Apparently a group of fantastic students have noticed that the characters they are reading about in books on their shelves seem, for the most part, a little too homogeneous. And they’re doing something about it. Students at Dothan Brook School in Vermont wrote some letters and are asking publishers to please include more diversity in books published for young readers. Head over to CBC Diversity to read more about this project.
I love this. So, so, so, so much. I’m immensely proud of these kids and the teachers who helped inspire this project. This is going to be meaningful to these students for many years to come, I guarantee it.
True story: The best teacher I ever had was my fifth grade teacher. She was great for a zillion reasons, but one of them was that she lived outside the box. In social studies that year she taught us about democracy and citizen power and how to make change. We talked about voting, expressing opinions, and the power of petitions.
This inspired me to write a little petition of my own. I’d give three teeth to have that actual thing in my hand right now, but I think it said something like:
Dear Principal,
We, the undersigned, are tired of the lousy food this school serves in the cafeteria. It looks gross, smells gross, and tastes gross. We think you can do a better job feeding us. Please make some changes.
Also, the ladies who supervise us in the lunchroom are nasty witches. They yell at us if we breathe too loudly or move our trays even the slightest bit. We think you could find some nicer employees who won’t scream at us while we’re trying to digest our food.
Sincerely,
And then I started passing it around. At lunch. All the cool kids signed it. (Okay, this is my story. I can tell it how I want.) But one kid (not a cool kid) read it and then promptly got out of his seat and took the petition straight to the nearest lunchroom monitor, a lady we actually called Ms.Witch.
Her face turned ten shades of red and she started screaming. I don’t remember the next few minutes because she made us all put our heads down on the tables and sit in stone silence. And also my heart was about to explode inside my chest.
I do remember making our way back in line to the classroom, and finding our principal standing at the front of the room, my petition in hand. Beside him was our teacher. She had the weirdest look on her face.
We all sat down and it was deathly quiet. No one made a sound. Principal guy narrowed his eyes and started speaking to us and he was so mad that spit was coming out in bursts and landing on the floor in front of him.
“I’ve run this school by myself for fifty-five years and done a fine job. I don’t need your help. I don’t need a bunch of kids telling me how to run my school. I will find out who did this.”
I looked at my teacher who was looking at him with this serious, empathetic, puzzled expression. As if she had no idea who had written that paper that he was waving around in anger. And that was the moment that the earth shifted a little on its axis for me. That was when I realized that even adults don’t always follow the rules. I knew she knew whose handwriting that was. (Show me any fifth grade teacher in the world who can’t look at a piece of paper and tell you exactly which student in her class authored it.) And this meant she was covering for me. And it opened up a whole world of subversion for me that I’m living in still.
I never got called to the principal’s office over the petition. The food never got better though, and Mary Poppins didn’t suddenly show up as a lunchroom monitor. Looking back, a hunger strike probably would have been a more effective strategy. I had a lot of things wrong that day: the definition of a democracy, the timing of a petition circulation, and probably a bogus cause to begin with. (I am pretty sure I brought a sack lunch every day anyway, so…)
But. I had the main thing right—when you see an injustice in the world, speak up. Do something about it. Don’t spend your whole life doing everything people tell you to do. Challenge authority. As Frederick Douglass said, “Agitate, agitate, agitate.”
These kids from Dothan Brook School get that. They are already speaking up and making sure the injustice they see doesn’t go unnoticed. Please go read some of their letters. They are inspiring. I hope their voices are being heard.