Episode #201: Special Bonus episode: Brendan Kiely, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Sayantani DasGupta, and Joanna Ho Discuss the Scholastic Censorship Controversy

In this special bonus episode, Brendan Kiely speaks with Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Sayantani DasGupta, and Joanna Ho about the recent censorship controversy involving Scholastic Education and the picture book Love in the Library.

Grace: Welcome to Book Friends Forever: Special Bonus Episode: Brendan Kiely, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Sayantani DasGupta and Joanna Ho discuss the Scholastic Censorship Controversy! 

As that very long title tells you this is a special and unusual episode for us! In some ways, this is kind of a throwback to my old kidlitwomen* podcast because neither Alvina or I are a part of the conversation that I am about to share with you.  If you remember, in episode 198, Alvina and I spoke about the Scholastic Controversy, where Scholastic demanded that Maggie Tokuda-Hall censor her references to America’s history of  racism in her author’s note in order to be a part of their Rising Voices collection.  Well, today, I bring you a conversation all about it with Maggie herself as well as two of the AANHPI Rising Voices collections mentors–Sayantani DasGupta and Joanna Ho. They are all in conversation with author Brendan Kiely.

Here is a quick bio about each of the speakers:

Brendan Kiely is The New York Times bestselling author of All American Boys (with Jason Reynolds), Tradition, The Last True Love Story, and The Gospel of Winter. His most recent book is The Other Talk: Reckoning with Our White Privilege.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the author Also an Octopus, illustrated by Benji Davies, The Mermaid, The Witch and The Sea, Squad, illustrated by Lisa Sterle, and Love in the Library illustrated by Yas Imamura with more books forthcoming.

Sayantani DasGupta is the New York Times bestselling author of the Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books, the first of which was The Serpent’s Secret. She is also the author of two other series set in the Kingdom Beyond multiverse, the Fire Queen series and the younger middle grade environmentally themed adventures, Secrets of the Sky.

Joanna Ho is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of many books for kids, including the NYtimes bestseller Eyes that Kiss Corners. She has received the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature Honor, a Golden Kite Award, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, and a Golden Poppy Award. 

 Just an FYI, as the authors do not introduce themselves–the first speaker is Brandon Kiely. The second speaker is Maggie Tokuda-Hall. The third speaker is Sayantani DasGupta and then Joanna Ho comes in.

TRANSCRIPT:

Brendan Kylie: Hello Maggie and Joanna and Sayantani. I'm grateful to be here to take some time to unpack and discuss the details and nuances and the rippling impact of Scholastic's Education Publishing Division's offer to publish their own edition of your book, Maggie, Love in the Library.

I thought a bunch of different ways to try to contextualize the story, but it seems way more appropriate for you to contextualize it for us since it's your story. So Maggie, it's also your courage that has turned this into the necessary community conversation that it's become. So would you mind first of all just sharing a bit about your book and then about Scholastic Education Division's decision to try to publish it and how they approached you?

Maggie: Yeah, so Love in the Library came out last year in 2022. It's illustrated by Yas Imamura. It's the true story of my maternal grandparents who met in a Japanese incarceration camp during World War II. I've been so lucky to work with Candlewick and with Yas for this whole book and everything around it. And then just a few weeks ago I received an email from Candlewick sub rights division saying that Scholastic wanted to license it, which was so exciting, but they had an edit that they wanted me to do to the author's note. And I kind of knew without looking what it was going to be, but I was still pretty galled by the entirety of it. In my author's note, I am pretty purposeful in contextualizing what happened to my grandparents is part of a continuum of state sanctioned violence that has been done upon different marginalized groups throughout American history and something that continues into our present.

And that paragraph was cut. I wasn't tremendously surprised by that because I get angry letters from Patriots and white Americans who feel like I'm being unfair or bitter or in one memorable case told me I belong in a camp for feeling that way. But they had also cut the word racism from the author's note altogether, the previous sentence leading into the paragraph had it twice, and they took them both out. And that's when it became very apparent to me that there was absolutely no compromise to be had here. And also that they'd tipped their hands with the erasure of the word racism because that has become such a hot topic word all of a sudden of something that we're supposedly not allowed to talk about in schools anymore. And to me, that made it very clear why they were making that decision and it was to preemptively capitulate to book banners, which makes no sense because books about Japanese incarceration are banned anyway just by dint of our identities.

We've been told our stories are not worthy, they're dangerous, they're just there to make white children feel bad or something. So they were trying to thread a needle with a center that just cannot hold. So I was furious and offended and grossed out and I sent voice memos to a few of my friends who were writers and I was like, "What?" And I emailed my agent first and was like, "Hey, on a scale of one to that lady who bought all her own books to get on the New York Times bestseller list, how much would it ruin my career to go public with this, because this is so messed up. This is so egregious." And I just knew I was not the only person that this was happening to. And she was like, "I am driving right now. Please wait half an hour to do anything bananas until I can give you my full attention."

