Diversity has always been such an interesting topic to me.
I grew up (and still work) in a primarily Hispanic and African-American community. My friends were from all kinds of backgrounds. If you look at my senior prom group picture, you'll find white, Hispanic, African-American, Indian, Chinese, and Filipino girls. My group of friends that I hang with on the weekend are Japanese, Indian, Hispanic, Chinese and white. Diversity has been the norm for me.
But as a white person, I always saw people who look like me on TV, in the movies and on book covers. It was only when I started working as a librarian with a large minority population that I began to look at "diverse" literature. I noticed that so many books written about African-Americans focused on slavery or the civil rights movement. So many books about Hispanics were migrant stories. These books did not reflect the experiences of my students and, quite frankly, didn't appeal to them either.
At the 2014 Texas Library Association Conference, I moderated a panel called "People Who Look Like Me: Beyond Civil Rights and Migrants" with authors Alaya Dawn Johnson, Diana Lopez, and Jason Reynolds as well as 4 local teens. The conversation was wonderful. The authors shared how they write about diverse characters and stories. The teens made several eye-opening comments that gave us a great insight into what they are looking for. For instance, one teen mentioned that most books about Hispanic characters sound more like her mother and grandmother than her. Another teen preferred covers without pictures of the characters since they are often stereotypes and restrict her imagination. I've never had so many people come up to me after a program and tell me how much they enjoyed the conversation and wanted to hear more.
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| "People Who Look Like Me: Beyond Civil Rights and Migrants" panel at 2014 Texas Library Association Conference |
Why do we need diverse books?
Because everyone is different and we need to have conversations about our differences and find our similarities.
http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/
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