Racial Divides are Hurting Our Children. Here's What Path To Publishing is Doing About it.
There's a price we pay for failing to address the growing divide between races. The highest price is not paid by adults, however, but by children.
That price is often emotional, mental, psychological, physical, and financial as they deal with divisions in their families, incarceration of parents, and growing-up years spent bouncing from home to home or foster family to foster family.
Adverse Childhood Events are situations children face that have been identified as so traumatic that the impact on the child not only lasts a lifetime but can be passed down to the next generation. The more of these events that take place in a child's life, the higher the risks are for poor mental and emotional outcomes - such as suicide or being drawn into criminal activity – later in life, and the higher the risk for their own children, as well.
Bullying and discrimination based on race or ethnicity are two of these events. When combined with other adverse events, such as a parent who is jailed, living in an unsafe neighborhood, food insecurity, physical or emotional neglect, parental separation or divorce, it can create a lethal cocktail of mental, emotional, psychological, and physical health problems that leave families in financial ruin and poverty.
It doesn't have to be this way. What if we as writers, authors, creatives, and publishers can change things?
We can!
First, though, we have to write about and publish these topics and issues. And more importantly, what we write and publish has to be content written with the intention of striking up conversations so that we can, next, talk about it. We have to be willing to hold open and honest conversations about the issues surrounding race and other differences. The current ways of holding racial conversations - specifically, where we talk about each other rather than to each other - aren't easy. And that has to change. And that is what the movement we are creating behind the novel, The Price We Pay, is about. This is the debut publication on Path To Publishing's imprint, PTP Press.
Each year at the Path To Publishing "Act Like an Author, Think Like a Business" conference in the general sessions and curriculum, we teach about how to turn your book into a movement, be it fiction or non-fiction. Well, here at Path To Publishing, we practice what we teach. But the impact we plan on making with The Price We Pay isn't practice. This is the real thing with a real meaning and goal behind it.
The results won't be immediate.
Human beings have a tough time changing because they first have to understand what they are doing to contribute to the problem, then see why the change they're being asked to make is essential to improving things, and then believe that making those changes is in their best interest. It can take many conversations before a breakthrough is made.
Patience is required.
Path To Publishing isn't content to sit on the sidelines waiting while the next generation of children pay the price for the silence, the divisions, and the failures of current leadership to step up and own responsibility for fixing the problems. We didn't create the problems, but we will do our part to solve them.
That's why we're crowdfunding a movement designed to bridge the gap between the races. The money raised will be used to fund the publication of The Price We Pay, dubbed the To Kill a Mockingbirdof the 21st Century but from the Black point of view, the debut novel of a young Black author. It will also go toward creating and delivering resources that will assist supporters and readers with how to hold and lead the tough conversations the book evokes.
Discover more about our novel approach to changing the conversation around race relations by visiting https://bit.ly/3B3iY0g. While you're there, sign up to #JoinTheConversation and support our efforts to open the doors to honest and thoughtful conversations that can produce conversions of heart and mind.
