This week: Stamped (For Kids) by Jason Reynolds, Ibram X. Kendi and Sonja Cherry-Paul with illustrations by Rachelle Baker

Just pause for a moment and let this truth sink in:

“Americans acted like they were playing one of those video games where you have to build a world. Except that’s racist. Native Americans had already built a world.”

The what-ifs abound here for me in the constant restless agonizing dream of a better world.

It goes without saying that Jason Reynolds is THE poet-prophet-sage for right now, and one of the most exciting voices in children’s literature. He is gifted to the degree of genius when he is speaking to kids, for kids and about kids. He gets it, and he parses the beauty and the mess of being a kid. He writes with such a clarity of vision and a vital promise to Black kids directly that he is telling the truth and offering a language—a fundamental (literally) language that is integral to childhood, and that a life can be built on.

My head is full to the brim and overflowing with all the instances, personal, familial, community-based, regional,national and universal where the lack of a language for the thing-expression-emotion-experience was the root of the pain and damage.

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As a kid, you might reject aspects of your elders and still have to deal with them, or you might recognize that they are complicated people for whom you have complicated feelings, but if you don’t have any way to talk about it, you’re pretty much guaranteed to just get really mad, and carry that rage around until it boils over. We were 80s kids, not exactly an enlightened epoch; my siblings and friends and I objected to anything we perceived as racist, and we were outspoken about it if not especially articulate or effective in our raging. I don’t even remember the word racist being used, I just remember being really exceptionally angry when a someone said something against a person of color. I wish there had been books like this back then. We had no language to confront racist behavior that we observed in our own families, at school and in the community - maybe we said something meekly polite like ‘that feels wrong’ or ‘I don’t agree with that statement’, but most of the time, we just suppressed our rage.