#WeNeedDiverseBooks

There are some givens in a school library: Guinness world records books and Garfield comic books will circulate until they fall to pieces. Second graders will want to read what their big brothers and sisters are reading, even when those books are really aimed at older readers. Kindergarten girls will want Cinderella books and they don't mean Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters.

Wait. What?

Yes, John Steptoe's stunning, award-winning book, which retells a Cinderella-variant from the Shona people, is just not attractive to young girls. Year after year, we look at which books didn't circulate, evaluating for whether to weed them from the collection, and way too often they are the books with people of color on the cover. The need for children to see themselves in books, in movies, on television, in video games is no longer debated, although the need is still acute. Christopher Myers writes in the New York Times, it is not so much mirrors, as maps. "They are indeed searching for their place in the world, but they are also deciding where they want to go. They create, through the stories they’re given, an atlas of their world, of their relationships to others, of their possible destinations."

But here’s the thing. White kids need diverse books too. When statistics show that whether one believes the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson was race-based is likely to depend on whether you are white or black; when in 2008 some white conservatives stated that Michelle Obama didn’t “look like a First Lady”; when there continue to be disproportionate rates of black suspensions in school, black incarceration in prison, black foreclosures in the housing market -- this simple fact becomes very clear: white and brown kids, male and female and transgender kids, Christian and Muslim and agnostic kids -- we all need to see maps for all kinds of people.

And isn’t that the beauty of story? That by reading or listening to or watching another’s story, we are reminded of our common humanity and our different experiences.