I recently posted about a decision by the Coretta Scott King (CSK) Executive Board to limit eligibility for the CKS Awards to those African Americans who are descended from people who were enslaved in the United States. A petition was delivered to rebuke this decision by a few controlling members. Then what?

I received some criticism for making this issue public. I believe that the CSK Awards are important enough to the youth literature community that everyone should be aware of its intended actions and shared documents that several people had sent to me. Secrecy about communal issues allows systemic oppression to continue by not allowing robust dialog across communities to examine and challenge policies and practices.

Since the letter was posted, decisions have been announced in the CSK Roundtable’s private discussion space in ALA Connect. I will not share what is meant to be private. I can suggest you contact members of the executive board with your questions.

This issue of who is Black isn’t one that’s confined to the CSK Executive Board and this bit of intragroup racism isn’t unique to Black people. I can remember in elementary school how students of Polish descent were picked on way more than me, the only Black girl in the grade. Eastern Europeans, Italians and Irish weren’t considered white.

The Black population of the United States is growing. In 2021, there were an estimated 47.2 million people who self-identified as Black, making up 14.2% of the country’s population. This marks a 30% increase since 2000, when there were 36.3 million Black people living in the U.S. more

I noticed the division between African Americans and recent African immigrants when I was teaching high school because the students maintained a divide between themselves. I noticed it again as an adult when we went from ‘IPOC’ to ‘BIPOC’. I think this division between Black and African American is meant to maintain cultural purity, by aren’t cultures meant to develop over time to adust to new technologies and ideologies? Aren’t all people of African origin oppressed?

There’s a good Code Switch podcast that just came out, “Remembering and Unrembering from Kigali to Nashville,” that relates the intersection of Black and African American histories here in the United States. The segment talks about the importance of telling our stories, of having them heard, and of creating new stories. “Speaking is liberating. It not only liberates the person who tells their own story, it also liberates others.”

The Coretta Scott King Award, the first award for African American youth literature is so important because of its historical presence in the African American community, and because it elevates the voices of those storifying the work of liberation. It’s attempt at cultural hegemony could easily limit the voices of Black authors and their communities in children’s publishing. I’m not comfortable with that and hope this policy with be removed. CSK will then need to work to repair its image.