re excited about what the tooth fairy will leave under their pillows, contemplating their first ride on the school bus, looking for dragons in their closets."
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