‘They Just Wanted Us to Read About a White Boy and His Dog’: Why Teenager Marley Dias Fought Back

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[Marley] Dias was 10 the day she came home from school to eat pancakes with her mother and vented her frustration at being assigned to read Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. Again.

“It is one of those ‘classic books’ that’s existed in our school systems for so long. My great-grandparents remember when that book came out. I read it last year and it was still assigned. Every single year they wanted us to read a book about a white boy and his dog.”

Dias decided – at 10 years old – to collect books with black girl leads to raise awareness of books with diverse characters and the overrepresentation of books with white leads in the school system. Her target was 1,000 books, which she would then send to a school in Jamaica that her mother had attended. “I didn’t pick my own school because I realised that even in all-black spaces like Jamaica, where it is majority black people, they don’t see themselves, and the narratives of white people are still being pushed on to people.”

She created a hashtag, #1000BlackGirlBooks, which started to pick up pace and soon catapulted the young Dias into the limelight. “Two of the first books I collected were Grace for President by Kelly DiPucchio and Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson,” she says. Since the campaign launch in 2016 she has collected well over 12,000 books, organised a reading party at the White House, shared a stage with Oprah Winfrey, appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and guest-edited a special edition of Elle magazine – all while keeping up with her classes and doing her homework. {snip}

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“One author that I love is Tomi Adeyemi; she wrote Children of Blood and Bone, an African fantasy story. We don’t often see black people in futuristic and magical worlds. So she’s taken a genre that has always been a majority white space, and she’s taken some of her own history of being an African American person, and she’s moulded that into something that’s not just a slavery story and is about the history of Africa and in a positive light. For the black kids out there, who really love fantasy but never see themselves, they now feel a whole new level of connection. That’s important.”

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“There’s a lot of economic segregation where I live, and it’s a very important issue. The only reason why it’s not in the book is because I just didn’t really know a lot about it at the time I was writing. I was 11. I address economic inequality now, in my speaking engagements, but at the time I wasn’t aware. I could have got my mum to help me, she would have been great, but then the book wouldn’t be from me.”

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