But basically, the day that I saw that email, I decided I was going public with it. There were just a few courtesy things I wanted to do first. I wanted to check in with my editor at Candlewick who I knew wanted to do a call with me anyway because she had seen it but didn't know that they'd already communicated to me about it. And so she was worried how I was going to take it. And so we had a call scheduled the next day, and in the call my voice was shaking and I told her, "The answer's no." And she was like, "Yeah, clearly." And I was like, "But also I'm going public with this. They left a pretty robust paper trail including a PDF of their recommended edit with these red lines through so much of my text." And she was like, "Okay."

And they've been deeply supportive from that conversation on as soon as they knew what was going on. Candlewick has been very much behind me. And as soon as I hung up with her, I pressed publish on the blog post that I had written about it, and I hit send on the tweet that I had had ready for it. I think she thought I was going to give them a few hours heads up, but she got literally five minutes. And I did that in the hopes that potentially Scholastic might change some of how they handle their business when it was called to light what they were doing. And I do feel like Scholastic has a particular obligation. Not every publisher specializes in the education market, but Scholastic does. And it means that they have a higher responsibility, frankly, than a lot of other publishers. Someone who just publishes comic books for funsies does not have the same obligation to historical truth and how we communicate it with future generations as Scholastic does.

And so I know that I am uniquely privileged in a lot of ways. I have really robust emotional support and I also have financial support and so if I ruin my own career by stepping forward about something like this, it will be devastating, but it will also be something that I can weather in a way that I know a lot of other people cannot. And so ever since then, it's just been a lot of unraveling with this situation and that's kind of why I was excited to chat with Joanna and Sayantani today because it wasn't until after I had gone public that I learned that this didn't end with me. I wasn't the only Asian American author who was being puppeted, trying to be puppeteered in this way. And so it's been pretty galling from start to finish.

Brendan Kylie: I appreciate your sharing all that with us and I think it's one of the gifts of a space like a podcast because short snippets in an article can never do justice to your full story and never do the justice, I think to the emotional story. So often things are taken out of context and even as you share this right now to think about all the effort you put into communicating and connecting with a lot of folks even before going public, but for I mean PW, to allow Scholastic CEO to just simply publish a line that says, "We wish," I'm not quoting here, but it's essentially, "We wish that Maggie had kept it close before going public." I mean...

Maggie: To be fair, Peter didn't say that. I think that was someone else. That was the initial statement was not from the CEO of Scholastic.

Brendan Kylie: Thank you for correcting me. But it's important I think you get the chance to share all that. And as you said, the story doesn't end with you, it continues and so I wonder since Joanna and Sayantani you're here, if you could also share a bit about where you fit into this, what does it mean to be part of the mentorship program? What does it mean to think about the Rising Voices Library collection and how did that then begin to affect your roles with the institution and with your own careers?

Sayantani: Joanna and I and two other author educators were asked to be mentors. So it's essentially a consultancy role, now I understand with this Rising Voices collection, which was built around uplifting AANHPI voices, so Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander voices. When we were asked, and Joanna and I have discussed this, I think our perception was that we would be deeply involved in choosing the 150 books in this collection. So it's a K-5 collection, there are 25 books per grade level. Five of those books in each grade level are considered anchor texts, meaning their texts that come along with teachers guides and lesson plans. And there are other teacher support materials that come along with these rising voices collections.

And again, this was collection number five. So 150 books times four had already been put together around themes such as Girls of Color in STEM, et cetera.

When Joanna and I became involved, I think it wasn't too long until we realized that we weren't going to be that involved in the picking of books. Rather, we are being invited to the Scholastic offices for two solid days during which we would look over the books that have already been pre-selected and do some panel recording and some other publicity work around this collection. So fast-forward, Joanna and I go to Scholastic. We do all of this work and we can talk about the holes and gaps that we found in the collection and the way that Joanna and I tried to suggest other texts and ways to kind of fill in those missing voices. But I just want to fast-forward to the Wednesday. So Maggie, you posted your tweet on a Tuesday maybe, is that right?

Okay, yeah.

Maggie: I have no idea anymore. Time is construct.

Sayantani: It's a colonial construct. Linear time is a colonial construct. There you go.

So it was a Wednesday evening. I just remember I happened to be scrolling around on Twitter. I happened to see your book and your book hit my eye. You mentioned, your book and your name hit my eye because only a few, maybe a week before Joanne and I had strongly suggested that your book be included in this collection, and we can talk about that, how that went down. And I read your blog post and my first reaction was fury and anger, and then I said, "Okay, no, no, step back. Write an email to the team and confirm that this is what went down." And I did so, and it was confirmed. Then we can talk about how that went down but the next 24 hours were a really difficult time period. We ended up having a very large meeting with the team and other members of other divisions of Scholastic, including the president and chair of the board. And in the end, I ended up deciding to step away from the mentorship and Joanna made a different choice and you can absolutely talk about that.

