Let’s start with this: Invention is creativity.
Creativity is making, expressing, presenting. Creativity is new.
The same old same-old is not creativity.
Human beings live for creativity. We are infinitely interested in each other, in what we have to say about ourselves and our fellow humans.
So it should go without saying that the more voices included in human creativity, the better. The more voices, the more variation, the more possibility something worthwhile will be said, done, sung, performed.
But that’s not the way it’s always been.
Greek myths started out as a mash-up, a stew, an alloy, open-source software. Then for a few hundred years, it solidified into something specifically Greek.
But after that, after it spread all over the known world, people began to change it. They innovated. They invented Greek Mythology.
And then they reinvented it. Again and again and again.
So today we have such things as Lore Olympus, which is about the coolest thing going.
In America, though, creativity has lacked a certain representation, a certain input.
For a very long time in the US, our books and movies and musicals have mostly dealt with European-American type people.
Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of excellent pieces of creativity out there. I think F. Scott Fitzgerald is a terrific American writer.
But just think what our world would be like if there had been also stories created by people of color. If there had been, for example, more Zora Neale Hurstons on the shelves along with the Fitzgeralds of the world.
Back in 1947, Major League Baseball opened its dugouts to players who were then called Negroes. The product on the field, if I may say so, became so much better. Why? Because the best of the best got to play finally. Not just the best of one segment of the population.
Recently, book publishing has begun to recognize that it might be a good thing to publish more books with stories about people of color by people of color.
This is a good thing for everyone. For one, consider the “death of the novel.” Critics have been proclaiming this for decades now.
Why?
Because (among other things) it seems as if the creativity of the novel writers had run out. There were no more original stories to tell.
“Please, please,” I recently read one agent saying in her submissions blurb. “No more stories about sad white people doing sad things to each other.”
So, thankfully, we are starting to see more creativity published in the mainstream by people of color. Their voices, previously unheard, are now enriching our creative landscape.
That has now begun to trickle down to schools.
In a school district in Texas, schools had adopted for their ELA curriculum author Jerry Craft’s Newbery Award-winning book New Kid and its follow-up, Class Act, whose protagonists are Black middle school students.
The story is covered very well in this radio broadcast, but the upshot was that a number of white parents didn’t want the book to be taught because it might make white students feel bad about being white.
(For the record, I grew up in Berkeley, California, the original locus of white guilt, and I was made to feel bad about being white for quite a few years in the public schools. Not only that, Black kids used to bully me both hilariously and painfully up until 8th grade. I never even attempted to go into a bathroom for years during the school day, for fear of being “jacked up.” I don’t know how I held it that long.
All that was easily sloughed off, however, once I got to high school and then college. Truth be known, I am probably a better person for going through that character-shaping experience.
And, as a white man with a considerable amount of privilege, I feel no pain and have no scars over being made to feel uncomfortable about being white.)
Mr. Craft’s books were removed from the curriculum and briefly banned from school libraries in that school district because they were inexplicably classed as teaching Critical Race Theory, something I can only conclude from my own personal research is a political football that is being used currently to gin up support for conservative politicians.
Politics aside, banning books by an author of color of course diminishes the amount of creativity in schools. And I, for one, would like to see more creativity, not less, before the eyes of our students. I want them to be steeped in creativity. The more creativity they see, the better they will be later on in life to solve the problems that require creative solutions.
But there’s something even deeper here.
In the radio broadcast linked above a Black mother of at least one child in that district was quoted as follows:
How dare you 444 [signatories of the petition to ban the books] remove what little representation my culture has to show its reality in literature form on the modern-day shelves. I don’t applaud you for placing the books back on the shelves. My only hope is that you not allow the unknown and false narratives to sway your judgment on needed representation of us all. Representation does matter.
This is so important and powerful—and I encourage you to listen to her whole speech. I like to talk theory and the big picture, but this parent brought the situation down to the real world, where real people are affected.
It’s all well and good for me to say that the more creativity, the better, but the reality is that when you have an entire group of people shut out from being represented in a nation’s creativity, that is horrific. That cannot happen anymore in a nation that believes that all people are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So, as I write about Greek Mythology’s original diversity and its ability to give voice to so many different cultures and peoples, I hope my readers can see the practical applications of my ideas. I want this book to help us be okay with all of us expressing ourselves, being seen, and being listened to.
Because we are all worthy of that.