Media Press Interview
Link to original article: https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/superheroes-that-look-like-me/
Derek Austin sat quietly by himself, a poster of a Black-suited superhero at the center of his display. Austin, a full-time graphic designer and photo retoucher, traveled to the fair from Raleigh, North Carolina.
“I’ve been doing graphic design since the 90s,” Austin says. “And I’ve always designed for other people and marketed for other people, but I’ve never done it for myself.” That all changed two years ago.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, Austin wanted to be an animator, but the field wasn’t as diverse as it is now. So teachers, principals, and other folks he thought should motivate him encouraged him not to pursue it. He decided to work in graphic design as a happy medium but not long after realized it wasn’t enough. “I wanted to do more. And I wanted to do something for me,” he says.
Oddly enough, it was a stint as a corrections officer, a job he hated, that encouraged him to write children’s books. In that position, he saw that many of the inmates weren’t necessarily in prison for a specific crime they committed but because of how they reacted to how someone else made them feel. Some people were incarcerated for a few years, but many were imprisoned for life. Austin saw it so much that it got to him. And when he saw a 19-year-old walk in with a life sentence, he knew he wanted to try to get to the guys while they were still young and impressionable. His last day on the job was a night shift where a cell of all Black men, ages 20 to 60, walked around doing nothing for the whole night. He quit that night because it overwhelmed him.
“I said, ‘But I gotta do something because I feel these kids modeled themselves after that thug life, that thug nature, and I’m like, you set yourselves up for something major that you cannot get out.” Austin decided he wanted to try to reach guys while they were still young, using the images he himself was most receptive to and accustomed to as a kid—superheroes. “But I never saw a superhero that was talking to me, not specifically,” Austin notes. “ I said, ‘Well, let me do that.’ ’Cause [kids] reacted to Black Panther in a way I never saw Black kids react.”
During the Black Child Book Fair, he noticed some kids doing a double take when they saw his book, as if they weren’t used to seeing a Black superhero casually. They paused for a minute. One kid in particular stuck out to him because he bought his book and kept walking around and reading it for the whole day. Even when kids from Betty Shabazz started to perform some songs, Austin looked over and saw the kid sitting, reading, nearing the end of the book.
“That made me feel pretty good,” Austin reminisces.
