Diversity in children’s literature is a controversial topic
these days. Weather its Walter Dean
Myers and his son writing op-eds for the New York Times talking about the lack
of diversity in children’s literature (and publishers admitting there needs to
be more diversity) or Barbara Bader’s among others articles in the Horn book
and elsewhere insisting that “multiculturalism” is becoming mainstream. This is far from the whole truth. Maybe the
conversation over the lack of proportionate diversity is mainstream, but the
results of our conversation is the same as in the past, a staggering and
shameful lack of diversity in children’s literature.
I think that the largely token or cosmetic or mostly
superficial “improvements” in increase in diversity in Children’s Literature
has done little to shrink the gap between the cultural and other types of
diversity in the general and local populations and the lack of diversity in
books over the decades. It seems that year in and year out the percentages are
nowhere near demographically proportionate to the population for most regions
of the United States.
There are plenty of efforts to make diversity mainstream
including Firstbook, a nonprofit social enterprise focuses on giving financial
and other incentives to publishers if the publisher becomes the industry leader
in publishing books that focus on diverse cultures, multiculturalism and other
cultural issues. Read there opinion
article to find out more. CLick
here for First book opinion piece
I agree with and really enjoy this quote by Kathleen T. Horning director of the
Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, in a recent School library Journal Article. “Again
it comes back to buying the books. I often quote the poet Alexis DeVeaux who
once said “Buying a book is a political act.” That has never been truer than it
is today. If we want to see change, if we want to see more diversity in
literature, we have to buy the books. Buy them for our schools, for our
libraries, for our families, for our friends. We must be the agents of change.
Otherwise, we are all participants in the “cultural lobotomy.” And it won’t be
technology that threatens the very existence of books. It’ll be their complete
and utter irrelevance in the real world that never was and never will be all
white.” Amen. We need to be the change we want to see in publishing, tell them
how we feel with our dollars and our daily conversations, and our blog posts.
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