Living in
New Orleans has exposed me to a lot of things I’ve never seen before. Some things are awesome, like crawfish boils.
Some things are confusing, like having the invasive Nutria serve as the mascot
for the minor league baseball team. Some things are just downright heartbreaking, like watching a policeman tiptoe around a
building with an AK-47 in full view of school students in the middle of the
day.
Things like
watching attempted raids of impoverished homes aren’t realities for many people
living in this city, but they are realities for me and for the community I
serve. And what’s disturbing is that as
much as I had heard about such things happening in this country, and as much as
I disapproved of them from afar, I didn’t let such violence and implied violence
get under my skin until I witnessed it myself.
Right now,
the NOLA YAVs are critically examining the role of race in this country.
We’ve been reading an outstanding book by
Michelle Alexander called
The New Jim Crow, which presents the idea that the mass incarceration being justified
by the war on drugs, is actually a means of further oppressing people of
color.
When you think about it, it makes
sense—folks who have been charged with a felony in this country, an alarming
percentage of whom are black men are, “subject to legalized discrimination in
employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as
their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were.” (Alexander)
Though this is difficult to digest, my
experiences are beginning to confirm it as truth.
As much as
we as a nation would like to believe and celebrate the idea of
“colorblindness”, it is still a Lie.
This year has shown me that in so many ways, but the most surprising
involves the publishing industry. Allow
me to explain.
Since I
love reading more than just about anything, since I taught Language Arts for a
few years, and since I noticed that the closest public library to my garden and
the surrounding neighborhood was nearly a mile and a half away (which might
sound close unless you think about living without a car and having to walk that
far for groceries and other services constantly anyway, and when you consider
that libraries deal in books, and books can be very heavy), I decided we should
install a Little Free Library at the Johnson Garden. With the help of my supervisors and a local
builder, we got a library built, registered, and ready to stock, which fell to
me.
I was
pumped to buy books, and only after filling my basket at a library book sale did
I notice that none of my choices featured any African-American characters. This is not to say that I assume that people
of color are only interested in reading about other people of color, but it is
more than a little stupid for a white girl to stock a library in a primarily
black neighborhood with books that only feature characters that look like her. So I looked again, and what I found was
disheartening.
Aside from
the more classic books by black authors, many of which are considered literature
as opposed to every-day pleasure reading, I found three books featuring black
characters. 3. Now, perhaps I’m just a hick, but I don’t always
reach for a Pulitzer Prize winning author when I want to relax and get lost in
a narrative—and I think that based on the success of folks like Janet Evanovich
and James Patterson, I’m not outside of the norm—but where are those authors,
narratives, and characters for people of color?
Who is the equivalent of Lee Childs or Danielle Steel in the black
community? Where are those books? I certainly couldn’t find them.
So I
decided to search the Internet, where I found a lot more than I’d bargained
for. Here are some of the highlights:
- A great article from Huffington Post, "50 Books That Every African American Should Read"; chock full of beach reads and
literature alike, and also sadly full of barbed comments directed at Huff Post
for having a “Black Voices” section of its website.
- An incredible TED talk on "The Danger of a Single Story" detailing how damaging it is for publishers to fail to
incorporate people of color in narrative texts, especially children’s books.
- The beginnings of a movement to encourage diversity
in publishing via Tumblr. Three different
meditations on that movement can be found here, here and here.
My findings
astonished me. I didn’t know that my
favorite pastime was tainted by the ugly realities I sometimes escaped by
engaging in it, and I had never been blessed to take on another
perspective. Sitting with the reality that
over half of the population of New Orleans is severely underrepresented in my
“safe” world of books is very difficult for me, but now I know. Which means that now I can do something about
it. I hope you’ll join me.
