updated post on Diversity in Children's lit

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.

Or Click here for publishers Weekly article

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

The Firstbook story innovation in publishing

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.

  click here for the School Library Journal article on diversity in Children's literature