Diversity Statement
This diversity statement was submitted as an assignment for LIS 564, Multicultural Resources for Youth.
As a white, cisgender female from a middle class family whose parents are still happily married, I’ve spent most of my life interacting with the idea of diversity as something outside of myself -- an “other” that I wanted to learn from and amplify. I haven’t stopped reading since I learned how to in kindergarten, and I love telling people about the books I’ve read. Books seemed the most doable way for me to promote those voices that don’t get heard, and becoming first a language arts teacher, and now a school librarian, seemed the most practical way to get these books to the people who need them most.
While I’ve never been actively oppressed by our society’s power structures, the erasure of multiple facets of my identity by these same structures has amounted to a different form of oppression that, while passive, still succeeded in silencing me. I was 19 the first time I saw a mental health counselor, but after two sessions, she told me I was “fine” and sent me on my way. When I mentioned my concerns to the gruff Navy doctor who did the follow-up on the heart monitor I’d worn the entire winter break of my freshman year because of heart palpitations, he told me it was “all in my head” before sardonically asking if I wanted to be medicated. I waited almost ten years before seeking counseling again, at which point I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). I’ve most likely been living with GAD for almost ten years because our society so profoundly misunderstands mental illness. Mental illness rarely looks like white men who “snap” and go on shooting sprees; more often, it looks like spotless employment and academic records and dishes left undone more often than not because projecting the appearance of not being a prisoner of your own brain is so exhausting.
When I was 26, I came across a BuzzFeed essay written by a woman who was demisexual, a section of the asexuality spectrum denoting people who only experience sexual attraction if they have an accompanying emotional bond. So many things suddenly made so much more sense. Having access to books with ace characters would’ve been helpful to me in high school and college, years when I experienced so much anxiety over being single, but even more actually dating. Knowing there were other people like me, that entering the dating pool wasn’t a requirement despite what all of my media consumption told me, would’ve helped me feel less lonely. It also would’ve normalized asexuality to my friends who thought my lack of shared interest in certain subjects was “weird.”
Knowing what it was like to stick out started earlier than high school, however. My dad was in the Navy, which stuck me with the “new girl” label until tenth grade. Even in places with a high concentration of military families, my teachers didn’t know what to do with me. My mom scoffed at my first third grade teacher when the teacher called after school one day to express concerns that I was struggling to socialize because I spent recess hiding under trees instead of playing with my classmates, explaining that since we’d just moved to Florida after five years in Idaho, the problem was that I was hot. There was also the fact that my teachers expected me to fill my gaps in content knowledge by myself; I spent the second half of third grade teaching myself cursive while doing my schoolwork because we hadn’t learned it yet in Florida, but my new teacher refused to accept my assignments in print. Not a single one of those teachers in elementary or middle school asked my parents or me what I needed in order to be successful.
All of this to say, I know what it’s like to feel powerless, like I don’t have a voice. I felt like I couldn’t challenge people who had some degree of authority over me: teachers, doctors, mental health professionals, the media. While those days might be over for me, many of my students are still in them. Books are still the best way I know to show them the way out. I want my library collection to be diverse, but that alone isn’t enough; I need to actively promote these books. I do that on a smaller scale currently in my readers advisory interactions with students in the classrooms I work in. Since I’ve built relationships with students over the years, they trust the book recommendations I give them. I try to use this influence for good by suggesting more diverse books. For example, my students who read books by Sarah J. Maas and Victoria Aveyard might also enjoy books by Renée Ahdieh and Roshani Chokshi. My students who read Sarah Dessen and Morgan Matson might enjoy Emery Lord’s When We Collided, Kathryn Ormsbee’s Tash Hearts Tolstoy, or Corrine Jackson’s If I Lie. The books I promote tell students exactly who I believe deserves to save the world or fall in love (or not, if that’s what they want). They need to know that I believe it could be them.
Most of my current students look like me, but that makes it even more important for me to expose them to people who don’t look like us. The school I’m working with for my Diversity Outreach Project is 80% white, but in the same district are an elementary, middle, and high school who have growing populations of Somali refugees, and just up the road are berry farms that employ large numbers of migrant workers. The realistic fiction books I’ve chosen to add to my colleague’s classroom library - The Hate U Give, Long Way Down, and I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter - couldn’t possibly look more different from most of these students’ lives if I tried, but that’s the point. I want all of my students to feel seen and that their voices matter, but I also don’t want my white students to grow up to become the authority people are afraid to question.