Category Archives: Diversity, Race, and Representation

Conversation about diversity, multiculturalism, race, and inclusion.

Awards, Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Awards Edition!

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We took a short break from blogging in the wake of last week’s big event in the children’s book world: the American Library Association’s annual announcement of their Youth Media Awards—or, as some like to call it, “The Oscars of Children’s Literature.” No outlandish outfits at these Oscars, but a few of our books do now have nice, shiny accessories on their covers:

Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award Honor and an ALA Notable Children’s Book

Seeds of Change: Planting a Path to Peace, winner of the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent in Illustration

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Surviving the Holidays

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Welcome to a pre-holiday edition of This Week in Diversity!

We’re starting out at Feministe, where a poster asks for advice on dealing with racist relatives during the holidays. There’s a wealth of advice and shared experiences in the comments. Whether you need the advice, have some to offer, or just like reading about thoughtful, open-minded people trying their best, it’s worth a read.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Looking At History and Faces

Another Friday is here, and we have another round of links to articles we think you’ll appreciate. Enjoy, and feel free to come back and comment on what you thought.

Our first reading suggestion comes from the New York Times. This year is the 150th anniversary of the start of the civil war, and the Times has a new column, disunion, that follows the war’s developments, day by day but a century and a half later. You can start at the beginning, or you may be particularly interested in Jim Crow on West Broadway, about a young African American man who refused to get off a whites-only streetcar, a hundred years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Prizes and Veterans

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There’s been a lot of chatter about prizes lately!

The ALA has added another children’s book award—and more diversity. The new Stonewall Award for Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award will be recognizing books for young readers relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Bullies, Surfer-Girls, and Ancient Diversity

October is National Bullying Prevention Month, and there are lots of great resources to use in supporting children and teens who are being bullied. We have several books, including First Day in Grapes, Willie Wins, and Chess Rumble. The Department of Health has a Stop Bullying Now site, and the National Center for Bullying has its Kids Against Bullying site; both feature games, videos, and information aimed at elementary-school kids. There’s a brand-new resource for gay, lesbian, bi, and transgender teens: the It Gets Better Project, a collection of videos—most recorded by ordinary people, but also including videos by Hillary Rodham Clinton, President Obama, and other celebrities—encouraging young people to hold on and live, because life gets better after high school. We hope you’ll share your favorite resources in comments.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Conferences, Movies, and Visualizing the World

October’s a busy time of year for conferences! At the New England Independent Bookseller’s Association conference, they had a panel on Selling Color in a White World. Our own Stacy Whitman of Tu Books participated—though, due to subway flooding, she joined the discussion via phone. Author Mitali Perkins and bookseller Elizabeth Bluemle shared their experiences from the panel.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: Gender, Books, and Maps.

Welcome to another diversity-filled week!

As happens fairly regularly in the literary world, people have been talking about gender and books. Two different takes caught our eyes this week: The Book Bench at the New Yorker took an analytical look at the discussion with What We Talk About When We Talk About Men Not Reading, looking at both men’s reading and at the the publishing industry. Meanwhile, author Maureen Johnson took a personal look at the issue with Sell the Girls, in which she talks about how the vast majority of her assigned reading, in school and college, was by and about men.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: More Colorful

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Happy Friday! We begin this week with some progress on the publishing front: lots of conversations going on right now among booksellers about how to sell multicultural titles, especially to white readers. Check out this great post by Elizabeth Bluemle as well as a discussion by the fine folks at Random House. It’s heartening to see so many different kinds of book people—publishers, booksellers, and readers—assuming responsibility and making it their mission to support diversity.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: What We Can Do

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We’re starting this week with author Mitali Perkins, who has some great suggestions on selling diverse children’s books. It’s mostly aimed at booksellers, but it has a lot that’s of interest to everyone, like its reminder about the many children on US military bases abroad. It’s also a great reminder that if one thing doesn’t work, try something new—for one store, it works best to have displays tied to heritage months; for another, it works best to spread the books throughout the store. That’s true of readers, too: what works best for one may not work for another, so find something new and try again.

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Diversity, Race, and Representation

This Week in Diversity: In Between

Greetings on this fine Friday! We have a couple links for you this week, dealing with interactions and being between cultures or peoples.

First, the Times has a look at Anglo-Indian culture: a relic of colonialist times, composed of people of (usually partly) European origins living in India, blending Indian and British cultures while being part of neither. Anglo-Indians occupied a middle position in the racial hierarchy of colonial India, seen as inferior to people of entirely English descent and upbringing, but superior to the native Indians.

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