Books featuring children of color where race is not the point of the story at Anti-Racist Parent - for parents committed to raising children with an anti-racist outlook

Books featuring children of color where race is not the point of the story

by Anti-Racist Parent columnist Dawn Friedman

Imagine if all the books about girls were about sexism. Imagine if female characters were generally there to give the reader a history lesson about suffragettes or a cultural critique about rape. What would that do to a little girl? To only see herself against the backdrop of oppression? What would that do to a little boy? To only see women in the context of the oppressed? Fortunately there are lots of interesting female role models to keep both boys and girls reading – girls like Ramona, Nancy Drew and Anastasia Krupnik – but imagine if there weren’t.

Now think about kids’ chapter books where the main character isn’t white. Think hard. Is there a black Ramona or an Asian Nancy Drew or a Latina Anastasia?

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find books about children of color that don’t make the kids’ color the point of the story. There just aren’t enough books about everyday kids doing everyday things where the kids happen to be African American or Chinese-American or Native American or Hispanic, etc. etc. There are many fine, laudable books (and many absolutely awful ones) about slavery and Civil Rights and the Japanese internment camps and migrant farm workers from Mexico but the ordinary kid? The one who is riding her bike or fighting with his little sister? That’s a lot tougher.

A big part of liberal racism (the do-gooder, well-intentioned, earnest but mistaken kind) is the belief that race/cultural are special events. But black people are black even when they’re not celebrating Kwanzaa or marching for equal rights just like girls are girls even when they are no boys around as contrast.

The anti-racist family’s bookshelves need to have both kinds of books – books about race in the context of racism and books about everyday kids of all colors and creeds. Our kids need this so that they understand that being white isn’t a prerequisite to having a story worth sharing.

Happily, finding everyday kids of color in picture books is getting easier all the time. Anti-Racist Parent columnist, Cloudscome, blogs regularly over at A Wrung Sponge about the best multicultural books she finds as a children’s librarian. She’s got a wealth of good info for anyone wanting to add to their picture book shelves. But it’s a little harder with chapter books.

I pulled a handful out of our own collection and am hoping you all can add to my list. I’d love to find more so let me know what’s on the top of your ordinary, anti-racist reading list. (My rules for inclusion? The child’s race isn’t a plot-device even if it has some bearing on his/her experience. In other words, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson didn’t make it in because Shirley Temple Wong is trying to assimilate into the United States, which makes it an issue book albeit a good one.)

Philip Hall Likes Me I Reckon Maybe – My memories of this book are what convinced me that I needed to take a long, hard look at my own shelves before I had kids (when I was starting my collection in earnest). I avoided reading this one for a long time because I couldn’t relate to the girl on the cover. She was black and I didn’t want to read a depressing treatise on race. When I finally did read it at about ten, I shut the book and wondered why the author made her black? I mean, she was just like a white girl and wasn’t race supposed to be a plot-point? I didn’t want my kids to have that same delusion.

The Black Canary – This is an historical fantasy book (as an aside, its nice and somewhat unusual to find genre books where the characters aren’t white) about a young boy who goes back in time to London in the 1600s. He is forced to join the Children of the Chapel Royal and perform for the Queen. James is biracial and his color has an impact on but does not define his time travel experience.

The Egypt Game — Nearly twenty years old but this book about a group of girls who take their pretending too far will still resonate with kids today. In a nice twist contrary to far too many kids’ books, the child with the least stable home-life in this multicultural friendship happens to be white. The illustrations in my copy show their age but it’s available on audio, too.

Moon Runner — Mina is a girl who likes girlish things. But then she discovers that she loves to run. When she wins her first race without effort, her competitive friend Ruth is unhappy. Mina is the new kid in school – should she throw the race for the sake of friendship? Or should she run for the glory of it? Oh and Mina happens to be Chinese-American.

Some Friend — This is one of my favorite finds of the past couple of years. It’s a pretty classic story of friendship, where Pearl – on the verge of adolescence – grapples with the challenge of popularity. Should she compromise her values (and family rules) to stay friends with fascinating Lenore? Will it be worth it? Pearl and her friends are African American and I like the way this is a taken-for-granted part of the story.

