Fall 2015 • Children and Libraries 3
I
’m white. But I didn’t start describing myself that way
until adulthood. In fact, I doggedly avoided it. In high
school, I once crossed out “white” and wrote “half Jewish”
on a standardized test. I knew I was white, but I also knew that
it was not good to name whiteness. Black history, we could talk
about, in Social Studies (during certain units). Latino cultures
were celebrated (or, at least, acknowledged) in my Spanish
classes. But the whiteness that served as the foundation for the
other 99 percent of my life was taboo. Nobody ever said “as a
white girl, I think . . .” or “white people like us . . .” in my (totally
white) circles.
It took me a long time and a lot of education to figure out that
whiteness is taboo in large part because naming whiteness
makes race—and therefore racism—something that includes
and affects everyone. If white people decline to acknowledge or
discuss whiteness, racism stays other people’s problem. If I am
white, I’m suddenly part of the equation.
But I am part of the equation. Because I am white, I have access
to what Peggy McIntosh calls the “invisible knapsack” of white
privilege,
1
and one of those is that I see my culture reflected
everywhere; in the United States, I am “standard,” I am “norm.”
And I’ve never lacked for books in which characters look, speak,
and act like me.
The now-familiar statistics kept by the Cooperative Children’s
Book Center (CCBC) confirm the truth that white culture is
extremely prominent and well-represented in the world of
children’s literature. Though there was a jump in the number of
books by and about people of color in 2014, the percentage is
still small (14 percent)
2
and does not reflect the US population,
which is 37 percent nonwhite,
3
or 50.3 percent—a majority—
when you’re talking about nonwhite children in US public
schools (by contrast, 82 percent of public school teachers are
white).
4
Clearly, white culture still dominates in children’s
literature, despite a population of children that is becoming
rapidly less white.
Why should white people care (beyond a desire to assuage
vague feelings of guilt) about something like the We Need
Diverse Books organization (for which I am a librarian)? Why do
white people, like me, need diverse books? Because “white” has
its own culture and cultural beats, and those are too often con-
sidered “universal” or conflated with “American.” White people
have not graduated into some advanced form of humanity in
which color does not matter, and being white does not render
us raceless. We are all racial. And white people, like me, have
access to privileges that are uniquely afforded to us because of
our whiteness. White privilege shows itself in our government,
our banks, our housing, our health care, our schools, and yes,
our libraries.
I should mention here that while they are linked, white privi-
lege is different from economic privilege. It is true that most
On Being White
A Raw, Honest Conversation
ALLIE JANE BRUCE
Allie Jane Bruce is Children’s Librarian at
Bank Street College in New York City, a
Librarian for We Need Diverse Books, and a
member of the 2016 Newbery Committee.