Daniel José Older: So I almost didn’t do this panel, um, I’m gonna say, I’m gonna talk about A Fine Dessert. I want it to be clear that this isn’t a personal attack, I love—I’m a big fan of your work—(note: couldn’t decipher here, possibly referring to some prior work of the author/illustrator) I’ve been admiring for years, I love it, and I believe, especially now having met you, but I certainly believe and I always have from your comments that you came from a very genuine place writing this book and drawing pictures for this book (speaker on left claps) that was never any doubt for me and, yes (in response to clapping), I always, I tell my students, we have to try knowing that we’re going to fail, and I believe in that, and, as writers and artists, our intentions become irrelevant once we put our creations out into the world, and uh a book is the creation of a village just like people are and so it’s really about the whole community (of kidlit?) that needs to be having this conversation, that is having this conversation, um that we need to address, I don’t think it’s just about your drawings, as much as it is about your drawings, it’s also about how they’re received and, you know, who decided to publish them and all these different ways we talk about them.
Um, (note: couldn’t decipher here) my reaction to the book was visceral and painful, um, slavery is an open wound in America because we have been lying to ourselves about it forever and we continue to today. And I think you really didn’t want to continue that lie, and I think the book does. And you’ve asked people to read the full book and look at the context of it and I—and I I know you put in the serious faces (?) at the last panel, that sequence, that idea
of bringing the drama of slavery to light (life?) and the tragedy of it. For me that didn’t do it at all. I think when we show slaves children doing slavework with a smile, it takes a lot more than a frown later on to really contextualize it properly.
Uh for me the context of this book is the wildly undiverse, uh, children’s book publishing world, its the, uh, ongoing cycle of violence against children of color that is committed uh by the state. It’s that the confederate flag still flies until there’s a massacre to bring it down. That we are still fighting the civil war in many ways and we’re still dealing with the fallout of slavery in many ways. Um people of color don’t have the luxury of being able to sugarcoat history to our children, and when we do, uh people die. and that’s one of the really important pieces about this that uh we are traumatized and it is an ongoing state of emergency for people of color in America today and children’s books need to speak to that without trying to provide umbrellas or make it sound like everything’s okay because its not.
The role of literature is to tell us the difficult truths, um, which again I believed you tried to do, but to arm us um for the world in all it’s ugliness and that’s not an easy thing to do in a children’s book, and I think that there’s a lot of honesty in the end when you know the writer says that they they know, that you guys knew, that you were gonna bring up an issue that you couldn’t fully take in the whole berth of and from from my point of view, where I stand, if you can’t then you shouldn’t touch it, um that’s how I feel about slavery, it’s how I feel about sexual assault, there’s some things that we can’t, um that we can’t sugarcoat. Um, so, I wanna say that because I think that we’re all trying to figure out how to do diversity right, and that’s gonna always come with times when we do it wrong. Um I don’t think anyone should be patting themselves on the back for starting this conversation—I don’t think you are—I don’t think anyone should be um because I think it’s a very unhealthy conversation for us to be having, right now, in America, I think we should be past it, I don’t think we should be wondering whether or not it’s okay to make it look like slavery may or may not have been not that bad. I think on a diversity panel we should be talking about strategies for moving forward and getting free, um, but we’re not. Um so that’s why I almost didn’t come, I’m glad I came, I’m glad that we’ve met, and we get to have this conversation, um, and I hope we get to continue the conversation, but I also don’t because I don’t think it’s a great conversation, I think it’s a really painful conversation and I want us to move forward from it, so… (audience claps)
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