I grew up talking about race and class and equity at my dinner table with my activist parents. During my two decades in the classroom, I taught a culturally sustaining curriculum, helping a diverse group of adolescents develop a positive identity through reading and writing. But in my first career, I normalized whiteness for a generation of young people.
I am a retired middle school English teacher. White. Jewish. I leave a legacy of beautiful students whom I’ve been honored to teach. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I pumped out commercial young adult and middle-grade fiction. I started out editing teen romances and went on to write my own series fiction, produced under deadlines so tight I sometimes smacked out a whole novel in under two weeks. The books were big business, marketed to deliver a frothy, irresistible confection to the largest audience.
What audience? When I was a young editor, just starting out, I remember discussing the lack of diversity in these books with a boss. Where were the Black kids? “They don’t read,” my boss told me. “There’s no market for that.” Sit with that for a moment.
Eventually, my boss did put a Black model on the cover of one of our signature romance lines and hired … a white writer to write the Black protagonist. (Left out entirely — as it usually was at the time — was any discussion of kids who were brown, Asian, or anything besides Black or white.) It fell to me to edit the book. I proceeded to remove…
