Mississippi state auditor Shad White is angry and he wants everyone in the state to know it. The reason for his rage is an anti-racism reading shelf program that was established by the Mississippi Humanities Council following the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
White kids typically feel relieved after reading Not My Idea since they know that police violence, discrimination, and microaggressions against people of color are wrong.
The program issues small grants to schools and public libraries throughout the state to enable them to purchase materials for children and young adults that address race, racism, and white supremacy. The $29,000 initiative, which the council says was largely funded by private donations and not tax dollars, has helped libraries purchase popular books including Helaine Becker’s Counting on Katherine: How Katherine Johnson Saved Apollo 13, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, and Matthew A. Cherry’s Hair Love.
White charges that these books, and many others currently on the shelf, teach white children “to hate themselves.” But his most virulent ire is reserved for the purchase of Anastasia Higginbotham’s 2018 children’s book, Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, by libraries and schools.
"Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness"
The illustrated sixty-five-page text, White told the Mississippi Free Press, has what he considers an offensive message—that “whiteness is bad.” And while White acknowledges that schools have a responsibility to teach students about the civil rights movement, he believes that books like Not My Idea subvert and distort the history of these efforts.
“Anti-racism books hurt kids, just like sexually explicit materials hurt kids,” he told the Press. “These ideas are a cancer to our society. They pull us apart.”
Other elected officials agree. State Representative Steve Toth, Republican of Texas, sent copies of Not My Idea to eighty-three of his GOP colleagues on May 7, 2021, to illustrate why they needed to support House Bill 3979, which limits what can be taught about race, gender, or “current events” in the state’s public schools. The bill passed and took effect on September 1.
And then there’s Chris Rufo, a senior fellow at the Koch Foundation-funded Manhattan Institute, who has spent the last two years writing denunciations and giving speeches that lambaste such Black and brown luminaries as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Ibram X. Kendi.
Like Shad White, Rufo is particularly incensed by Not My Idea. After conducting a 2021 survey to ascertain where and by whom the book was being used—he found thirty-one school programs in thirteen states that were teaching it—he told reporters at the rightwing British Daily Mail that “the book traffics in noxious principles of race essentialism, collective guilt, and anti-whiteness.”
Higginbotham, in an interview with The Progressive, calls these assertions an intentional misrepresentation. Her aim in writing the book, she says, was to both “stir up good trouble” and address race and racial justice from the perspective of a white woman raising white sons.
The idea for Not My Idea, and the illustrations she created to accompany the story, she explains, began to take root in 2014, two years after she enrolled her sons in a private school that is deeply committed to diversity and equity.
“After Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri, the Black women educators who lead this school invited the students’ families to come in and talk about race and racialization,” Higginbotham recalls. “This had a profound impact on my understanding of racial justice. It helped me see that whiteness was something I brought into the room in every interaction.”
Higginbotham wanted this awareness to extend to children. White kids, she continues, typically feel relieved after reading Not My Idea since they know that police violence, discrimination, and microaggressions against people of color are wrong. They also know that, when they attempt to talk to family members about it, they are often shut down and told not to concern themselves with such vexing matters.
“There’s no doubt that kids do not want racism and do not consent to it,” she says. “Not My Idea gives them a way to be a compassionate witness to their own humanity and their own concerns about racial equity.”
Nonetheless, she says that she was both taken aback and delighted when White held up a copy of the book to illustrate his revulsion over school and library expenditures. “I thought, ‘Wait a second, libraries and schools in Mississippi are stocking Not My Idea?’ I was elated,” Higginbotham laughs. “It meant that the book has found its way into the homes and lives of people looking for a way to talk to their kids about race and whiteness. It was thrilling.”
Jennifer Baumgardner, founder of Dottir Press, Higginbotham’s publisher, shares Higginbotham’s excitement and stresses that, despite an onslaught of derision, the book has received many stellar reviews. Kirkus, for one, called it “a necessary children’s book.” Jacqueline Woodson, praised it in O, The OPRAH Magazine, and School Library Journal called it “an honest explanation for kids about the state of race in America today.” To date, she says, more than 50,000 copies of the book have been sold.
“As a publisher and writer, I’ve always been drawn to talking about difficult things, things we’ve been socialized to stay silent about,” Baumgardner tells The Progressive. “Anastasia’s books, and the topics she’s written about in the Ordinary Terrible Things series that Not My Idea is part of—divorce, death, sexual boundaries, race, and sexual abuse—were a major reason I wanted to start a press. Not My Idea was our first release.”
But it has not been an easy road. “For the past year or year-and-a-half, Not My Idea has been used as a dog whistle for the right,” Baumgardner says. “They use jargon about the book to inflame the base. There’s been a steady barrage of messages to Dottir, emails saying things like ‘this is the most racist, anti-white book in the world’ and ‘you are a racist piece of shit for publishing this garbage.’ ”
That said, both Baumgardner and Higginbotham remain committed to writing and promoting works that support a more equitable and just society.
“I’ve seen the impact of Not My Idea in action,” Baumgardner adds. “I was with Anastasia for part of her book tour, and saw discussions in which painful things came out. In one workshop, the school administration revealed that 100 percent of the kids who’d been expelled the year before had been Black or brown. That was not a coincidence. Reading Not My Idea and then discussing it helps both children and adults engage whiteness and challenge white privilege. It’s a catalyst for social change.”