But Joanna, do you want to talk about how Maggie's book, how that came into discussion?

Joanna: Sure.

I'm going to backtrack even further than that and just add. So I was approached over a year ago to be a mentor for the collection and at that time I was told that I was the only mentor being asked and that they only wanted to have one for this collection. So I was super clear, that's a horrible decision. I won't be a mentor if I'm the only one. There's no way that one East Asian person can represent all of AANHPI. So that was a caveat for me. I think what I took from that conversation, one is there was clearly a huge need for lots of mentors to help guide and curate and do all the things for this collection. I think at that point, because they listened, they brought on multiple other members and mentors. It felt like, okay, they're here to actually listen to mentors and to take our input into this process of creating a collection for AANHPI stories.

I would second everything that Sayantani said. I think we went in, I know I for sure went in thinking we would have a much stronger role in curating books. We were also told we would be helping to work with rising or aspiring authors, particularly from groups who have very, very few published, traditionally published stories. So traveling to places to work in workshops, et cetera. So it felt like a really almost too good to be true opportunity to really publicize and share and amplify stories that really need to be told.

So fast-forward to this weekend, I think throughout the process, before we even got to that weekend in New York, we had really pressed just over email, when will we see the collection? When do we contribute, when do we get to see what's in there? When do we get to talk about it?

We have to have discussions we don't even know. And then it became clear, oh, they've already done a ton of this work. We were sent a spreadsheet with lots of books on it, at which point, Sayantani and I and the other mentors also dove in and started to read a lot of the books and left a lot of comments, provided a ton of suggestions of other books that they should consider.

Fast-forward again to the weekend, we were shown over that time, the 25 books that had been selected as the 25, what was our input there. But the weekend felt like the priority was in the filming and then the publicity and creating the marketing materials, which felt actually really meaningful in many ways because there were a lot of conversations had around the importance of a collection like this around the harm of having such invisibility, any erasure historically of AANHPI stories.

We talked very much in depth about the necessity of speaking to truth, of speaking about true history, of having true and critical and honest conversations about all of the things. And so when this happened, it felt not only, it's like a betrayal... You felt just super used that you're being used to market and sell materials and not being listened to at all. Because what happened to Maggie's story, what was asked of Maggie's story, it was a complete... It just went in the face of everything we had spent two days talking about and filming and really I think pouring our souls out about the need and the importance of these things.

I was in Vietnam when... So I woke up one morning and my phone had just... I don't go on, I'm not on Twitter very actively anymore and so there were just lots of people who knew I was involved, my agent or friends, "Hey, you should probably see this. We know you're on vacation."

So that was a whirlwind for me catching up on what had happened. I ended up staying up until 2:30 Vietnam time to participate in the meeting that Sayantani discussed. And I was waiting until that meeting to see the response from Scholastic and their leadership to decide whether or not I would stay on as a mentor. I think in that meeting Sayantani and I think left feeling differently. I left feeling like, "Okay, that the bar is not high at this point if they're even saying the right things, which I think in my experience doesn't even happen often enough." So this is not to say that's this is enough, but that's a first step. Were they saying, were they listening? Did it feel like the apologies were real? Did it feel like they were hearing what we were saying in that meeting?

Did it feel like they would commit to new next steps? It felt in some way that that was happening in that first meeting. And since then I would say it feels... I've been in, because Sayantani and I are also both trade authors at Scholastic, it's been clear that not every team at Scholastic is operating with this kind of mentality, at least in my experience. And I think in somewhat Sayantani's as well.

And so be as I've been in multiple different meetings with different groups within Scholastic, and I think for me it's felt like there have been efforts and the right things are being said. I am currently skeptical, cautiously hopeful to see what really is going to come about what happens at this point. There have been other meetings, Maggie, I don't know if you want to talk about that other meeting as well, but I'll pause there and let others jump in.

Maggie: Yeah, no worries. Yeah, there was another meeting that I was a part of, that was the meeting the only direct contact with Scholastic I've had throughout all of this. And it was the CEO, Peter Warwick from Scholastic Rose...

I'm sorry, now I'm forgetting everybody's names. If other people can chime in.

Oh no, we're all in trouble.

Anyway, there were a lot of division heads from Scholastic, including from the education division, et cetera,

Speaker 5: Rose, is the head of the Scholastic education division.

Maggie: Right. I brought with me some people from Candlewick who were just, I think there were in solidarity with me and then Joanna was there and the two educator mentors who were on the mentorship were there as well. Sayantani was not, which I had hoped that they would invite you anyway. And from my point of view, I was hoping for... Because at that point they'd already a... At that point, they'd already apologized publicly and so I'm not really interested in being frustrated to... The point was not to rake them over the coals. The point was not to make them feel bad. What I wanted was a full and honest recounting of what had happened, and I wanted evidence of concrete changes that were being made to make sure that no other marginalized creator would be put in the same position that I was put in again.

