the universe of books

I’m still reeling a bit from yesterday’s great news.  Because Shadra won the John Steptoe Award for New Talent, there’s a good chance that more libraries will acquire our book.  And with Black History Month on the horizon, many book stores and schools will be scrambling to assemble a collection of black-oriented books to display.  But February is the shortest month of the year, and books like ours can teach and delight children ALL year round!  As I’ve mentioned before, having a black child on the cover of a book sometimes misleads people.  I liken it to the way race functions in advertising.  If there’s a black child on a box of cereal, quite often consumers (of all races) will assume that that product is only FOR black children.  Yet a white child on a box of cereal indicates that the cereal is for everyone.  Whiteness represents the universal, while blackness–historically–has represented only the specific experiences or needs of that group.  There are exceptions, of course–a black celebrity can “cross over” and no longer seem bound to his/her racial group (Michael Jordan on a box of Wheaties).  We see this happening now with our new president: a beautiful, loving black family is now THE first family, the unit that embodies America and its values.  That has NEVER happened before.  We also see a shift in advertising–more actors of color advertising products meant for universal use (banks, cars) and not only to sell cleaning products (which invokes the history of black women as “domestic experts,” read: maids).  All this is to say that people’s perceptions are slowly starting to change, I think.  I hope!  I got a touching email the other day from a boy in Ontario; he’s white, and he wanted me to know that BIRD really meant a lot to him because his father’s struggling with addiction and is no longer with the family.  The book was given to him by my friend Jason, who is black.  Jason’s going to try to get BIRD into the local library, because he sees that it’s needed in that mostly white community.  Addiction isn’t something that only plagues “the inner city.”  It’s not something that only afflicts people of color.  And just because there’s a black child on the cover, and a black family featured within, doesn’t mean the book doesn’t have universal value or only warrants being displayed in February.  Check out this website if you haven’t already: White Readers Meet Black Authors.  They describe their mission as a “sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted plea for EVERYBODY to give a black writer a try.”  To that end, guest blogger Doret Canton (the Happy Nappy Bookseller!) has launched a giveaway for bloggers who are willing to step outside their comfort zone and review a black-authored book they may previously have considered unappealing or irrelevant to their online audience.  We all look at certain books and think to ourselves, “Oh, that’s not for me.”  But what might happen if you picked it up anyway, read it, enjoyed it, and gifted it to a friend?  I do hope more readers–children, parents, teachers, librarians, book buyers–will embrace this new era and test the water we black authors tread every day…