For a really long time, nearly all books were written by white men, or white women who were pretending to be white men. Eventually things opened up a bit and it became acceptable for women to write books, especially children's books. Still, the overwhelming majority of these writers were white.
Even now that publishing is making moves to put out more books by diverse writers, there's still pushback. Recently, Newbery Award winner Jerry Craft was uninvited from a school because someone decided that his book New Kid, which tells the story of a Black boy at a mostly white private school, teaches critical race theory. Think about that. The very fact that a book chronicles the experiences of a Black boy makes it offensive.
A library system is currently the subject of community protest and demands that its funding be revoked after it shared a Facebook post publicizing its LGBTQIA+ children's collection. If parents don't want their kids to read books with queer content that's one thing. I think it's unfortunate, but it's not my job to control the choices of other parents. But attempting to push their views on a library system and get its funding pulled is another thing altogether.
Even when there's no protest around books by BIPOC and queer writers and about BIPOC and queer kids, too many people often assume that those books are only for kids who identify with those groups. Librarians and teachers might recommend New Kid to Black students but not to white students. Or if they know one of their students identifies as nonbinary they might point them to a book about a nonbinary kid. But if a kid is cisgender, why would they need to read that book?
I'll tell you why. Because books don't need to only serve as mirrors. There still aren't nearly enough, but there are more and more books being published starring the kinds of kids who didn't see themselves in books for most of history. But even white, abled, cishet kids need to read books by kids who are different from them. Because the more we read about people different from us, the more likely we are to accept them.
I only lightly police what my 10yo daughter reads. She's not ready for heavy romance or violence, for instance, so I won't let her read The Hunger Games even though she has friends who has read it. But she's read a lot of books (including New Kid) that feature kids who are different from her. Black kids, queer kids, poor kids, immigrant kids. I could go on. This has given her an understanding that not everyone is like her and that's okay. When a teen from our church came out as nonbinary this year, my daughter didn't bat an eye. She doesn't have any peers that identify as nonbinary, but she was familiar with the concept because she'd read about it.
I'm excited about new books coming out that will continue to expand the number of kids who can see themselves in books as in a mirror and the number of kids who can look through a window at someone who's different from them and recognize that they might not be that different after all.
Just for fun, I'll end with a couple pictures. I recently rearranged my bookshelves. I'd been putting books in randomly wherever I could cram them in. The end result was that I might have to visit four different bookcases and two different floors of my house to find all the books in a single series. Now the books are categorized (but not alphabetized, that's way too much order for my ADHD brain) and all the series books are back with their friends.
I knew middle grade fantasy was my greatest love, but I didn't know just how much it outweighed all the other books I own. The two pictures below show my three shelves worth. Poor MG contemporary only takes up part of one shelf. And mystery is a lonely four book collection. All of middle grade fares better than adult, however. In all categories that takes up exactly two shelves. You might look at my shelves and think I'm a parent of voracious readers, but, no, I'm just a middle grade writer.