And I was not able to receive either of those things from that meeting. I think the meeting was really well-intentioned, and as I said there, I appreciate their forthrightness in how they've apologized. I do think that it is a solid apology, but from my point of view and also from the point of view of restorative justice, the quality of apology does not matter as much as the evidence that you have learned from the situation and will not do it again. And for me personally, the honest recounting was a really big part of it because part of what got cut from my author's note is about honestly retelling sins that have been committed in our nation's past and in our present. And without accounting for those we can never heal. There's no moving forward from a situation where we don't acknowledge the truth of what has occurred.

And since that was not offered in that meeting, I don't think out of malice, but the editor who made the decision was not present and nobody who was in the meeting felt comfortable speaking for that person. If it were me, I would've come ready to that meeting to answer the question of what happened, because it seems like a basic starting point. No one was ready for that. Again, don't think that was out of malice, but it is what happened. And so in the meeting, I felt so many good intentions, but I could see a breakdown already happening between the self-professed credo of the company and what has been going on within the culture at lower levels. And I think that leadership dictates that culture in a lot of ways. And if they're talking about, well, we need to make sure that we don't lose these markets, decisions are going to be made accordingly. That was not what was said in the meeting. Nobody said something like that. That is me connecting dots. And I just want to be really clear. It's not that they said that this is me making assumptions.

And so I don't even necessarily blame the editor who made this choice. I strongly suspect that there is likely a culture where they felt that that was the necessary decision in order to use this book that the mentors had championed for so specifically that they had already internally flagged as a problem. And so I think that's what happened. I have no idea because Scholastic hasn't told me directly, but that would be my best guess.

Sayantani: Just to jump in, Maggie, I really appreciate hearing your side of the story because I wasn't in that meeting, as you say. And it is giving me a three-dimensional perspective on what happened. I'm a Scholastic trade author, I have published seven books with Scholastic, I have four more coming out. So my publishing career and  in life is deeply tied to this company. So that said, I felt like I was being a good citizen when I went and agreed to be a mentor for scholastic education. That said, I think what happened with your book and your courage to come out and speak about it was like a dam breaking and so many, as you just said, so many other connections started to fall into place for me. So Those connections include things like when Joanna and I and the other mentors first got the initial list of books, I noticed that to my knowledge, there were no queer AANHPI creators and or stories involving different structures of families or queer young people in them. When I brought it up, the first thing I was told was, "Oh, but that's more of a YA issue. This is a K-5 collection." 

Maggie: Who? Sorry, and that's new.

I love hearing that.

Sayantani: A kindergartner having two moms or somebody having a crush: That's a pretty standard K-5 issue. And in fact, I in good faith, went to the team with a number of names of authors who I knew wrote in the elementary/middle grade space. And I said, "Well,  what about things? What about these people?" In retrospect, I was being gaslighted, but in the moment I felt like my suggestions were being taken seriously. I was asked to spell out last names and other things. But at some point, and Maggie, you kind of connected the pieces, at some point the actual words were said out loud that, "Oh, if we include X, Y, Z, these books won't be picked up in Texas, Florida, other communities with particularly loud and stringent ban books communities, folks or laws in them." And when we jumped on that and pushed back on that, it was rolled back but it was said.

When I noticed that so many of the books in the collection were a very [inaudible 00:25:51], but they were very othering. They were either othering by being narratives that were distant, so not diasporic narratives, narratives set in the home country. Ultimately They were othering by being exoticized narratives. There were stories about food and mangoes and colorful holidays and colorful [festivals] [inaudible 00:26:12].

Maggie: Not mangoes, Sayantani, not mangoes.

Sayantani: I love a good mango but the mango became representative of that brand, that flavor of exoticism.[I mentioned it so much that eventually people] were making jokes about it. People were sending me mango emojis and I felt like they were hearing me. But yet, so when you put the pieces together of resistance to queer narratives, detoothed and depoliticized narratives always about holidays or food stuffs or set in home countries, not in the diaspora, and then comments about markets and then [Maggie] your revelation, your bravery, everything just fell into place for me. And the thing I think I was most upset about after being upset about what had happened to you was the fact that had you not spoken up, had I not happened to see your tweet because I was tired and scrolling around on Twitter, unlike Joanna, who knows that there are better things to do in life, had I not happened to see your tweet, what happened to you and what undoubtedly was happening to the entire collection and other collections would've been done in my name, in my name without my knowing.

And what I said in the meeting was, "Forget the books, forget the publishing career. "How dare you move forward in this way against somebody who I stand with."

And it felt like such a deep and cutting betrayal. And there's a part of me, honestly that still wonders if they just thought, Maggie, that you would agree and they just thought Joanna and I might...

