A thread for white librarians

I am a white woman raising a white daughter who loves graphic novels. I bought her TWINS by Varian Johnson when it came out so she would have a new GN to read. She was excited to have a new book to read, read it, and said she loves it.

When I asked her why she loved it she said it was cute, funny and reminded her of her own relationship with her sister.

I tell you this story because there is discussion about how do you get white kids to read “diverse books.” And if you find yourself asking that question as a

white parent or librarian, this means you have your own internalized racism to deal with. I know this because I did and I do myself personally. And then we pass these issues on to and teach them to our kids. We do it directly and indirectly.

As both a white librarian and a parent I have had to work to unlearn the harmful things that I have learned and decenter whiteness. It’s a process. It’s ongoing. I often still super suck at it. But I’m also trying to do the same with my kids, the biological and the library ones.

But a really important thing I have found is that when we ask that question we are centering whiteness, we’re underestimating our kids, but also we are placing our own internalized racism onto them. A great majority of kids do not see the world

through the same lenses we do. This is not universally true, because as we know there are still large portions of kids being taught to be racist and cisheteronormative. That is an issue and I don’t want to downplay that.

However,

what I do want to say is that if you are a white librarian who finds yourself asking “how do I get white kids to read diverse books” or finds yourself saying “my kids don’t read those kind of books,” I’m here to tell you the 1st thing you need to do is work on addressing and

dismantling your own bias and racism. You also need to work on decentering whiteness, as if the white POV is the default. We, white parents and librarians, are a huge part of the problem. We have to acknowledge it, make a choice and do the work to do and be better.