CBC Diversity
Month
A round-up of children’s books that reflect racial diversity. @nytimesheadline
“Child, what are you going to do with that degree?”
I was full of pride on the day I graduated college—until Grandma Lynell asked me that simple question. You would think that someone with a nearly perfect GPA and two graduate school acceptance letters would know exactly how to respond. My goal was to become a professor of African-American literature and black feminist thought. But I hung my head low because I felt that I had not only tricked myself into thinking I was completely sure of my life’s goal, but that I had also duped those women and men who sacrificed so much for me to be able to walk across the stage that day.
I laughed it off and went about celebrating, but Granny’s question hit me—hard.
“I want to change the way we imagine black girls in books and in culture and I want to create new spaces for black girls to be represented.” @elle
Cultivating empathy through fiction. via Signature
Contributed by Reyna Grande, Author
I learned to read in English in the 8th grade. As a child immigrant from Mexico struggling to adapt to the American way of life, I had a hard time finding my experiences reflected in the books given to me by my teachers at school or the librarian at the public library. Closest were the works of the Chicana writers I’d read in college, such as Sandra Cisneros and Helena María Viramontes, where I found bits and pieces of myself. But I did not find books that spoke directly to my experience as a child immigrant.
I did find books about adult immigrants and the struggles that adults—like my parents— experience when they arrive in the United States: low paying jobs, abuse and discrimination in the workplace, fear of deportation, struggles to assimilate and learn English, and the hardships of navigating and understanding the nuances of American culture and society. But as a child, wasn’t I as much a part of the immigration narrative? Weren’t my pain and heartbreak, struggles and triumphs, also worth telling? Didn’t I also risk my life and fight just as hard for my dreams?
Why weren’t children’s voices being heard?
“Although the topic of diversity has received more attention in the industry over the past few years, responses to this year’s survey suggest that only slight progress has been made.” @publishersweekly
“Although children’s book publishing appears to be slowly growing more diverse, it remains to be seen whether the trend toward inclusive content will continue.” @bustle
“The questions roiling the children’s publishing world are among the pressing cultural questions of our time: Whose story gets told, and who gets to tell it? How do you acknowledge oppression without being defined by it? And to what extent should writers bow to popular opinion?” @motherjones
Contributed by Randi Pink, Author
During summer breaks, my mother dropped me and my siblings at the library before she went to work. The first three floors of the library consisted of thousands of books, and the fourth floor housed abstract paintings, still shots, and delicate sculptures. All four floors were skewered by our roller coaster — or escalator — depending on how you looked at it. We had my mother’s eight-hour shift to make ourselves useful, or busy, or seditious, or wild, or all of the above. The bookshelves were our hiding places, magazine quizzes our entertainment, and frustrated librarians our complimentary babysitters.
Back then, I was a reluctant reader in every sense of the word. Even bored in a library, I rebelled against the written word. During especially dull lunch hours, I’d ditch my siblings and snake my way through the bookshelves, sliding my index finger along the spines in search of little black superheroes, or fairies, or Cinderellas. But I rarely found them. Rosa Parks was there. Harriet Tubman was there. They were usually displayed on the front most round tables marked “Black History.” The learn something tables, as I called them. Today, I would inhale those books, but as an eleven-year-old girl, I wanted little black superheroes, or fairies, or Cinderellas. I wanted to read for pleasure, not work. It nagged me. Bugged me. It got on my nerves that I didn’t adequately see myself in that giant library. So I did what any eleven-year-old girl would do, I wrote my own stories.
Celebrate #WorldKidLitMonth with these international children’s books! @bookriot
CBC Diversity held its third panel of the year on September 7, “The Diversity We Don’t Talk About: Religion in the Workplace,” in which children’s publishing professionals discussed the intersection of religion in their work lives and in the books they publish. @publishersweekly
“If we don’t give children books that are literary mirrors as well as windows to the whole world of possibility, if these books don’t give them the opportunity to see outside themselves, then how can we expect them to grow into adults who connect in meaningful ways to a global community, to people who might look or live differently than they.” @newyorktimesofficial
