Whether or not you follow any bookish people on Twitter you might have noticed #DiverseBooks trending a week of two ago. This is the biggest issue that the bookish world is facing at the moment. Within 24 hours this campaign had gone viral with authors, publishers, bloggers, and readers tweeting and posting on any social media sites they could get their hands on.
Why this started we are not exactly sure but a contributor has to be a panel at BookCon that consisted of white males. These four men were supposed to represent children’s fiction as a whole. How are four all male, all white people supposed to represent one of the biggest genre’s published? John Green was supposed to be a part of BookCon but pulled his name until they agreed to remedy the situation by making the panel more diverse.
This one conflict has created a whole campaign to get readers more exposed to different books that are diverse when it comes to gender and race. Some companies that promote authors have taken the time to promote books that are diverse. More and more people have started posting books that are diverse whether it be because of the author or the characters in the book. Julie Kagawa’s Iron Fey and Blood of Eden series because of her race. Rainbow Rowell’s book Eleanor and Park has gotten a lot of promotion due to her male character’s Korean ethnicity.
The biggest argument for diverse books so far has been that kids will feel better about themselves and the race and gender that they are. One tweet on twitter was that we need diverse books because no little kid ever said “I want a box of 64 white crayons!”.
This campaign goes straight back to the argument that is as long as time–racism. Does diverse really help kids feel better about themselves? Whether or not it does, people have argued that it does. No research has been done on this but I would think it would go directly back to Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s argument with the doll test that was presented in the Brown vs. Board Argument in 1954. Now the only thing left to do is see whether or not this campaign actually leads to more diverse books, because we need #DiverseBooks.
