{"id":14505,"date":"2016-03-16T08:30:04","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T12:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=14505"},"modified":"2016-03-16T08:30:04","modified_gmt":"2016-03-16T12:30:04","slug":"is-it-time-for-a-new-incarnation-of-the-diversity-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=14505","title":{"rendered":"Is It Time for a New Incarnation of the Diversity Database?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In 2009, I began maintaining a list of children’s books featuring main characters of color with stories that were not<\/em><\/strong> primarily about racial issues. I was looking for books where fully realized individual characters led the action in stories that ranged from mysteries, fantasies, and adventures to friendship and family stories. I\u00a0wanted\u00a0to find a broader range of books in which contemporary young readers might see themselves and their friends’ lives reflected, accepted, celebrated as mainstage actors.\u00a0These stories certainly might include thoughts or questions about identity and culture, but were not driven by them. To date, this World Full of Color database<\/a> has 1,275 titles.
\nBut because of my criteria,\u00a0my diversity database necessarily excludes hundreds of fantastic books where the plots are<\/strong> driven by issues of race. I grieve these omissions and wonder what to do about them. They are often some of the best written, most powerful and important books to arise from our literature, and I find myself\u00a0unhappy about their exclusion from the database.
\n
\nI feel good about the database. It came about as a result of some discussions with various friends, authors, and artists. During one of these conversations, my friend and colleague, Christine Taylor-Butler, heaved a huge sigh. “If I have to give my girls one<\/em>. more<\/em>. story<\/em> about civil rights or slavery, I will scream.” Christine and her daughters are African-American, and while she would be the first person to say how vital it is to know your history and honor your peoples’ past and ongoing struggles, she is also tired of her daughters being overwhelmed with stories of adversity, pain, cruelty, and struggle. Where are the books featuring kids who look like her girls, that are lighthearted or funny or romantic of full of mystery and adventure and fantasy? They have a right to escape reading, too, to be heroines of stories where they can just BE. Sometimes readers\u00a0want a vacation from their\u00a0own experience of otherness.
\nBecause of our field’s sorry history of prioritizing stories featuring white characters, we created a world where books with brown faces on the covers signaled heavy topics and serious issues. Those serious books themselves are not the problem, of course; many of them were the most formative, powerful books of my own childhood, helping to develop\u00a0my social consciousness and spark\u00a0empathy, understanding, curiosity, compassion, kinship. We still need those books. Our divided country NEEDS those books. And it is ignorant to think that the experience of being a child of color in this country is ever divorced from\u00a0issues of race or ethnicity or culture. That is an inevitable part of growing up brown in America.<\/span>
\nSo it feels … incomplete, wrong, a disservice …\u00a0to maintain a diversity database where a book like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry<\/em> can’t be included, where many books by\u00a0luminaries in\u00a0our field like Julius Lester and Jacqueline Woodson are excluded. What kind of diversity database is that?! And yet, the database is used by hundreds of parents and teachers in search of books that meet the criteria I originally set. Diversity in\u00a0publishing hasn’t yet caught up to the culture, and so there is still a great need to find and feature\u00a0picture books, early readers, chapter books, middle grade, and teen\/YA titles where brown kids are the stars of the show in mainstream stories.
\nSo what to do?
\nLibraryThing.com, the host of the database<\/a>, allows people to create “collections” within their libraries. I’ve thought of creating a collection titled something like, “Diverse books in which race IS the driving force of the story” — pithier suggestions welcome — or creating an entirely new database combining all of the titles to create\u00a0a fabulous collection of books featuring main characters of color. Period.
\nWhat do you think? I would love your\u00a0thoughts and\u00a0suggestions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seven years after creating a diversity database, I’m chafing at its restrictions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}