Aepgirl
Why do we need books to tell us how not to be racist? Treat everybody with respect regardless of colour, race, gender, mode of dress.
That's all very well to say. The problem, really, is that books are usually filled with white characters with maybe a black side-kick for the sake of diversity, and that's it. This prevents white readers from ever learning about other cultures, how it actually feels to live in a black (or brown) skin, and so on. Fiction helps us to understand, to get into the shoes of another person with a different background; at the moment this works primarily in one direction. As a young girl with dark skin growing up in a British colony, ALL the books I read, from Enid Blyton to the Bobbsey Twins and onward, hat white characters. There was never a dark-skinned character or anyone from a culture outside of America or Britain. This only strengthened my idea that being dark was somehow inferior, that we do not even deserve to be written about. On the flip side, we learnt what it's like to be white and how white people experience themselves; trust me, there's a difference!
That's one of the reasons that, as I grew older, I became a writer, and now I have several published novels, some of them with a full cast of dark-skinned people in a non-European setting, others with a mixed cast.
I'd be happy to post some of my titles here, if it is allowed and not discounted as self-promotion... May I?
