Lily White Titles
As you may or may not have noticed, I've been reading a couple new books this year. One or two. And as I have read I have noticed like never before the sheer lack of children's books containing characters that aren't white. I mean, we all know that there's a severe lack of multicultural lit out there for kids, sure. But have you ever sat down and looked long and hard at the sheer number of whitey white whites out there?
Mitali Perkins posted some info on her blog from the Cooperative Children's Book Center on kids books published in 2005 and how they fall multicultural-wise. Tis eye opening to say the least. Go look.
posted by fusenumber8 @ 3:25 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
This topic came up a few times at the SCBWI Conference. In fact, it was a theme of the very first speech (Jacqueline Woodson) as well as the very last panel of editors who spoke. There was frustration, explanation of various difficulties, and more frustration. Sadly, there appeared to be no easy solutions, but it's good to know the problem is at least not the big elephant in the room that no one ever addresses.
I probably should have done the math and provided the percentage breakdowns of multicultural books in the table as compared to the population demographics in North America, but I'm in the middle of plugging through the first draft of a novel due 9/1. Does anybody else want to give it a shot? Thanks for the mention in your blog -- one is featured on fuse's blog and one sees one's site statistics soar skyward ...
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