We need to start prioritizing Young Adult books with BIPOC authors

When I was young, I thought only white people could be heroes. Beautiful blond, pale-skinned humans, with blue eyes and slightly upturned noses like Peter Pan. I dreamed of being dainty and beautiful and when I wrote my own stories of magic and bravery, I wrote of valiant characters who didn’t look a bit like me.

There was a time when I was embarrassed of my yellow skin because it wasn’t ivory, and it darkened too much under the summer heat. I cursed the brown moles that adorned my body and especially the one under my lip that people couldn’t ignore. Only evil witches and bad guys had moles on their faces—not heroes.

YA literature taught me to be brave and defiant, but unfortunately, it also inadvertently taught me to reject myself. If I wanted to be different, I had to be different in a particular way and if I wanted to be important, I had to be white. I learned very quickly that authenticity was endearing but only if it pleased certain rigid norms. If I wanted to be smart, I couldn’t care about my looks but if I wanted to be pretty, it had to be the type of effortless I couldn’t achieve naturally.

“YA literature taught me to be brave and defiant, but unfortunately, it also inadvertently taught me to reject myself.”

It got to the point where I was convinced white people didn’t sweat. In all of YA literature, white girls had a tendency to do something quirky when they were nervous like bite their bottom lips or dig their nails into their palms. Instead, I sweat, and I thought it was weird. Imagine being in middle school, taking gym class every other day and believing that you were the odd person out for getting hot and damp after running?

Now, I’m not saying books taught me white people were a glorified race but when you’re only exposed to perfection under a certain light, it’s easy to imagine your race and your culture to be “other”. If BIPOC characters were written in, they never received much of a role and were usually there as the author’s proof of diversity stamp. I’m pointing to J. K. Rowling’s Cho Chang and Suzanne Collins’ Rue Stenberg and countless other characters that don’t even come to mind. If I told you the name Eric Yorkie, would you even remember who he was? But somehow, everybody remembers Mike Newton from Twilight.

We weren’t written into these stories, so how could we ever see ourselves as the main character, the hero or the saviour? Successful YA authors have failed to paint BIPOC characters under the same light as their white heroes. How could white kids grow up to recognize the beauty I see in my own people when they aren’t represented in the books I’m reading?

“If people of colour aren’t even writing BIPOC heroes into our own stories, then how can this cycle ever be broken?”

Chimamanda Adichie put it plainly in her 2009 TEDTalk. She said, “I wrote exactly the kind of stories I was reading: all my characters were white and blue-eyed”. Watching this, Adichie made me face all of the heroes I ever conceived myself—they didn’t reflect my reality one bit.

So, here’s the kicker: I consumed white heroes as a child, grew up to write white heroes and then watched as more white heroes got pushed to the forefront of the bookstand. If people of colour aren’t even writing BIPOC heroes into our own stories, then how can this cycle ever be broken?

There are too few role models centred for BIPOC children to grow up with. When I was young, I wanted to be Suzanne Collins’ Katniss Everdeen, Cassandra Clare’s Clary Fray and J. K. Rowling’s Hermione Granger. But what about Marie Lu’s June Iparis, Leigh Bardugo’s Inej Ghafa and Jenny Han’s Lara Jean Covey? What about the countless other books with BIPOC characters that haven’t even reached me yet? Why aren’t they the ones we’re talking about because they’re marvellous and multifaceted but they’re absent from the majority of our conversations.

“Why aren’t they [books with BIPOC characters] the ones we’re talking about because they’re marvellous and multifaceted but they’re absent from the majority of our conversations.”

I think we need to start prioritizing BIPOC writers and their novels, especially those who cater to our youth today. My generation grew up with books about rebellions and uprisings and look at how defiantly we fight today. If we want to see a better world, one without bigotry, discrimination and racism, we need to teach our kids that BIPOC heroes exist and are just as admirable as the ones I grew up reading about. These changes are already in the works. Look at the white-dominated movie industry that is finally beginning to produce movies with Asian role models like Disney with Raya and the Last Dragon and Marvel with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I’m waiting for a generation that idealizes BIPOC people too—even more so—and if YA literature follows suit, it might just be possible.

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