knitting librarian

Today was a holiday and therefore I was off work. Because my parents (our usual babysitters) go to Florida for the winter, in the past, this has been a date-day for John and me—but somehow I forgot that this year and didn’t suggest that he take the day off. I remembered last night about 10pm—too late for him to schedule a vacation day. Oh well! Maybe I’ll schedule a personal day for next month and see if we can work that out instead.

I spent much of the day in bed reading and dozing. I did get up and watch the last two episodes of Private Practice I had stored on our TiVo and picked up a cheese steak sub for lunch—yummy!

While I was watching I did some skimming of email and was surprised to read someone’s comment that their child’s preschool was closed today “like anyone in her school even cares about the holiday.” It got me thinking—mostly because I was offended by the comment—how could anyone be that ethno-centric that they didn’t see that Martin Luther King, Jr. did things that benefit our country. This, combined with something I heard on the radio saying that even today, people don’t know what King’s “dream” was, just hit me as sad and wrong. One of the lines from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that has always stood out in my mind is the statement, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

I hope that day comes too, but I see many people who still make judgments based on color—whether they are black or white. I’ve had a student accuse me of recommending a book to him “because I’m black and there’s a black guy on the cover of that book.” I went on to tell him about the book and that I’d read it and that it was one of my favorite books (true). My booktalk did convince him to check out the book and he ended up talking to his friends about the book. It’s still one of my most popular books and I recommend it equally to all students. When he came over to the computer to check the book out, I very quietly pointed out to him that by jumping on me like that, he’d done to me exactly what he accused me of doing—judging me unfairly without having any information about me. He acknowledged that I was right, he had. The fact that he recommended the book to others and I had kids constantly streaming in to borrow or get on the waiting list for the book told me that I’d done a good job of matching him to the right book.

There’s a saying posted in my library that says “Character is who we think we are, reputation is who others think we are.” I hope that my students understand that I look beyond their skin or eye or hair color and see who they are.

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