Dawn Friedman is a writer and mother to two children. Her articles have appeared in Salon.com, Yoga Journal, Brain Child and the Greater Good and she is the op-ed editor at Literary Mama. She is also the founder of OpenAdoptionSupport.com and since the adoption of her daughter in 2004 has become passionate about the need for adoption reform. She blogs at this woman’s work.

Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Trackbacks & Pings

this woman’s work » Blog Archive » Forgot to say on 09 Feb 2007 at 3:35 pm

[…] I have a post up at Anti-racist Parent! […]
neurosesgalore.com » Blog Archive » A Pretty Good Birthday Present on 27 Nov 2007 at 10:38 pm

[…] boy and the story is just a story with no heavy handed message about race. You can check out what this woman has to say about the topic generally. I totally vibe with some of the stuff she says. To this […]

Comments

Jeremy Pierce wrote:

One thing I appreciate about many science fiction and fantasy stories is that it can sometimes avoid this problem because of the nature of the creative universe of the story. Science fiction dealing with inter-species issues will sometimes have characters who are black or Asian, etc., whose race plays no role but is not ignored.

In the Harry Potter universe race is never an issue, but Rowling will mention that someone is black. An Asian character and a set of twins who are presumably Indian are prominent. But the whole story does deal with some race issues more overtly, with the Death Eaters’ concern for pureblood wizards as a major theme of the series. Having that as the issue allows being black, say, to be a fact but not one that becomes the point of the story.

Star Trek did some similar things throughout several of their series, although I think Deep Space Nine did the best job of it.

But it would be nice if people could write books that didn’t need fantastical situations to achieve this that would catch on enough to remain in circulation.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 9:07 am ¶
Lyonside wrote:

Jeremy:

As a sci-fi/fantasy fan, I know some examples, but at the same time, the vast majority still has “white” or “European” features as their standard human. This comes across either in the cover art (which authors have little to no control over) but also in physical descriptions of characters. Sometimes the universe in which the story is set works it in by essentially seperating groups by geography (think medieval-ish times). But just as often in some space opera, race is not mentioned because the default human is still white, maybe with a tan.

Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books have tried to address this, but personally I think it failed. The Pern books take place in a basically feudal society so it has a fantasy feel (but the origins of the people on the planet is total sci-fi). McCaffrey’s made of point of saying that the first settlers were very diverse - this shows in names (Asian, African, etc.) as well as authorized illustrations, etc. So explain to me why, 6000 years later, virtually every character is basically a European with maybe (maybe) a tan? My guess is that those settlers weren’t as diverse as I’d imagined.

TV is a whole nother critter that really deserves it’s own post, but I’ll say this much: I’m tired of the visible minorities being alien (even human-type aliens) and the Earthers being white. Over and over again, I see it. The ST verse tried hard, but it still came across as tokenism, because the background extras were still pretty pale.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 9:51 am ¶
Jeremy Pierce wrote:

I’m not saying everything they did was just fine. I’m just saying it’s a venue that makes it a little easier to see different races as normal, because the contrast with people who really aren’t normal is stronger, and often those interrelational issues will be at the fore. I do think some of them try harder than they get credit for, and they’re more aware of issues other shows seem to be unaware of, even if there are things that they don’t quite deal with or shouldn’t handle the way they do. Babylon 5 is another one that was better than most, I think.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 10:21 am ¶
dawn wrote:

Looking at speculative fiction is interesting but doesn’t solve my dilemma. The Black Canary (and Susan Cooper’s Green Boy, which takes place in a fictional island in the Bahamas and has two boys with loc’d hair on the cover) is a spec fic story with human protagonists. The situation is fantasy but the kids are regular kids and they are (mostly) rooted in the everyday world with trips to the past or to another dimension (if I’m remembering Green Boy correctly). Think A Wrinkle in Time.

