At the end of 2024, according to my Goodreads report, I read (and blogged) about 63 books or 19, 661 pages worth of text. Granted I borrowed a lot more audiobooks from my local library, but they all followed my parameters: YA, and mostly non-white authors.
What my data did not show was that 84% of the 63 books I read were written by non-white authors. It is not as important to me if the non-white authors are black, asian, indigenous, hispanic, or middle eastern. They just need to be not white.
Why?
In 1992, I was a 24 year old first year high school English teacher. I was given two textbooks. A Warner's grammar book and a thick American literature textbook that started chronologically with the puritans. Think Anne Bradstreet and Rev. Jonathan Edwardsʻ "Sinners in the hands of an angry God." Besides a brand new teacher, I was a mother of 2 and a published poet writing mostly in Hawaiian creole, or what we called pidgin English. These textbooks were not interesting to me. I felt like I too was American. I was searching for my students mirrored in the literature that I was offering to them.
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop of The Ohio State University wrote her essay on "mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors," in 1990, but I would not know about her work for another twenty years. On a little island in the middle of the Pacific, I just had my gut instinct to know that literature, chosen correctly, could uplift my students by showing them their gifts, their identity and their power. They would get the white authors with the other English teachers. But when they had me, for American literature, we read Cisneros, Morrison, Baldwin, Hughes, Hong Kingston, Walter Dean Myers, Lois Ann Yamanaka, Eric Chock, Juliet Kono, Wing Tek Lum, Joe Balaz.
I sometimes worried that when my AP summer reading list went out, I would get a call from an irate parent, or an irate principal regarding some of my choices. I never did. But one alum, a brilliant future lawyer, came back after high school and told me that what she appreciated was the very interesting literature that I had them read. For her year, it was Bluest Eye and Their Eyes Were Watching God. She said she did not read that kind of literature again until college.
What I learned from that encounter was to stick to my instincts. It was to use literature as weapons and journey markers and safe havens. For me that can only happen with diverse books. As much as I loved fantasy books with Tolkien as my north star, fantasy as a genre was so white, until recently. Thank you authors and thank you Rick Riordan for opening the door for non white authors who have changed the fantasy genre by using cultural folk tales as the foundation for new literature.
My proudest moment this year as a mama of English teachers was when I accompanied some of my alum to the ALAN workshop and got to see their joy as they opened up their box of books. But the true moment of pride came when I realized that these teachers, all non white, all working in native Hawaiian communities, were really listening to my stories about diverse books and not standing in line for free books from white authors. Ang, in his first year of teaching, figured out the padlet trading app and traded his non white authors for diverse authors. He got the message and he is passing it on in his classroom.
So this year, my aim is to continue to read, blog, and pass on the books to my English teachers. That is not different. But my aim is also to up my % of non white books to 90%.
Cheers to diverse books!
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