Diversity in Black YA Books – Black Teens Deserve Better

Black teens and children love books, tropes, and plots about issues they face as regular shmegular teens. For example, they love shit like reading about two Black teens falling in love, “coming out” to their parents, maintaining a rocky friendship, their first encounter with sex, how they deal with bullies, how to deal with parents, coping with divorce, typical school drama, reaching their hopes and dreams after high school, and more. Before 2017, at least in my experience, these kinds of books were DAMN hard to find, and in some cases, if you aren’t an avid reader with subscriptions to blogs that post new Black YA releases, they still are hard to find even though the diversity in how we tell Black stories appears to be improving.

Overall though, I’ve watched my Black middle school students reject books I’ve offered them because they didn’t want to read about racism anymore. And that’s real. Black teens deserve better. They deserve to read a wide range of experiences that affirm their Blackness and their language without placing whiteness and this racist society at the center. They deserve Black entertainment, written by Black authors. They deserve to see themselves outside of needing to belong and be accepted by whites. And that’s what I commit to doing as a YA author without having to take NO for an answer by the industry as an independent author. I would never sign my rights and creativity over to an industry that doesn’t value Black voices no matter how dope the deal might be. Looking Beyond the Ordinary is a start alongside many stories out there that don’t get visibility that came before me. And I hope the rest of the industry, yabookstagram, and everyone else wakes up to what Black teens really need and want.

Janee’