I need/want my kids to see the everydayness of the heroes/heroines. I want them to be able to relate to the children in the way that I related to the heroine of Philip Hall. But I don’t want tokens (as Philip Hall was to me) or too much “exoticness” (the excellent Island of the Blue Dolphins was one of my favorites but her experiences were too foreign to me to relate to her in the same way).

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 10:45 am ¶
kim wrote:

Hello Jeremy.

I have to say I did not see a way to get beyond your wording of “problem”, and the issue of “creative universe” in your exploration of how science fiction seeks to be more inclusive, in a less obtrusive manner, than works outside of that genre.

There is a running “joke” with the Black communities from which I hail (across the spectrum of inner-city project, to suburban land-owning, to educated homeowner who travels internationally, to activist artist). So ubiquitous is it, it is referred to only in the unspoken gesture of the raised eyebrow, and smirk-on-cocked-head:

It is always easier to introduce alien beings, from outer space, and alien races, into the lives of the “mainstream” character, and to develop a loving respectful bond between the human and the alien, than it is to develop a Black character similarly. This ranges from books, to film.

Dawn wrote:
“It’s difficult to find books about children of color that don’t make the kids’ color the point of the story.”

Surely we don’t need to create a universe where such interactions are able to exist.

The tricky thing about having had almost forty years of Black Studies courses at universities across the nation is the question that gets raised about how to explore a subject matter: is the work operating on two (or three) different levels when both author and characters are Black? What is the significance of the author being Black? Of the characters being Black, and from Chicago, with their history of Mississippi roots?

We are led to a point where “the problem” of Blackness is, consequently, sought to BE seen as a universal problem of humanity, of human travail, love and beauty.

And then, lots of other folk get mad, when such ideas of universality are posited.

Dawn, thanks for those titles, and for your continued involvement in your exploration of the way in which we are all linked, and touch (or don’t). (I love cloudscome’s site, by the way…just a lovely job she does there.)

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 11:10 am ¶
joan wrote:

I’m always on the lookout for books for younger kids that include people of color without their color being the issue. Thanks for raising this issue and especially for the link to the other blog.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 11:34 am ¶
joan wrote:

Oops, I should include some of our favorites.

The Trucks, Planes, Boats, etc. board books by Byron Barton feature people of various shades, and not just a token person here or there.

Bigger Than Daddy by Harriet Ziefert is a sweet story about a boy and his dad as they go about their day. They are black.

Children’s author Jane Kurtz has written several books set in various countries in East Africa. They often have to do with life in Africa, but the stories are not about the color of skin.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 11:41 am ¶
Suzanne wrote:

One set of books that we like are the Jamaica books - by Juanita Havill and Anne Sibley O’Brien. The stories are everyday stories that could happen to any girl. Jamaica just happens to be African American. We also like the Grace books by Mary Hoffman.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 12:40 pm ¶
Bibliophile wrote:

I have spent hours and hours on the internet figuing out how to stock my preschooler’s shelves with books that feature people of color and/or multiracial families as the protagonist(s) but where racial or cultural issues are not the main point of the story. I’m so glad you blogged this; it will help point the way for me when my kiddo is ready for chapter books.

Favorite picture books in our house:

The Snowy Day - Ezra Jack Keats (and one of my childhood faves)
A Whistle for Willie - Ezra Jack Keats
More More More Said the Baby - Vera B. Williams (this one’s better for the infant and toddler set)
A Chair for My Mother - Vera B. Williams
More Pies - Robert Munsch
David’s Father - Robert Munsch
Something Good - Robert Munsch
Chugga Chugga Choo Choo - Kevin Lewis
Shanna’s First Readers series - Jean Marzollo (character from Playhouse Disney)
The Story of Little Babaji - Helen Bannerman
Little Bill series for beginning readers - Bill Cosby

Please, please comment if anyone has any others to add!

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 12:55 pm ¶
Green SAHM wrote:

Thanks for the list, Bibliophile! I have a preschooler too and was just trying to think through her books. She has a birthday in a few months and may have to pick some of those up. I know she adores Shanna and Little Bill.

