The passing of such an influential black author could revitalize young, black, male readership and authorship, or it could deepen the dearth of existing books for this demographic.
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A few months after I graduated college, I wandered a Borders bookstore, killing some time on a rainy weekend. I happened into the Children’s section, looking at the new releases, keeping tabs on reading trends so I would know what to place in my classroom when the time came.
Publishers spend large chunks of money to have certain books placed facing outward. This is so ambling shoppers like me will fix our attention on those forward facing books rather than an indistinct book spine. I remember spying the cover of Monster by Walter Dean Myers, donning two literary medals and the mugshot of a emotionless black male. I’d heard this book recommended time and again in college but never picked it up. Since I had time to spare, I figured I’d read the first few chapters in the store.
Two hours later, my legs stiff from sitting in the kid sized chairs, I read the final page, smoothed the cover crease as best I could, and placed it back on the shelf. (I know, I know … I should have bought the book). It was one of those moments I realized how little I yet knew about the world and how isolated I was from multicultural experiences.
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Walter Dean Myers passed away from illness last week at age 76. His 50+ books for young adults and children feature black characters finding positivity in urban life, speaking candidly about warfare or imprisonment, and living the gritty and complicated lives of teens. Award after award aside, Myers was also a staunch advocate for increased character diversity in young adult literature. Just this past April, Myers’ NPR interview “Children’s Literature: Apartheid or Just a General Lack of Color” highlighted research from The Cooperative Children’s Book Center that shows in 2013 only 93 out of 3,200 surveyed books (with an estimated 5,000 published in total) were about African Americans. In addition, only 68 were by black authors.
So why is this dearth so disheartening? As Myers stated in his interview,
“There’ve been studies saying that if the kids are behind in the third grade, only 20 percent of those kids ever catch up. What happens, the kids also understand the gaps. They see this wide divergence and they give up. And so one of the tools we can use to try to bring them back into the mainstream is transmitting values in books. When you go to a book and you see your circumstances — here is a poor child, here is a child who doesn’t have breakfast every morning — when they see themselves, they’re saying ‘look, I am valuable.’”
Literature by black authors and for black students provides not only a mirror but a potential road map. And this strong connection with black culture is a topic white authors cannot fully communicate. In Myers’ words,
“Of course I feel you should write about anybody you want to write about, I couldn’t care less who you write about. But what very often happens is that, when you’re writing about a culture that’s not your own, you may hit large areas of it, but there are so many areas that you miss.”
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Which brings us to the divergent road Walter Dean Myers’ passing offers. One road celebrates his literature, popularizing it even more with black students, balancing the priorities of mainstream publishers, encouraging existing black authors to continue putting out quality literature, and inspiring black men to “pick up the pen” so that The Cooperative Children’s Book Center data years from now is not so skewed.
The other road mourns the passing of a great author and advocate, but moves on without significant change.
Society owes it to our young black men to venture the former road and seal off the latter. It won’t be an easy path, but it’s a necessary one. It’s one that Walter Dean Myers inadvertently describes the benefits of in the last stanza of his famed poem, “Love That Boy.”
He got long roads to walk down
Before the setting sun.
I said he got a long, long road to walk down
Before the setting sun.
He’ll be a long stride walker,
And a good man before he done.
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Image credit: US Department of Education/flickr