I just came back from attending a fabulous panel discussion that opened up the NCTE conference in Washing D.C.

I was on a panel being moderated by Rudine Bishop, and my fellow panelists were Christopher Myers, Matt de la Pena, and Mitali Perkins.

For the following two days all kinds of attendees came up to me and told me how much what I said below resonated with them, so I thought I’d sum it up, as best as I could remember (you know what it’s like when you’re on stage!) and transcribe it here for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend the conference.

So here it is:

When I was a young girl, growing up in a small Judeo-Christian town a friend of mine told me this joke. I don’t mean to offend anyone and in fact, I myself found it racist, but I tell it here to make a point.

Once there was a Catholic who lived in a farmhouse.

On a cold stormy night there came a knock at the door. It was a man.

He said, “Please sir, could I have shelter? I’m  half frozen and very hungry.”

The owner of the farmhouse said, “Are you Catholic?”

The man said, “Yes.”

“Oh! Come on in and rest  yourself there by the fire!”

A little while later another knock came at the door.

It was another man, half frozen, asking for shelter.

The owner said, “Are you Catholic?”

The man said, “Yes.”

“Oh! Come on in and rest yourself there by the fire!”

A little while later another knock came.

It was another man, half frozen.

“Are you Catholic?”

“No, I’m Protestant.”

The owner said, “Oh. Well there’s some room there on the porch. Maybe if you press yourself against the window you can get some warmth from the fire.”

Now make no mistake. I found this joke to be very offensive, but I didn’t say anything. But to myself, I thought, “Wow. If this is how one Christian talks about another Christian, what the hell do they think of me?”

And ever since then I’ve always felt like I was out there on the porch, looking in, to a warm scene of people gathered around a fire, but the warmth doesn’t penetrate the glass of the window.

Growing up in such a community, I used books to survive.

I didn’t know you could purchase books! As immigrants we had enough problems just keeping food on the table, there was never money for books!

The books I feasted on were from the library.

And I remember reading one of the Anne of Green Gables books, it was one of the later ones, Anne of the Island or something and I got to a point where L. M. Montgomery refers to ‘those heathen Muhammadans’, and I couldn’t believe it!

She was talking about me!

Couldn’t she ever have imagined that one of those ‘heathen Muhammadans’ would one day be reading one of her Anne books and identifying so much with the characters, thinking that aunt was just like so and so, and that uncle was just like this uncle of hers???

I got so mad I threw the book across the room.

And once more I felt like I was out on the porch, looking in.

We need diverse books!

But what really constitutes diversity?

These days there’s an awful lot of books that pass as diverse literature, that are written by white feminists, who mean well, but I wonder how well they can really penetrate the cultural paradigms of the ethnicities they write about.

I mean how can someone from inside the cabin really comprehend what it’s like to be out there on the porch, when they’re sheltered and warm from the fire?

And think about it. When you’re in a well lit house, looking out onto a dark porch, the windows act as mirrors, you can’t properly see outside! It’s your own world that’s reflected back at you.

And as a result many of these books that the white feminists write really just come down to plunking a white feminist kid in an exotic setting and writing the story as they would react to it!

What kind of diversity is that?

We can’t just color the kid in the story brown or what have you and maintain western ways of thinking.

Kids need to be exposed not only to characters of other colors but also to different cultural thinking and ways of problem solving.

We need to be less superficial.

Because ultimately, how can we ask children to think outside the box when they’re living so firmly within it.