Diversify Yourself: We need diverse books

Serena Bettis • November 3, 2015

Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by Kirstin Cronn-Mills, about a transgender teen. Photo Credit: Serena Bettis

America is the most diverse country in the world (in terms of population), but only fourteen percent of children’s literature published in 2014 has a protagonist of color. Less than forty books published in 2014 had protagonists of American Indian origin, about sixty with Latinos, over one hundred with Asians, and one hundred eighty with African or African American protagonists. This does not seem to matter as much to sixty-two percent of the U.S population, but to the other thirty-eight percent it means the world.

The lack of representation in media does not represent the world, and this needs to change. When people of different ethnicities, origins, and sexualities are shielded from other people like themselves, they feel lost and alone. This indirectly says that a person’s culture is not something to take pride in, and that leads people to feel ashamed and insecure about themselves. Diversity in media allows diverse people to see themselves in their favorite characters, to be proud of their origins, and to have a friend or role model who comes from the same place.

The exclusion LGBTQ+ people and people of color in the media is because of and supports ingrained racism present for all of human history. Many people in America believe that the Civil Rights movement nearly abolished racism, but to this day, the highest numbers of hate crimes are against black people. Between 2000 and 2010 the total number of hate groups in the U.S rose from 600 to 1,000 (though they dropped drastically between 2013 and 2014), and of 5,922 hate crimes reported in 2013, 48.5 percent were based on race, and 20.8 percent because of sexual orientation.

Media without diversity presents a false image of humanity to the world. It discredits a good portion of the population, and the exclusion of diverse cultures prohibits white people from learning about different ways of life. If literature had more diversity, people would learn tolerance by feeling sympathy and support for fictional characters that they translate onto real human beings. They may also discover that they have things in common with people of different origins, and they would feel less afraid of them, which would lead to less violence against them.

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In 2014, a group of authors and publishers, fronted by Ellen Oh, launched the We Need Diverse Books campaign to raise awareness of this issue. Their campaign includes supporting diverse books, giving lists of books with diversity and encouraging people to read them based on other popular Young Adult books, and showing other people’s opinion about why we need diverse books. Less than 24 hours after the launch, #weneeddiversebooks was trending worldwide.

Fossil, too, is a diverse place, and contrary to popular belief, the student body does care about other people and issues, they just need to know about them. My goal for this review column is to get people reading diverse books, whether they were good or bad, and get students talking about why they need diversity in their lives. Tweet @serenaEIS, or leave a comment below, and tell the world why you need diverse books, too.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.