I just love watching kids that age play. Little to no awareness of race at that age in many children; they see playmates!

My husband and I are science fiction fans and I have to agree that many science fiction authors do at least TRY to add characters of different races. They may not always succeed, but I do appreciate seeing efforts in that are.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 1:38 pm ¶
Kyla wrote:

I always recommend the Gregor the Overlander books when people are looking for good books about children of color. They’re about a boy who falls through a grate into the Underland, where he’s supposed to fulfill some prophecy and has to figure out what happened to his father.

Another good series is Chasing Vermeer and The Wright 3; the author mentions that the kids are all mixed, and that’s the last you hear of it. The books are really good, well-written and better researched versions of “The Da Vinci Code” for kids.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 1:48 pm ¶
Bibliophile wrote:

Glad it was helpful, Green SAHM.

Actually, my child is quite aware of race, and has been since the age of 2 - certainly not the historical and social implications, but definitely aware of differences. He would point to drawings of dark haired, brown skinned boys and say his name. For a couple of months, all East Asian toddler girls with were “Emily” (a classmate), all African American boys with closely cropped hair were “Chuckie” (another classmate). He has also been aware of it because both in our multiracial family and at his preschool (where there is significant diversity among the kids, the families, and the teachers), physical differences were being talked about as children were learning their colors and body parts (i.e. red hair, brown skin, blue eyes). He has been pointing out other families where the members don’t all have the same skin color since about the same age; even before he had the language to articulate it.

Ironically, the very first time I got questioned as to whether I was “the babysitter” was by a child who was just shy of turning three!

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 3:31 pm ¶
chicagomama wrote:

Dawn - thanks for a great post - I was just going through this exact issue over on my blog earlier this week. You included some titles here that I don’t have yet, and I am on my way over to amazon to pick some more books up.
Do you perchance have some more suggestions that show Asian children/families or Latino children/families (opening that one up to everyone). I have found those ethnicities least represented in the books I have found thus far. Thanks again.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 5:50 pm ¶
daddyinastrangeland wrote:

This doesn’t address the issue of representation of U.S.-based people of color, but international children’s books present another angle here, esp. if we’re talking picture books. In books originally published in Asian, Latin American, or African countries, for example, main characters and background characters tend to look like the folks considered the “norm” (for lack of a better word, b/c of course there’s ethnic diversity and stratification issues in other countries) in the country of origin.

At least on a purely visual level, I found it refreshing to thumb through some new English translations of some South Korean books [full disclosure: I received them in exchange for future reviews on my other sites from publisher Kane/Miller, which is also supplying prizes for the current contest going on on Rice Daddies] and see them peopled by Asian faces–and not have the books be either about race or be the usual “ethnic folktales” kind of thing we get here.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 6:33 pm ¶
Bibliophile wrote:

Oh, I forgot 2 more:

Meet Michael’s Dentist - Fisher Price Little People
Sonya Lee Visits the Doctor - Fisher Price Little People

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 7:19 pm ¶
kim wrote:

Chasing Vermeer is a series? I didn’t know that. Will have to talk to the ten-year-old.

I love the Jamaica books, and the Grace books as well. Those girls are kick-butt for their confidence and their heart. I love the way their hair is drawn and colored…deep, longing sigh here.

Gregor the Overlander? Wonderful title, thanks!

daddyinastrangeland: such an astute consideration and piece of advice.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 7:33 pm ¶
Ally wrote:

I was just thinking about this tonight when I opened A Pocket for Corduroy and realized the little girl and her mother appear to be either Latino or light-skinned African-American (Jamie’s currently drifting off to sleep or I’d sneak in his room to look again).

I worked at my aunt’s children’s bookstore back in the 80s off and on up through just a few years ago (Dawn, you probably know what store I’m talking about) and the progress made in the past 20 years has been huge, not just in the books available but in the customers’ perception. I remember clearly showing a woman a book that addressed the topic she was looking for that happened to have a black child protagonist and she turned it down because she wasn’t buying it for a black child. That was 15 years ago. It probably still happens but I personally haven’t experienced it.