Maggie: I think they absolutely thought I would agree or they wouldn't have just done it so casually.

Sayantani: Part] of me wonders if it's because we're Asian American women.

Joanna: I was just going to say that. I was just going to say...Yeah, I just ditto everything you just said. I think there was a real fear of my whole career has been an anti-racist education in running professional development and that is why I became an author. That's why I became an educator, all the thing.

Sayantani: I'm a race and ethnicities studies professor. That is my job.

Joanna: And to Maggie, your point and me as the administrator at a school I've done... My career has also been really tied to restorative practices and restorative and liberatory practices. So everything you said about the meeting that was not super successful, it really resonates. I think that there is for sure a theme. I think there's a part of, in past collections, mentors have not been involved. We were told multiple times that we were the most vocal, the most wanting to be involved.

Sayantani: Some of the mentors, I mean to their credit, were very famous.

Joanna: They're very famous musicians, whoever. And so this happens to be our field. We're both authors, we're also educators. We know books and we're passionate about books.

Sayantani: And we're tied to anti-racist practices in all of our very professional [lives] [inaudible 00:30:02].

Joanna: That's what we write about. That's what we do. So I think that there's for sure that element of not expecting us to be vocal, of wanting to be vocal and then continuing to be vocal. And I think that absolutely has something to do with us being Asian American and the expectations in stereotypes that come along with that, the unexpectedness of the strength with which we speak and push back. So I think that...

Sayantani: Do you want to talk about Maggie's book and how we...?

Joanna: Yeah, I was just going to spring that up. So, in that collection, so I brought up your book specifically Maggie, I'm obsessed with your book. I think I've told you that like 8 billion times. But I brought it up and we also noticed there weren't any books about internment at all in the collection. I think to your point... So I agree with what Sayantani's saying. I also think one reason this was baffling to me is because one of my books was included in there, and that speaks to immigration. It talks about when Yo-Yo Ma played at the border of Mexico and Texas and it speaks very explicitly about racism. 

And so it was on some level a surprise and on some level, totally not a surprise. So the couple things I want to talk about. One is, in bringing up your book, I brought up multiple dynamics within what was happening in this process and on this team is I brought up the book in conjunction with WaterCress, which is another really incredible book. And we were told  multiple times, we're only going to look at the books that are here in the room in the collection, and we have to push really hard. "No, I know. These books have to be looked at. These books need to be seen. Please have somebody go pick them up from the back list storage area, wherever that is downstairs."

Sayantani: Because they were there. They had to consider.

Joanna: They had them.

Sayantani: They were just put in the discard pile or the not no pile. So it wasn't hard for people to get them.

Joanna: There was just a lot of resistance. And so we pushed, they were eventually brought up. All the mentors, read both books. Gust saw the value obviously in both books. And it felt like actually a really rich conversation. It felt like they listened and that the team agreed. What I would say here is that there are members of the team that are younger, more junior, and are all of color. And I think what I sensed in the conversations when we were able to be in the room together is that they are voicing many of the same things that we were voicing and they're not being listened to and that there's some culture happening on this team where their voices aren't being heard and there clearly is what, to what Sayantani was saying, a dynamic of what the expectations are of what sells, of how they want to sell and what they want to and won't include. And there are people on the team that I know also have issues with some of these philosophies.

But they're paying for it.

Yeah, for sure.

Maggie: May I just interject for a second, which is just that School Library Journal wrote, the editor wrote a letter about this, but she interviewed somebody who specializes in diversity, equity, and inclusion. And what Lily said, I thought sums up what you're talking about so well, which is when companies don't take a stance on issues, meaning systemic racism and justice inequity, sexism, transphobia, all of these, that means that their ability to take action on these issues is only as good or as bad as their worst informed decision.

Joanna: When I read that, I was like, "Yep, that's totally..." I thank you for bringing that up. So I think that there's dynamic here, and then I think that goes to actually what you talked about, Maggie, in the meeting, which is just that this whole situation aside, if we move into a broader perspective of what's happening global in our nation and why companies feel so much pressure to capitulate to these bigoted, racist, homophobic voices, is that-

Sayantani: But Joanna, they're not even capitulating because it's not like somebody protested Maggie's book or pushed back against it.

Joanna: It's preemptively and thank you.

Sayantani: It's preemptive.

Joanna: Yes, you're right. Yep.

Sayantani: It's [apalling]  [inaudible 00:34:30] the word. We're carrying water for fascist agendas. We're doing the work of the book banners for [them]... They're a minority but if publishers keep anticipating that someone might or might not feel some way about something, then we're doing their work for them.

