The Diversity Discussion

Now and then I get asked to talk to about the need for diversity in young adult literature. These days, when the need for diverse books is being so prominently discussed, I have tried to understand why these talks are so hard for me. I have the sense when I show up that there’s nothing new I can say. Doesn’t everyone already know how vital is to for a young person to see him/herself in the books he/she reads? Isn’t it obvious how much we need all young persons to see how we are all the same deep down? Surely, everyone understands how empathy, how living in the mind and life of another, destroys racial and ethnic stereotypes. What more is there to say about the need for diverse books? So I talk about my birth in Mexico, my crossing to the United States when I was nine, my growing up in El Paso Texas, to explain why I naturally write about young Mexican-Americans. My characters are good role models, I think, despite (or because of) their human frailties. I’m sure their existence has helped kids, Latino and non-Latino, to understand themselves and others, but do I really have profess out loud that this is one of the reasons I write? Can I just say that I write about Latino kids because that’s what comes out? Ismael, Hector, Marcelo, Pancho, Vicky, they are just there, first as small seeds and then they grow slowly over the years in my mind and then they are born. I’m just the Stork here. I don’t create my characters. I simply deliver them. And sometimes, the characters that I deliver are white kids like D.Q. and Wendell and, I confess, I don’t do a lot of research about their culture to make sure I get them right.
These talks are so hard because there’s so much about what is being discussed that I don’t know. I’m just trying to write some stories. To a lot of the questions that I get at these talks I have to say, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Why aren’t there more books about and by Persons of Color being published? I don’t know. The literary agents and the publishers and editors I personally know all love good diverse books and they go out of their way to find them. Some of them, as was (and is) the case with me, are willing to spend the effort and time needed to develop a book with potential into a good book. Is it a question of money, then, as so many seem to say? POC books don’t sell. I don’t know. My wife had a group of her Wellesley College students over to the house for lunch and I asked them: Do you think the Harry Potter books would have been less popular if Harry had been a Person of Color? The white students mostly said no, the Latino kids said yes. I don’t know. And if J.K.Rowling decided to re-publish her series but this time Harry’s parents were African, what else would she need to change besides Harry’s skin color? His speech? The way he thinks? Would he still be brave? So much of the diversity discussion is, ironically, divisive. Us. Them. You can’t possibly understand. Ironic because what good literature does best is unite by revealing glimpses of the soul that is the same in all. In the end, it comes down to you and me. What can I do? What can you do so there are more good diverse books written and read? That’s what I end up saying at my diversity talks. What I Francisco Stork can do is try to write good books, try to write books that will last, try to write books with the kind of characters that come naturally to me, that are in me waiting to be born, try to write books that speak to all. I can encourage kids of color to work seriously, patiently, at the craft of writing. I can, time permitting, help young writers with their manuscripts. And maybe, I’m not sure about this at all, but maybe, I need to keep on talking to groups, hard as it is, about the need for diverse books.