Phillip Hall…was one of my favorite titles growing up. I read that book to pieces, it and it’s sequel - the name is escaping me. We are very in to a Snowy Day right now, another childhood favorite that I’m really enjoying. It and Corduroy are also among another rarish group, picture books that show city life. The boy in a Snowy Day lives in an apartment building as in most of Ezra Jack Keats’s picture books, IIRC, and in A Pocket for Corduroy they start out by walking to the laundromat (in which there is a very diverse crowd doing laundry).

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 8:21 pm ¶
Sandra wrote:

Dav Pilkey’s The Paperboy is a nice picture book about a young boy who gets up early, while everyone is sleeping, and goes out on his paper route.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 9:08 pm ¶
landismom wrote:

Great Post

How about Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsberg? That’s one of my favorites.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 9:40 pm ¶
Lisa (Blah Blah) wrote:

I love this thread…landismom already mentioned one of my favorites, which then made me think back to a book called Striped Ice Cream, by Joan M. Lexau. It may be out of print, but it’s worth looking for maybe at the library - especially as a story that teaches kids that love is not only to be found in material things.

Posted 09 Feb 2007 at 9:55 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:

Chris Crutcher’s “Whale Talk” wasn’t bad either, although your hero is a bit too… perfect for my taste, and his adoptive parents are too… perfectly liberal in thought and execution, with no internal conflicts whatsoever to be real.

But 1) it deals with ethnicity, sexuality, etc. in a pretty matter-of-fact way, and 2) the main plot doesn’t hinge completely on the multiracial nature of your hero, although his background makes it easier for him to embrace the high school social rejects and make them into a swim team.

It was worth a read, anyway. But definitely in the 14YO category, not a 9 YO.

Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 12:14 am ¶
SB wrote:

Egypt Game is 40 years old! Not 20!

Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 4:45 am ¶
dawn wrote:

Jennifer, Hecate, etc. was one of my favorites! I totally forgot that one!!!

Chicagomama, I have had a HELL of a time finding chapter books with Asian-American leads. (I practically fell off my chair when I realized the lead in Moon Runner was Chinese American.) Gary Soto has written a number of chapter books with Hispanic leads. I haven’t read any of them yet (they’re sitting on my bookshelf) but he’s an award-winner so I’m thinking (hoping) they’re probably pretty good.

I wonder if the success of the multicultural picture book market will lead to more showing up in the middle-grade market. (Note: Forward thinking children’s writers among you! Perhaps now is the time to strike with a great manuscript! I would LOVE a chapter book series featuring a spunky little girl like Amazing Grace!)

Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 8:41 am ¶
Alexandra wrote:

I’m not a mom myself (yet!), and it’s been years since I read a lot of kids books, but I am so glad you made this post. It used to drive me nuts when 99% of books were about default white people. It still does.

The good ones that I liked, the ones that made race an aside, include Striped Ice Cream and Holes. Holes I read recently because I was considering going to see it in play form (later I was simply too busy). They would mention the kids’ races in passing, but these kids were prominent characters. A Pocket for Corduroy was also a book I enjoyed, so thanks for mentioning it!

And believe it or not, to the best of my memory, those darned Baby-Sitter’s Club books had a token black character, but the books that starred her were really good. You can only write so many issue books when one of your prominent characters is black. I remember reading the Jessie books, laughing my head off, and feeling like she could be my friend. She was portrayed as having an ordinary family and did ordinary family things, worked at her job babysitting, and going to school and ballet lessons.

In fact, the one BSC book that discussed race really heavily did not star Jessie, but instead one of the white girls, Kristy. This was useful because the white character got to hear all the racist things that other white people say “in confidence”. All the ugly things that people hide while maintaining a charade of acceptance. It’s been years since I read that book, but perhaps I will hunt it down again. It really stuck out in my mind.

Sometimes I don’t know what I think of mentioning someone’s race in a description (because no one ever feels the need to say that someone is white…how would that be for an awareness exercise of some kind?). I think the author mentioned race to prevent white readers from using the default white person in their minds as they read.

