The stakes could not be higher. It's about changing imagination.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas:
There are billions of dollars, billions of dollars being currently invested so that the new generation of children and teens have no idea what kind of world they're living in, what kinds of other people are living in it, and who they themselves are. Billions of dollars have been invested in the maintenance of the status quo. In my book, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, I actually put together a framework so that people could understand that the realm of pure imagination in Western science fiction and fantasy is eating the idea of Black death, erasure, and marginalization in each successive generation of children, because we have seen this happen. So, the stakes could not be higher.

It seems to me that it is clear that as soon as we began to see that we need diverse books movement and just the mass movements of the 2010s and publishers and Hollywood studios began to green light, as Tracey points out, creatives of colors work that they've been writing and dreaming up all along. They finally get a foot in the door for work that they are threading the needle to get through, and just that little bit of momentum scared the powers that'd be enough to invent entire campaigns against children's authors, illustrators, there are databases. We have to deal with this mess in state elections. It's influenced state elections. They know they're lying, but they're running scared because we have had centuries of... And I don't want to say a single story. I talked about that a bit in chat and I won't bring that here into the call. But they're really afraid, because if we truly have stories that reveal the truth of who we are one to another that give kids, to quote Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, "Glorious mirrors, windows and doors, then we are going to have a new world."

And what authors like those we've named, my sister Tracey and all these wonderful authors who are dealing with the nonsense of book bans are doing, they are seeding new worlds. Shout out Octavia E. Butler, the Parable of the Sower. That's what they're doing. The far right and people are lying about CRT and all bathroom bans, all this mess, they see this new world breathing as we turn this page. They're not going to be able to stop it, but what they're trying to do is impose as much pain as possible. The work that we are doing to stop the fear of a Black mermaid, some people think it's frivolous. Who cares about Black mermaids in a book or a movie, but the stakes could not be higher. It's all about changing imagination.

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