Using Diverse Books in the Classroom

I know it sounds cliché, but I was in Kansas, I was in Topeka, and it was an all white school, and the teacher said to me, well, we don’t get a lot of books about African Americans because we don’t have African Americans in our class, in our school.

I thought, are your kids always going to be here? I said, when your kids leave here and they come to New York City, I don’t want my child to be the first black person they ever encounter, because that’s gonna be way too foreign for them, so why don’t we start with the literature.

I think it’s important that if your school system is not racially or economically or diverse in terms of gender, that the books still reflect that because the kids need to meet people unlike themselves and find a place in those people and in the story where they are, they share a common ground.

Because it’s the beginning of the connection that literature’s trying to form, that education is trying to form. We’re trying to figure out how to connect with people and work together and make a better world. I mean that’s what education is, is about understanding, it’s about overcoming ignorance, it’s about overcoming intolerance and you now bigotry.

The more people know about other people, the less doubt there will be. I think that we have to constantly publish books that talk about that. There’s always going to be a need and I think now we have a lot of books and if you use a lot more books.

I think there is a need of getting more books out into the world and people realizing that this book about this gay white boy from California is very valid in my classroom because I don’t want my kids to grow up to beat up this boy. That kind of stuff is so important.

We still have a lot of issues of censoring, censorship, of books getting challenged, of parents thinking they know what the book’s about by reading the flap copy and deciding that’s enough and not allow their kids to read the book. We’re still living a time of fear and censorship which is heartbreaking.

I see teachers using my books in the classroom to introduce historical figures or historical events to their students so my books can be the jumping off point. For example, Birmingham, 1963 might be the jumping off point for a discussion of the Civil Rights Movement. My poems have such a powerful punch that they automatically make kids want to know more.

They want to know, first of all, did this really happen, because today’s kids can’t fathom things like segregation. They can’t believe that America allowed such a system to exist, and rightly so. I’m glad they can’t believe it because it was ludicrous.

Once they read my books, they can then begin to read maybe longer works, novels, for example, chapter books set during the same time or they might do research projects or just social studies, just the social studies core area about the Civil Rights Movement or about segregation or the slavery era and other periods and people that I write about.