Joanna: Which is... Yes, thank you. Which I think that goes to the responsibility of what you were saying, Maggie, which is just that publishers and especially Scholastic because of the market and because of their school and education focus have a responsibility that they are not stepping up to and they're trying to play both sides. They want to have a credo, but they also want to sell to everyone and you just can't do both. You have to take a stand and you have to make a statement and you have to act upon the credo in a way that actually supports the credo, not by making everyone happy and being kind and empathetic to all, and then changing your vocabulary so that things sell in different markets. But by taking a stand and angering the people who should be angered and supporting the people who need to be supported.

Sayantani: Because there are kids in Texas and Florida, there are queer AANHPI kids. There are kids who need this history regardless of what their identity is, who we're not supporting. There are teachers and librarians who are begging for complex texts that don't flatten or depoliticize these issues and our communities and our histories. All over Texas and Florida, we're not doing them any favors. We're doing them a disservice. So Maggie, I think you'll appreciate this part.

Joanna turns to me and she says, in this meeting in person at Scholastic, “Have you seen any books about Japanese incarceration in these 150 books?” And I said, "Oh my gosh, no, I haven't." And so she hands me your book after they've brought it out of storage or whatnot, and we both asked, "Well, why wasn't Maggie's book included in the first place? This is gorgeous. This is stunning."

And what we were told in the moment, and I, like a big goofball, bought it in the moment was, "Oh, oh, of course we agree with you. This is an absolutely stunning book." And it is. [They said]: “It's a stunning, beautiful book, but it's about love. And there are a teenage couple on the cover, and so that might be off-putting for elementary schoolers because it might be thought of as a romantic book or a somehow sexual book.” And of course Joanne and I laugh and we shut them down and we're like, "This is not that at all." And everybody's grandparents met somehow. We do the whole thing. In retrospect, I just can't believe because I read, I sat there in the room and I read your author's note and it felt so on point and so sharp[and]  because I had bought into this pantomime of progressive politics that was at work in the room.

I believed this narrative about, "Oh, we thought that a couple in love in a library, in an incarceration camp might be two kissy kissy for elementary schoolers.” It was obviously not the issue. It was obviously always your author's note. In retrospect, when the scales fell from my eyes, that was so clear. In the moment, I was not able to see that and so I really just thank you for speaking up and turning on the lights for me because I really think what's scary and dangerous is these half-truths that we're told – just what Joanna was talking about. These half-truths about “we're uplifting voices but not those ones and don't say that thing.”

Maggie: I think in my blog post, not to put myself to sound like the worst in the world, but what I stand by, I stand by all of it. But a phrase that I find myself revisiting a lot is publishing our dubious white ally. And I say that from so much experience. This is the incident that I came forward with. I was a bookseller. I've worked in marketing for Chronicle books. I worked at iBooks for Apple negotiating placement in that store with all of the major publishers, which means that I had conversations with people really high in sales for every traditional publisher. That was my job for a while. I've seen this industry from every single angle. I have had these conversations so many times about people where they want to mollify the progressives, who make the media that they require in order to have product versus where the rubber meets the road when they have to sell to this larger audience and that includes racists.

People who genuinely support not only the silencing of marginalized voices, but the actual eradication of the people that they belong to are part of their customer base and they are unwilling to cut ties with those people when they make decisions like this. That's what they're communicating to every marginalized author whose stories they promised was so important to them. And also the next time someone tells me one of my books is "important" at the same time is finding a way to diminish it, I will be dropkick them into an active volcano. I think I have hit my absolute limit of what I am capable of listening to with this. I don't know that I would've come forward if I didn't have so much experience also advocating for other people's books in these circumstances. I was a bookseller when Two Boys Kissing came out, and I took that book into so many schools and I had to go to bat for it constantly.

And that is also how I know that you can do more than provide annotations for your books. So one of the things that I ask Scholastic about in that meeting, because to me this was central, it's like if you really want to prove to me that you intend to make sure this never happens again, I want to know how you're actually working to stop book bans. I don't want to hear anything like nice statements about how you never support censorship. I want to know what you're doing. And their answers were, "We provide annotations to librarians and teachers who are trying to fight a book ban." And that basically just means sending the good press and reviews about those books. For context that is on my landing page of my website. That is not something that a billion-dollar company should be offering. That is available for free everywhere.

They also said they do that through their curation, which was a really disappointing answer because this was a curatorial problem that had just occurred and that's why we were having this meeting at all. And I hope that it didn't show on my face, but I'm pretty sure it did that. That was a very insufficient answer to me. And they also said that one of the people who was in the meeting works with PEN America on a special task force about this. That's great. I am glad to hear that and I don't mean to diminish her hard work, but none of those things are lawyers. None of those things are money. 

Sayantani: No, I mean, as somebody who is at Scholastic, what was confusing to me was how… The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

Brendan Kylie: Or they do.

Maggie: Do you think that's it?

