KidLitWomen* was co-founded by Grace Lin and Karen Blumenthal in March 2018, with the mission of “calling attention to the gender inequities of our industry, uplifting the women who have not received their due, and finding solutions to reach equality.” The following article expands on a KidLitWomen* social media post by Lin.

Many of my writer friends who are white feel anxious when we talk about “diverse books.” If other white writers are anything like my dear, well-intentioned friends, they might be thinking that kids don’t need any more stories about white characters and that no one wants to read or publish them anyway. So even though these writers do want to support this developing diversity, they also worry about their own place as children’s book creators. They fear that they, as White Writers Who Want to Support Diverse Books and Authors, have no stories that the world demands or desires.

Which, of course, is not true. In order to achieve true diversity in children’s literature — a diversity so commonplace that we won’t even need to call it that — we need everyone, and that includes white authors. But we need white authors to speak with us, not for us. At times, this is hard to explain to my white friends, so I usually explain it using a parallel situation — that of a feminist, male author.

The way a lot of male authors jump in to “help” feminism is to write a feisty girl protagonist into their books. While the intentions may be good, this doesn’t necessarily help. I mean, yes, by all means have strong, self-confident girls and women in your books! But women do not need men to tell that story. Women are perfectly capable of writing those characters themselves. Shannon Hale can easily write her kick-butt protagonists as being strong and confident females, because she is already that herself — just follow her Twitter feed and see how she stands up for herself and her beliefs time and time again.

If men are truly looking to write stories to help women, we would all be better served if instead they wrote feminist male characters. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of male-authored books about boys using aggression as a way to connect with one another — from imagining their toys destroying another boy’s to pranking a common foe. They are super entertaining, and I want to make it clear that I am not against those types of books. However, there are a lot of them. And when these books become the definition of “boy books” either by authorship or subject matter, it reinforces the idea of masculinity as forceful and violent; that boys can only bond through some sort of antagonism (either toward each other or against someone else). Books like William’s Doll (Charlotte Zolotow’s 1972 landmark book in which a boy wishes for a doll) or Garvey’s Choice by Nikki Grimes (in which a boy struggles with his father’s “jock” expectations) — books that show gentler, less aggressive portraits of masculinity — are harder to find and are less frequently written by men. Yet that is what all boys need to see in order to be able to envision a more flexible ideal of the masculine identity.

What feminism needs is not for male authors to write female characters that mimic the stereotypical male traits of boldness and physical power, but for them to write male characters that redefine masculinity. Feminism needs male heroes that embrace what has been disdained as “girly”— and for the male authors of those books to proudly share them with their readers.

And it is in that same vein that I call upon white authors. When the demand for diverse books became too loud to ignore, many of you — with the best of intentions — jumped in to “help” by writing books with minority heroes. This doesn’t necessarily improve things. Yes, of course, make sure the characters in your books reflect the diversity of our world. But we don’t need you to tell the story of the triumphant, rising-above-struggles minority protagonist. People of color can write those characters themselves.

No, if white authors truly want to support diversity and equity, we would all be better served if they, instead, wrote white characters who are aware of the racial disparity in our society and grapple with their privilege and all the complexity that entails. Our traditional “all-white world of children’s books” (as was labeled in Nancy Larrick’s groundbreaking 1965 essay) is so well-peopled with characters unaware of how differently that world treats people of other skin tones that most of our real-world white population refuses to see racial injustice when it’s actually in front of them. Books by white authors that show characters realizing the differences — such as Tricia Springstubb’s Every Single Second or Sharon Creech’s Bloomability — are harder to find. Yet these are the books we need to be commonplace if we are to create a more equal society.

What diversity needs is not white authors to write heroes of a minority race, but rather for them to redefine the white hero. We need authors to create white characters who are (or are learning to become) socially aware and who fight alongside people of color, without being saviors, and we need authors who know how to do the same.

Yes, writing these kinds of heroes in a satisfying story is a challenge, and obviously not every book has to have a message. But for those worried White Writers Who Want to Support Diverse Books and Authors, these are also the stories and characters that you are uniquely qualified to tell.

From the January/February 2019 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.