Something that also came to mind was the issue of giving such books to people as gifts. White people seem to avoid books about people of color because it’s like they feel these books “aren’t for them”. There are some young children in my life now, families and friends, and I always like to give books as gifts. Somehow, I’m picturing myself (a white person0 giving a book to someone (also white) as a gift, a book that stars a person of color, and the white people all recoiling because they think I’m trying to be political, or force them to have a teaching moment, or just causing trouble. All of these people are the liberal, well-meaning racists, and they’d make a big show of saying, “THANK YOU, OH HOW NICE! I HAVE BLACK FRIENDS!” blah blah.

I hate to think that I should only be giving these gifts to my own future children, and resorting to the thousands of white kid books for events like birthday parties and baby showers. “Well if you want to do that in your own home, that’s fine…” Know what I mean?

Thoughts?

Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 10:37 am ¶
Alexandra wrote:

Oh, and I also forgot that one of the very first characters in the Baby-Sitters Club was Claudia, the Japanese girl. It was the same deal with all the books starring her: she adores art, she struggles in school, she loves to babysit, and her Japanese heritage is treated in a matter of fact way that does not dominate every page written about her.

Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 10:41 am ¶
squirrel wrote:

This is such an awesome post. I’m bookmarking it for future reference. Thank you for all of the book suggestions.

I haven’t noticed any poetry here, but I think that’s a really important thing for our kids, so I figured I’d throw this out there:
Greenfield, Eloise. Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems.

Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 2:44 pm ¶
mamazilla wrote:

just an fyi… a while back, i started my mixed race children’s book search via this website - http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit_resources/diversity/multiracial/multi_race_picbooks.html

most of the books are race/culture centric but they do list a handful that sound like they’re more character driven (however, i haven’t read any of them):

EL CHINO by Allen Say (Houghton Mifflin, 1990). An inspiring picture book biography of Bon Way “Billy” Wong, the first Chinese American bullfighter—a young man raised in Arizona who found his dream in Spain. Ages 4-up.

MILLICENT MIN, GIRL GENIUS by Lisa Yee (Arthur Levine, 2003). Millicent Min is (1) just about the enter her senior year in high school, (2) has no friends, and (3) is resented by other kids because she sets the grading curve. She’s also eleven, which might have something to do with at least (1) and (3). Because of (2), Millie’s parents sign her up for summer volleyball and make her tutor her mortal enemy… A dry, funny first novel. Ages 9-up.

NINJAS, PIRANHAS, AND GALILEO by Greg Leitich Smith (Little Brown, 2003). From the flap copy: Elias, Shohei, and Honoria have always been a trio united against That Which Is The Peshtigo School. But suddenly it seems that understanding and sticking up for a best friend isn’t as easy as it used to be. Elias, reluctant science fair participant, finds himself defying the authority of Mr. Ethan Eden, teacher king of chem lab. Shohei, all-around slacker, is approaching a showdown with his transracially adoptive parents, who have decided that he needs to start “hearing” his ancestors. And Honoria, legal counsel extraordinaire, discovers that telling a best friend you like him, without actually telling him, is a lot harder than battling Goliath Reed or getting a piranha to become vegetarian. What three best friends find out about the Land of the Rising Sun, Pygocentrus nattereri, and Galileo’s choice, among other things, makes for a hilarious and intelligent read filled with wit, wisdom, and a little bit of science.

WHALE TALK by Chris Crutcher (HarperCollins, 2001). Popular YA author Crutcher presents T.J. Jones (a.k.a. The Tao), a black Eurasian whose biological mother abandoned him in large part due to the influence of drugs and whose white hippie parents are a treasure. T.J. takes on the school’s outcasts as a cause, and he helps to form a swim team to give them an outlet, a safe place, and a forum to triumph on their own terms. Meanwhile T.J.’s father, plagued by guilt over a tragic accident, faces another bully. Dark, funny, sarcastic, thought-provoking. A rare interracial YA for older teens. Ages 12-up.

btw - there are many books for all age groups and most ethnicities listed on that site.