Sayantani: But I mean, what happened to me was that moment that I quit,  every single person I know in trade from the newest members of a publicity team or a marketing team to the senior people on that team, editorial, president [of trade] [inaudible 00:43:33] was reaching out to me with support, was saying a hundred percent were just as enraged. Personal notes, public notes, it was an avalanche of support from trade but maybe that's because I have years of a relationship with trade. But they were...

Maggie: Outraged.

Sayantani: outraged and baffled as if they were me coming in from the outside. And so what I think I feel a little bit heartened by is the fact that I went and I took all of this [to them]: “There's no LGBTQI rep I don't think in these collections unless it's by accident.” And I went and I dumped this in trade’s lap And I said, "What are you going to do about this? What are we going to do about this?"

And at least to now, I really feel like trade has been trying to step in and do things.

Maggie: Well, that's the thing though, is this is not trade's fault. Trade is so unrelated to what is happening here in so many ways.

Sayantani: As a Trade author, I feel like, and I was in distress, did they step in. Well, and maybe not just because I'm a trade author, maybe because it's the same company, and they were shocked that these people weren't doing what they were supposed to do. I feel like at least they've stepped to some degree. What I feel really disappointed and frustrated about is that education marketing.

I mean, I'm not even sure that first day they understood how egregious what they asked of you was. It wasn't even like they were doing bad things and then covering them up, they gave me all the receipts. They emailed me the exact PDF with all the red circles and the word racism cut out, and they said, "Yes, this is what we asked of her." So what I find just shocking and egregious is the lack of self-awareness and I think that that lack of self-awareness then translated into, in the meeting Joanna and I were in, I thought lack of any sort of apology. There were things said in passive voice, mistakes were made, missteps were taken.There was no recognition, responsibility, reparation, remorse, all those [aspects of] restorative justice.

It wasn't there.

Maggie: No, I was just going to chime in to what Sayantani was saying. I want to be really clear that I don't blame trade people in trade for what is happening. I don't think anyone's looked at David Leviathan's career and been like, "There's somebody who's into queer erasure." It's clearly that's not what's happening here. But I do think at the highest levels within Scholastic, they have made some really smart choices about how to present to their company. Here's the stuff that we publish ourselves versus how they then do the ugly work of selling everything. And they are not limited to their own trade published books when they sell everything so they're making different choices. And I think for a really long time they've been able to effectively balance those two things in a way that appeased everyone publicly.

My DMs were full of people who felt otherwise inside but didn't feel comfortable talking about it out loud, didn't want their name associated with any of this, which I think is really fair because I'm genuinely worried. I've tanked my career with this and this is the only career I've built myself toward. I've been in children's lit since I graduated college. That's the first thing I started doing was being a kids' bookseller and I've just worked my way through until now I'm supporting myself as an author. And it could be over because of this. This could be why another editor doesn't want to work with me. A bookseller today actually was like, "Have other publishers been coming up to you and saying like, Ooh, we want your next book." And I was like, "No, absolutely not. I haven't heard from any publisher other than Candlewick who's great, but no other publisher's like, "That whistleblowing lady. I want more of her work."

That's not like a sexy thing. And so, I don't know. I want to be clear because I have seen a lot of demonizing of Scholastic as an entire company and on the one hand I understand why that happens, but I think flattening the effort of all the people who work in trade is a real disservice because they have also published so many important books. And so, I don't know, I guess I just wanted to be able to say that into a microphone at least once because it made me sad to see that happening. And Twitter is not always the best place to be like, "Actually."

Sayantani: Make this nuanced

Maggie: I don't know that you understand. Yeah. What I'm saying is on their education side where they have a higher, I think a higher responsibility, that seems to be where they've let it down the most.

Brendan Kylie: Joanna, I know you wanted to say something else as well.

Joanna: No, I was feel like anything I was going to say about trade has been said. So the only thing that I would add is I think at this point, so as far as what I understand is happening internally with Scholastic is one, so we've seen the public apologies. We've seen the public statements. We had the super disastrous meeting with Maggie, which also didn't mirror some of the things we've saw at other meetings. Honestly, I think that they were, not to give them any excuses because they should be nervous. I think they should have been much more prepared than they were for that meeting. And that's something that the mentors who are at the meeting have been pretty clear with them about on the backend. So things that they have committed to, in addition, obviously asking Maggie to contribute her book as is and as it was written, as it always should have been, and the public apology, they've committed to doing a really deep internal review.

They are looking at bringing in an external person that could be positive, that could be negative, but I think that they're... We'll see what happens to help them really do a deep, I think reflection. They're done a lot of circles across the entire company, like listening circles to hear how the rest of the companies, this is what I'm hearing from the leadership, so take it with whatever, as many grains of salt as you want. And so they've committed to listening to revamping the entire curation process with an eye towards including mentors more deeply in that process of looking back through all the collections, not just the AANHPI collection and to see what's included, but also with a very specific lens towards LGBTQ books and inclusion in all of the collections. And then they've also committed to not, I think, request edits both, I think across the company so that's fair.

