From the November/December 2000 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Future Classics

believe there is a place inside all of us that wants to believe and know The Universal Truth. I believe there is racism and sexism and homophobia because people are afraid. I believe history repeats itself—wearing clunkier shoes, lower-slung pants, and listening to music that samples songs I once danced to.

I believe there will always be a fear of “the other.”

And because the solution was, is, and will always be about communication, I choose Chris Raschka’s Yo! Yes? as the book I would want to put into the hands of a child today and a hundred years from now. In Yo! Yes? two boys (but in a hundred years will gender be defined in the same manner?) — in Yo! Yes? two people meet across the lines of race (yes, I believe there will still be racial lines a hundred years from now) and form a friendship. Through spare, uncomplicated, and inviting language, Raschka moves us through the boys’/people’s doubt and loneliness into a place of hope. And as long as there are young people walking into classrooms or tapping into chatrooms or moving into neighborhoods as strangers, there is a place in the world for Yo! Yes? As long as there are people who have never had a friend across a racial line, there is a place in the world for Yo! Yes?

I believe books like Yo! Yes? push the world toward thought and action and change and that this is what art is meant to do. I believe there will always be art because there will always be people who need to make it and people who need to experience it.

I believe there will always be room in our world for growth and change, and a book in the hands of a child is a beginning.

—Jacqueline Woodson