Linden Tree has leaves of unjustly limited colors

I work at Linden Tree in Los Altos, California and so I did a quick recognizance of the first ½ (new releases and older releases A- H) of the 8-12 (intermediate) books. I went by number of titles as opposed to number of total books. I found 602 total titles of which 445 or 75 percent boasted Anglo main characters only on the cover (though over half of these had both a boy and girl and sometimes just a girl). Only 62 titles or ten percent where multi racial or other racial group by any stretch, and the rest (95 titles or 15%) featured other non human animals as subjects to focus on.

This is sad, and not an accurate portrayal of the demographics anywhere much less in California. In the 2010 census, Los Altos claimed to be 70.6% white. 23.5% Asian, 4 percent multiracial, and roughly 3 percent Latino.   This means Los Altos is roughly 31 percent non-Anglo humans. A percentage that is done a great injustice by the 10 percent of the section of children’s Literature I surveyed.  Almost all of the multi or ethnic books were not about Asians, much less Japanese boys and girls. Asian and some Japanese families comprise a good percentage of our beloved loyal customers at Linden Tree. It is simply disrespectful and dismissive of a culture to deny their existence and not describe their experiences and their imaginations in all parts of literature and imagination.

Linden Tree tries its best to find and explore diversity when and in any way we can, this said much literature about Asians for 8-12 year olds tends to be non fiction and mythology and folk tales. This disparity and the significant absence of literature for Asian intermediate readers needs to be fixed as does the distance between the percentage of ethnic groups and their representation in all aspects of youth literature in general.