Sayantani: That was a pre-standing rule across the company.

Joanna: Which wasn't being followed, clearly.

Yeah. So that's another thing.

Maggie: Yeah, I'm not super impressed by our will. We have will already but now we'll follow it.

Joanna: it's a constant wrestle because everything that's been said here, I'm just here snapping my fingers. And it's just this idea that a collection like this is needed and it's important. And that the erasure of AANHPI history and stories in schools in particular is almost complete. And so the opportunity to be able to create a really powerful inclusive collection that can be in schools is one that I hope can be done well. And so I think there's one part of me that feels like somebody has to stay and be critical and be watching and be observing what the process is and be pushing from within that particular specific process. I think my fear is if I leave, maybe they bring someone who just is a yes person. here's my wrestle in terms of the line and the tensions. One is it takes time to really do a process, a thoughtful review like this well, and there's a sense of urgency that's like, "Why don't we have answers?" But it's like if you're really going to do the reflection on this deep cultural, philosophical problem that exists, it's going to take time. So one, is being patient. One is knowing that it's messy. They might have good intentions, they might set out and do the things that are, the things that... The correct steps, correct, whatever that means. But that is going to be messy. It's not going to be like suddenly, "Oh, we figured it all out and it's a beautiful thing, and now we have a perfect process." And so I think figuring out my own internal compass of watching what happens and what the clear next steps are and will be, and whether it does feel like they are based on having listened to and heard the feedback that has been shared, not just by mentors, by the public, by Maggie, by internal people, by former employees across the board.

Will they take steps that feel genuine and restorative and genuinely work towards healing and change? Will we be able to create a collection that I feel like we can really genuinely be proud of and will Scholastic really take steps to stand up against book banning against the bigoted folks who are trying to silence not just our voices, but our entire lives? Those are things that I wrestle with but I think the reason I choose to stay is because I do believe in something like this, and I hope to be able to add a critical voice, but it's also, again, like I shared before, I'm very cautiously skeptically hopeful, and I'm waiting it out to see what I end up... How long I end up staying.

Brendan Kylie: I think I've thoroughly, enjoyed is the wrong word, but I'm honored to have listened to the three of you speak as much as you have and I long for more. And I also really hope that to the points that all three of you are making, that there is a lot more listening, but also listening is an action and action should follow. And there's just no way to get around what the three of you who've already said it in so many other ways as well about saying one thing, but doing another. You can't dismantle racism in an institution without actually participating in that dismantlement as opposed to perpetuating it and turning a blind eye and or profiting from it because that's part of your profit margin.

But I think that it's an inspiring thing to listen to the three of you speak, but also Maggie, it was inspiring that even when you were joking earlier about will the whistle-blower get a pat on the back? Well, the whistleblower will always get a pat on the back from admirers and fellow authors and I know that's not financial compensation, but it is a hell of a lot of love that we all have for you.

Sayantani: And solidarity.

Brendan Kylie: And solidarity, absolutely. And I hope if there's anything else that you wanted to share before we close out, I know we'd appreciate hearing it.

Maggie: Yeah, I guess I imagine a lot of aspiring or current children's book creators might be listening to this and I would say publishers are the gatekeepers to our careers in so many ways, but they can't exist without us. They can't make anything of value without us. And if we let them silence our voices, what future are we serving. When we make these choices about, "Yes, it's okay to remove this here. No, I can say this a little bit softer there." When we try to make ourselves squishier and more friendly and less frightening to an audience that would frankly be just as happy with us dead, we serve a really bleak future. We serve the present that we are currently in that nobody is happy with. So if we want change, and I imagine that's why you write for kids, you have to make some of these tough calls sometimes. And I think if more of us start doing it, publishers will be more afraid of doing it to us.

Everyone's snapping. It's not just silence.

Brendan Kylie: You can't hear.

Joanna: We're all dumbfounded by your powerful eloquence.

Brendan Kylie: I'm hoping for rousing music at the end of that. That's like a crescendo. That's beautiful.

Sayantani: That was gorgeous. That was gorgeous.

Brendan Kylie: Beautiful. Beautifully, beautifully said.

Joanna: Maggie, did this just come out of your mouth?

Maggie: I just passed out. I have no idea what happened.

Joanna: Did just come out of your mouth that beautifully, or did you write it down first? It's so amazing.

Grace: And so that was the Book Friends Forever: Special Bonus Episode: Brendan Kiely, Maggie Tokuda-Hall. Sayantani DasGupta and Joanna Ho discuss the Scholastic Censorship controversy! I hope you found this conversation thought-provoking, I know I did.
Alvina and I will be releasing our regular episode later this week where we catch up with each other’s lives, talk about what’s on our minds, and share with each other what we’re grateful for. I hope you drop by for that as well! 

I’m grace lin and happy reading!