Tags
brown girl dreaming, Children's Literature, Daniel Handler, Jacqueline Woodson, literature, Nancy Larrick, National Book Award, National Book Award ceremony, YA, Young Adult Fiction
Timing is everything. Most stories have a two-week expiration date, as I have learned, which means when you pitch a piece, the clock is ticking. The NYT says if you haven’t heard back from them in three days, it’s probably a ‘no.’ That’s fairly humane. Others can take much longer; and some don’t reply at all, which means by the time you don’t hear back, the window has closed. In many ways, the academy has prepared me for this uneven level of wide-scale rejection.
What happens to those rejected pieces that are au courant and cannot be refreshed with a new lede, headline, or timely news hook? That’s the question I asked myself when a recent piece I wrote about racism, children’s literature, and YA, involving Daniel Handler’s cruel remarks during the National Book Award ceremony, failed to find a home.
My trenchant critique of ongoing racism in children’s literature was deemed “too far in the weeds” by one major news outlet, which I initially thought meant too political or academic. Turns out, it meant something else entirely.
I also learned that once Jacqueline Woodson offered her response in the NYT, the story was over because she had the last word, and what a beautifully elegant and thoughtful word it was.
I was also told that Handler deserved no more news time for his casual racism issued through micro-aggressions. And I agree.
For all of these reasons I understand the story is dead. And yet . . . we cannot place boundaries around racism and its legacy because it’s no longer news worthy. As long as there is racism it should always be newsworthy until it is eradicated or becomes an outmoded idea that we are embarrassed to remember and committed to never repeating.
I have decided to publish the orphan piece here because I want my students to know that I was moved to participate in a conversation about a systemic problem, that I attempted to apply what we discussed in the classroom to the ‘real world,’ and that what we do and say can matter, even if no one wants to hear.
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Handler’s Remarks Reveal Larger Problems in YA
Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Nancy Larrick’s now-famous piece ‘The All-White World of Children’s Books.’
In 1965, Larrick, a children’s education advocate and former President of the International Reading Association, reported that ‘Over a three-year period, only four-fifths of one percent of the children’s trade books from sixty-three publishers’ told contemporary stories about African Americans.
Larrick, who passed away in November 2004, argued that substantive representation of Blacks in children’s literature was important not simply for Black children, but for whites as well. ‘There seems little chance of developing the humility so urgently needed for world cooperation, instead of world conflict, as long as our children are brought up on gentle doses of racism through their books.’
Unfortunately, not much has changed in the past five decades. Given the racial politics of the publishing industry, where 93 percent of all youth books are about white children, and the scarcity of diverse voices in children’s literature, Jacqueline Woodson’s National Book Award is a monumental achievement.
Her poetry memoir brown girl dreaming, which won the 2014 Young People’s Literature Award, celebrates the endurance of the human spirit as it documents the adversity her family faced spanning from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement up to the 1970s.
Daniel Handler, best selling author of Lemony Snicket fame who has sold more than 60 million books worldwide, served as the host of the award ceremony. What should have been a celebration was overshadowed by Handler’s joke about the irony of Woodson’s watermelon allergy.
The use of an old racial trope was one of a series of comments targeting African Americans that Handler made throughout the evening. Others included a remark about ‘probable cause’ in regard to two African American nominees in the same category and Handler’s expressed desire to someday win a Coretta Scott King Book Award, a prize reserved for African American authors and illustrators of children and young adult books.
While Handler initially only admitted to ‘ill-conceived attempts at humor,’ he later conceded that his comments were racist and made the decision to donate money to #WeNeedDiverseBooks, a grassroots organization that seeks to ‘increase visibility for diverse books and authors.’ Supporting charities and encouraging others to do the same are worthwhile endeavors, but they do nothing to address Handler’s casual racism.
In her eloquent, wrenching, and informative response to the series of unfortunate events, Woodson states that she is motivated ‘to write stories that have been historically absent in this country’s body of literature, to create mirrors for the people who so rarely see themselves inside contemporary fiction, and windows for those who think we are no more than the stereotypes they’re so afraid of.’
Over the last three years, I have taught a university course called Young Adult: Fiction and Film. Although technically an author of young reader, rather than young adult, fiction, Handler and his work have been the subject of class discussions about topics ranging from the suffering of children as a consumable product to most recently the announcement that Netflix plans to produce an original series based on the famed Snicket books. The course encourages students to see favorite stories and authors from their childhood in a new light. Handler’s recent remarks have certainly given us an additional opportunity to do so. Students have discovered an incredibly homogenous world, where white children, like Handler’s Baudelaire orphans, are heroes and agents of change; whereas people of color either do not exist, are confined to the background, or their sole purpose for inclusion is to help the heroes and heroines achieve their goals.
One holiday season, as my young son and I discussed our gift lists, he offered to give me a hint about one of my presents. I was more curious about what kind of clue a preschooler would provide than about the gift, so I agreed.
After some thought, he offered, ‘It rhymes with Pemony Micket.’ This year when he asked if the 2014 Lemony Snicket book Shouldn’t You Be in School? would be on my Christmas list, I said ‘no’ and had to explain why.
While Handler’s racism in ‘gentle doses’ is inexcusable, it has cast a much-needed public light on the lack of diversity in the youth and young adult book market and publishing.
What was true almost 50 years ago is still true today. As Larrick asserted in her conclusion, ‘White supremacy in children’s literature will be abolished when authors, editors, publishers, and booksellers decide that they need not submit to bigots.’ Handler’s comments brought forth the specter of that legacy to demonstrate, unequivocally, that the industry is still submitting, willingly.