On the “Apartheid of Children’s Literature”
Christopher Myers writes wonderfully at the New York Times about “The Market” of children’s literature, in which, “of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people.”
“Who would stand in the way of such a thing?” I’ve asked this question of industry folks, of booksellers, of my father, who’s been fighting this battle since before I picked up my first words. The closest I can get to the orchestrator of the plot — my villain with his ferret — is The Market. Which I think is what they all point to because The Market is so comfortably intangible that no one is worried I will go knocking down any doors. The Market, I am told, just doesn’t demand this kind of book, doesn’t want book covers to look this or that way, and so the representative from (insert major bookselling company here) has asked that we have only text on the book cover because white kids won’t buy a book with a black kid on the cover — or so The Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way.
Myers calls this an “apartheid of literature, in which characters of color are limited to the townships of occasional historical books that concern themselves with the legacies of civil rights and slavery but are never given a pass card to traverse the lands of adventure, curiosity, imagination or personal growth,” and compares the current “mandates” to the long period where children’s literature feared the occult.
That is, until a number of years later, when a certain wizard came along, and vampires, witches, werewolves and Greek gods, and all manner of magical beings soon followed. Perhaps the wizard and all his supernatural kin were able to elude the dictates of The Market because they had magic wands and powers. Or perhaps the imagination of publishers, parents, teachers, editors, librarians and book buyers, these people who care so much for children and literature and believe in good stories told well, in cartographies that have no blind spots, was much more important, in the end, than that unwritten rule put forth by The Market, that backward segregated map that has led us to this dismal place.
Read the rest of Myers’ piece here.