All the GOATs We'll Never Know
On account of the small, stingy people we know all too well who stand between us and the better world we deserve
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
On Monday afternoon the full Board of my county library system voted to exclude a book depicting a trans child - no, not operated on - and then afterward (because Backwards is their brand) they voted on a policy to remove books from the children’s section that intend to affirm gender transitioning. (Yeah, it’s a head-scratcher of a policy, but as inartful and probably unenforceable as it is, its aim is clear.)
They professed that books like this, depicting children who actually exist and live in our community, are harmful to children if they’re in the children’s section of the library - which begs the question as to what they would do if one of the actual living, breathing children who are like the child in the book, were to show up and hang out reading books in the reading corner at a branch of the library?
“Are the other children being harmed by that child?” I asked nobody in particular.
”Shhhhh!” I was admonished by someone in the classic fashion of a true librarian. “They might tell you if you give them that chance.”
The policy - and, frankly, the overall national vibe of grown-ups dumping on children they actually despise in the guise of protecting them - is tragic because there are kids in real life who, like all the other kids in real life, deserve affirmation for being just who they are, no matter how badly library board members wish they could ban them (before settling, for now, on merely banning books about those kids).
The book in question, if you’re curious, is Melissa. (See this link for more). Once published as George, the author apparently first thought naming it “Melissa” would be a spoiler. Anyway, the book’s title, as it’s presently shelved, is Melissa but, as small-minded people are wont to do, the Board members itching to ban the book kept calling the book by its “dead-name” - which would be a diabolical form of cleverness on their part if not for the fact that they were simply complying with the widely accepted directive in book banning forums as to how to refer to this book.
Melissa. Like so many of the books for children that are about children, Melissa is doing the important work of serially representing the countless types of children who live among us, near and far. This concept, known as “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors,” transforms lives through the affirmations that ripple through children’s books about children.
Recently, in the early elementary Sunday school classroom at my church, the children heard one of these stories of affirmation, from a book called Beatrice’s Goat. It’s a great example of how a book can be a mirror and a window without the grown-ups becoming skeered their children will soon choose to become a Nigerian goat farmer if they read it.
The events of this true story took place in 1992, when Beatrice - Beatrice Biira being her full name - was 8. At the time of our story she was the second oldest child in a large family that received a goat from Heifer International. That goat - Mugisa (which means "Luck" in Beatrice's native language, Lukonzo) helped her family stay afloat financially and helped Beatrice stay in school long after many girls were forced to drop out.
The story in the classroom sticks to the wonderful tale of Beatrice and Mugisa and Beatrice's friend, Bunane, up to the point where Bunane's family is about to receive its own goat.
It's the stuff that happened after the storybook ends that’s important for us.
From that point where Bunane's family received their own goat, Beatrice was able to attend a private school in Kampala with the money Mugisa earned. Her story became the subject of a best-selling children's book and that event, in turn, sent Beatrice on a book tour in the U.S. where she later attended Connecticut College on a full scholarship.
Ms. Biira then went on to work as an intern for then-Senator Hillary Clinton. After her internship, she went on to be a key organizer and presenter at the Women in the World Summit. I looked her up on Twitter and LinkedIn and I see that she currently works for Heifer International.
There's really no way to know how many Beatrices are out there who had -- and have -- the same talents, gifts and aptitudes as Beatrice Biira but whose family did not get a goat or whatever little leg up they needed to reach whatever potential they had.
What I do know, with absolute certainty, is that these undiscovered Beatrices are legion. Some walk among us. There are way too many of them who, like "our" Beatrice from the storybook, are wearing clothes that they tear down the back every so often so they can keep wearing them as their bodies grow.
Some of these children are Melissas instead.
Some of them are not a Melissa yet they’re positively transformed because they’ve learned about Melissa - which is not to say that they’ll want to transition any more than those non-Beatrices who read about Beatrice probably did not decide to raise goats. They’re just better off because they now live in a slightly larger world where they may encounter the Beatrices and Melissas in their lives as relatable people. As neighbors. As study partners. As prospective confederates and collaborators in all sorts of adventures.
Can you imagine being privileged and lucky enough to live in a world where all of those Beatrices are given the opportunity to grow to their potential? Or more boldly wondered: what if children could choose to be whoever they wanted to become from all the choices opened up to them in the children’s section of their library?
I imagine that far better world all the time.
I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this ‘in order to love you, I must make you something else.’ That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you. – bell hooks
I imagine that world for the kids who are the spitting image of me when I was a kid.
And, because I’m not small, I imagine that world with equal ferocity for the kids who are nothing at all like me at any point in my life.
I dream of this selfishly, not selflessly, because I want to be operated on by the best surgeon, not the best surgeon who reminds me of myself; and because I want to hear the best music, not the best music that’s performed by singers who remind me of myself; and because I want to dine on the finest cuisine, not on the best grub that’s simmering on the stoves of chefs who remind me of myself; and because I want to ride across the best bridges and byways, converse with the most thoughtful people, and sleep on the most comfortable bed, utterly contemptuous of the filter that inquires as to whether the people involved in any of those things reminds me of myself, while being confident they’ve had the unfettered opportunity to be present in my life in any of these ways.
I pity those who consign themselves to live in the highly contracted, self-affirming, pustulant universe where everything must mirror back to themselves. I am enraged when they try to force others to suffer miserably in the mingy space they’ve badly engineered for themselves, let alone for others.
“I want people to see my color and my culture written all over me, because I am proud of the skin I'm in. It is an important part of my identity. What I don't want them to do is mistreat me because of it.” – Luvvie Ajayi
In the expansive world I imagine, the books that tell us about all those kids who are odd, or weird, or outcast - which describes every child in some way - are not removed from library shelves by puny people who wish those kids didn’t even exist.
The churlish deeds that our pestiferous county library board signed onto yesterday would never happen - and those phlegmatic people whose bitterness toward children is put on open display would not be suffered gladly - in the far better world we deserve to create for ourselves.
To be clear, I'm not saying every child should become a doctor or lawyer. I'm imagining a world without career hierarchies where the greatest poets can be found in every library because they were not steered or pressured into careers in medicine or law; where the child who loves goat farming can prosper and be enriched in that field so that their own child who may be most adept at surgery is not condemned to a life of making shoes for Nike; and where the child skilled at making mechanical things run who wishes to repair snow blowers instead of developing the next generation of vehicles that operate on renewable energy sources, can ultimately find their way to the Rockies and not to the rocket design department at SpaceX.
Every child is a Beatrice in their own unique way.
And whether the vomitous members of my library board want to hear this or not, every child is a Melissa in their own unique way.
What’s more, in all the ways that they’re neither of these characters, they’re definitely like someone else on the pages of books in that children’s section who makes real life children feel a little less different and a little less alone - and whatever character that may be, I pray that no library is attacking them either.
Indeed, rather than banning them, I want all of them to get their goats…which, for some child curious about the ways they feel different from what the world tells them they must be, may be a goat that comes to that child in the form of a book discovered on a library shelf.
We can't know where their journeys will take them if all the doors are opened up to the children in our community so it must be with wonder and curiosity - not a sense of self-affirmation - that we ought to do our part to create a more perfect world by making sure every child, Melissas included, gets the allegorical goat they deserve (and that we owe it to ourselves to send them).