![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Library Days
Jul. 18th, 2009 12:09 pmThe library has an outreach program to one of the local daycare centers, and yesterday I got to pick out the chapter books to send for the fourth through sixth graders.
Mostly this consisted of me careening around the children's section with my inner eleven year old unleashed. "Oh look! It's Matilda! And The Egypt Game, I absolutely have to pack The Egypt Game. And The Headless Cupid too. And the Time Warp Trio series! (Surely I wasn't the only one who read those? They were awesome.) And So You Want to Be a Wizard! Which is probably a little too old for them! But maybe there's a super smart twelve-year-old who will love it!"
By which point my cart was half full of books, and I stopped to take a breather and consider my selections and went, "My God, I've got a cart full of white people books."
Of course I went back to get more books by authors of color, but it was still disheartening. My selection criteria had been "Did I love this book as a child? Yes? Then IN IT GOES"; and when I was a kid I did read a lot of books by authors of color, so it wasn't that I didn't know about them. But apparently the only ones that stuck were Lensey Namioka's engagingly shallow samurai books and Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused, which was in the wrong age range anyway.
And it's exasperating, because I can read whatever I think I ought to, but I can't love something just because I think I should. There's this feeling - that I can try to be what I think is a better person, who reads books by everyone and anyone; but deep down, I am only ever going to be this parochial little girl who loves books by people just like her.
Mostly this consisted of me careening around the children's section with my inner eleven year old unleashed. "Oh look! It's Matilda! And The Egypt Game, I absolutely have to pack The Egypt Game. And The Headless Cupid too. And the Time Warp Trio series! (Surely I wasn't the only one who read those? They were awesome.) And So You Want to Be a Wizard! Which is probably a little too old for them! But maybe there's a super smart twelve-year-old who will love it!"
By which point my cart was half full of books, and I stopped to take a breather and consider my selections and went, "My God, I've got a cart full of white people books."
Of course I went back to get more books by authors of color, but it was still disheartening. My selection criteria had been "Did I love this book as a child? Yes? Then IN IT GOES"; and when I was a kid I did read a lot of books by authors of color, so it wasn't that I didn't know about them. But apparently the only ones that stuck were Lensey Namioka's engagingly shallow samurai books and Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused, which was in the wrong age range anyway.
And it's exasperating, because I can read whatever I think I ought to, but I can't love something just because I think I should. There's this feeling - that I can try to be what I think is a better person, who reads books by everyone and anyone; but deep down, I am only ever going to be this parochial little girl who loves books by people just like her.
