White women writing about diversity: Jessica Love and GTFK on offering "doors, windows, and mirrors"
Rachel Amaru, Co-Founder
It is hard not to fall in love with Jessica Love’s books, Julian is a Mermaid and Julian at the Wedding. The drawings are beautiful and dreamy water colors deliberately painted on brown paper, and the stories contain subtle but potent messages about self-acceptance, self-discovery, and joy. And, as Maria Papova writes, about the power of unconditional love.
Jessica Love includes a portion of an interview with her on her webpage devoted to Julian is a Mermaid. One of the questions was of particular interest to me, in light of the fact that both Delia and I are white women engaged in work about raising people’s consciousness about race:
Love responds to this question in some detail, and adds questions of her own: “Do I have the right to tell this story? Is this cultural theft? Will I be doing more harm than good? Am I taking some other author/illustrator's spot?” She also acknowledges confronting “[her] own internalized white supremacy delusions, all [her] own invisible biases.” Ultimately, she concludes: “I don't know if I got it all right, but I know I brought the best of myself to the effort because picture books are deep stuff, and it's a big deal to get in on the ground floor of a child's developing mind. I wanted to make sure my offerings were doors, windows and mirrors.”
When we founded Good Trouble For Kids, Delia and I spoke often, and we continue to do so, about what it means to be engaged in the work of critical race theory, and writing pieces about Black authors and artists when we ourselves are both white, and therefore operating from a place of privilege. Like Love, we ultimately concluded that we would need to bring the best of ourselves to this project, and that in so doing, we might bring attention to literature and art that has not always received the necessary attention it should have. And, to quote Love again, we recognized very early on that picture books and children’s books, including YA literature – is really deep stuff, and we wanted to share our own love and appreciation of these books with families and educators.
One of the things that brought us together on this project was the recognition that we shared a common desire to expand people’s consciousness around race and social justice through the mediums of literature and art. And yet, there is always the nagging question of what it means to be white in this arena. Over and over again we returned to a 1993 Charlie Rose1 interview with Toni Morrison where she said: “white people have a very, very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it.” We took this as a directive, as an obligation to think about a way we – two white women with small arts organizations -- could find a practical way to combine our talents and interests to knit art and activism, words and witnessing. The goal was deceptively simple in some ways: help families diversify their libraries, become familiar with Black authors and artists, and support independent Black-owned bookstores. We chose to engage with children’s literature because it seemed to provide a fantastic creative jumping off point to explore all sorts of racial and social justice issues from the ground up, i.e., from babes to young adults. Hope always lies with the next generation, the prayer that our children will do better than we have.
We hope that Good Trouble For Kids has opened doors and windows, and mirrored experiences that are not mirrored often enough on the page. We have tried to pick books that feature an array of diverse characters – race, religion, gender identity, etc. – and the majority of these books have been by authors and illustrators identifying as Black, indigenous, or persons of color. There have been times, as with Jessica Love’s Julian at the Wedding, that we have chosen to highlight a white author who we think has really honored Toni Morrison’s injunction to “do the work”.
As bell hooks said, “that willingness to critically engage art by black folks in all its profundity is still very difficult in a culture of domination where people do not learn to look beneath the surface.”I hope that some of what we have done at Good Trouble For Kids is to encourage you and your children to look more carefully beneath the surface, and, as Jessica Love did, to watch, listen, and examine yourself – especially if you are white. These are stories that need to be told, that children of all races want to hear. Jessica Love’s book, like so many others that we have featured this past year, are stories of human beings desperate to be seen.
And oh, what beautiful human beings they are.
Like Jessica Love, we also feel it is important to have established accountability practices. Our initial donations went towards purchasing books for BLM 5280’s incredible Freedom School, and our books have all been purchased from Black-owned bookstores via Bookshop, primarily Semi-Colon, a Black woman owned bookstore in Chicago, and Shop at Matter, a Black and woman owned bookstore in Denver. We continue to individually support other organizations doing racially conscious work, including the Equal Justice Initiative and Cave Canem, an organization devoted to supporting Black poetry, and Art From Ashes, a local Denver arts organization with the mission of “empowering youth through creative expression and personal transformation.”