#author guest post

By Mina Javaherbin

I grew up in prerevolutionary Iran and immigrated to the United States when I was a teen. My new book, My Grandma and Me, is an homage to a peaceful childhood, when everyday activities are bliss. When I came to America, I was running from war and revolution. It took me a long time and a considerable amount of money to follow the immigration procedures and become an American citizen. All this happened before mass immigrations, revolutions, and wars in other countries had made a noticeable dent in the American psyche. These days the internet has caused a silent revolution in everyone’s consciousness and we are more aware of our global village.

Terms such as global village,multicultural, and diversity did not trend during my childhood. However, we’ve always known about one another, and we even try to communicate—hence the United Nations. But it’s clear from the recurring disagreements and wars that sitting across a table in a large building is not enough, and a multicultural mind-set is needed to prevent things from getting lost in translation.

Immigrants have the basic foundation of becoming multicultural readily available, as we already have to deal with two cultures. But the degree of immersion varies. I can only speak of my own immigrant experience, and I’m genuinely interested in both my Iranian and American cultures. Something exquisite happens when a person opens themselves to learning about more than one belief, one lifestyle, and one language. For me, it enhanced my relationship with cultures beyond the Iranian and American.

I’m passionate about writing from my multicultural perspective, which was bolstered by my immigration but fostered from early childhood through extensive travel and multilingual education. But why should my books about different people and places be worth sharing with the lucky majority who grow up in the culture they are born into? Because technology and ease of travel has now placed us in one another’s backyards, and whether we like it or not, we have become neighbors. If we refuse to know our neighbors and instead build territorial walls, we are alienating people who most likely share similar challenges and dreams, people we could bond with and befriend. Books about people we don’t know—or are afraid of—cultivate a multicultural mind-set so that when we meet these people, we’re more comfortable with their culture.

As a multicultural author, I write to help create multicultural readers. I hope my readers wonder, What would I do or think if I lived in the world of this book? Understanding how views are formed in different settings gives us a multicultural outlook that brings about respect, sometimes to the degree of advocacy for people we disagree with. And the ability to see a multitude of viewpoints prevents a multicultural person or society from permitting the absolute rule of a singular dogma. So let’s all become multicultural and relegate wars to museums. We all deserve peaceful childhoods—and adulthoods—with our beloved grandmas.

Mina Javaherbin has written several award-winning picture books, including Soccer Star, illustrated by Renato Alarcão, and Goal!, illustrated by A. G. Ford. She lives in Southern California.

By Natasha Díaz

As a white-presenting, multiracial Jewish woman, I looked like most of the protagonists in the books that I read growing up (aka white girls), but I never related to them. I didn’t understand why all the characters somehow came from families that seemed exactly the same. These casually all-white, anglo universes weren’t a part of my reality, and as much as I appeared as though I should, I did not I see myself mirrored in the pages.

When I got a little older, I realized that if I searched, there were books that featured mixed-race and Jewish characters. If it was a Jewish narrative, the book was almost always about the Holocaust. In the stories I found with characters of mixed race, more often than not, biracial and multiracial narratives focused on their external appearance and exoticized the character’s “European features” praising “light eyes” or “silky hair” or “thin noses,” reinforcing the sentiment that the lack of visual connection to their Black or Brown heritage made them special or more beautiful and desirable. The stories rarely delved into the internal struggle so many people of mixed heritage experience with feelings of unworthiness to themselves and their histories. Biracial and multiracial characters were written as victims of their “light-skinned plight,” often bullied by darker-skinned people in their families and communities. (I should pause here to state for the record that not all mixed or biracial or multiracial people have a white parent, and not all people with mixed racial and ethnic heritage, even those who do have a white parent, look white or are light-skinned. There are many mixed people who present as Black and Brown and are subject to the same prejudices that monoracial people of color experience.) But it seemed as though all mixed people were being portrayed in one way. And as readers, we were asked to pity and empathize with the hardship of not fitting in as a result of a lighter skin tone without ever acknowledging the negative impact that perpetuating these colorist ideas has on communities of color.

When I decided to finally write the book that would eventually become Color Me In, I promised myself that I would create a world on the page that my younger self needed. One that looked and sounded the way mine did when I woke up every day, filled with a blend of races and communities that didn’t shy away from the uniquely complicated experience of being multiracial and white-passing, as well as Jewish in ethnicity without much connection to Judaism as a religion. I wanted to write a character who learns not only to take pride in her various cultures but also to take responsibility and accountability for her privileges as she tries desperately to make herself feel whole. I wanted to write something messy, the way the world is, especially when you move through it as a gray area personified.

I wrote Color Me In because I want young people to know they have a right to take ownership of their identities, and that when they do so, it is important to recognize where they fit within the cycles of systemic injustice that plague our country. I wrote Color Me In because I want young people to find strength in their unique backgrounds and experiences and to use that power to rise up and be loud in the fight for equality because we need them now more than ever.

natashaerikadiaz.com @TashiDiaz on Twitter @NatashaErikaDiaz on Instagram and Facebook.