Posted 10 Feb 2007 at 10:59 pm ¶
Margie wrote:

Dawn, although I don’t have any books to add to the list, I want to thank you for a great post. And maybe ARP could maintain a list of good books its readers have found - I know parents everywhere would appreciate it!

Posted 11 Feb 2007 at 6:09 pm ¶
Billi wrote:

Philip Hall Likes Me was my favorite book in Elementary school

Thanks for this list !

-b

Posted 11 Feb 2007 at 11:39 pm ¶
Marka wrote:

“A Wizard of EarthSea” by Ursula La Guin

Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 10:57 am ¶
Bordermama wrote:

I love these lists! Books of color that do not make race the issue fit into my category of being “color blessed.” Being color-blessed doesn’t deny that we notice our many different colors…we all are taught to sort shapes and colors as children…so of course we all notice that we are each different. The balance is to not dwell on our differences. http://bordermama.wordpress.com/2007/02/11/color-blind-vs-color-blessed/

Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 11:16 am ¶
cloudscome wrote:

Thanks for the link Dawn. I was reading and posting about middle grade and YA fiction last summer, but lately I have been mostly about biographies, folklore and picture books. I’ll get back to chapter books sooner or later…

After thinking about this post all weekend I posted a list of chapter books on my blog a wrung sponge today. What a great question to keep in mind!

Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 11:39 am ¶
Elaine Magliaro wrote:

I read Carol Fenner’s YOLONDA’S GENIUS and Jacqueline Woodson’s LOCOMOTION a few years ago. If my memory serves me right, the race of the main characters wasn’t the major focus of the stories.

Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 2:18 pm ¶
Kyla wrote:

I totally forgot about Millicent Min! There’s a “sequel” to that, too; the same story, but told from Stanford Wong’s point of view.

For picture books, I really loved Too Many Tamales, but I don’t know if it technically makes the cut.

Posted 12 Feb 2007 at 2:26 pm ¶
Bettie Bookish wrote:

I have a toddler and a preschooler, and the preschooler loves:
“A Snowy Day”
“In My Heart,” Molly Bang
“Ten, Nine, Eight” Molly Bang
“Good Night!” Claire Masurel, Marie Henry
“Christmas Is Coming!” Claire Masurel, Marie Henry
(I’m not sure if the child in the Masurel books is intended to be Asian, but my 3 y/o is convinced they are pictures of her, so I am not about to argue.)

And let me add my own gratitude to Dawn for beginning this post.

Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 2:56 pm ¶
Ally wrote:

I’ve been scanning our bookshelves since reading this post and we’re still firmly int the animals as protagonists picture book phase, but I did read “the First Day of Winter” tonight by Denise Fleming and the boy decorating the snowman (I believe he’s a boy, although it’s not clear) is African American.

Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 9:28 pm ¶
Jim R wrote:

I have always wanted to see a movie or book written without any gender or race involved until the very end. At the final draft of the book, flip a coin for each character’s gender, and roll a die for each character’s race.

Protagonist - female, asian
Side kick - male hispanic
Love interest - female african
bad guy - male white
bad guy side kick - female persian
random victim - male white
random victim 2 - male pacific islander

You get the idea - random choices made. What would it do to the plot lines if these were done after the fact, rather then as part of the story?

Posted 15 Feb 2007 at 1:44 pm ¶
mc wrote:

Other titles not yet mentioned

The Akimbo series (I think there are at least 3 books) by Alexander McCall Smith. Early Chapter book featurting a black African boy in many wonderful adventures.

Ziggy and the Black Dinosaurs series by Sharon Draper. There are 6 books so far. Four African-American boys (ages 8-10) solves mysteries. Wonderful chapter books.

Ann Cameron’s books on Julius and his brother Huey and their friend Gloria. Early chapter books.

Posted 20 Feb 2007 at 1:24 am ¶
Stacie wrote:

It was the best book ever.I loved it.

Posted 22 Feb 2007 at 8:24 pm ¶
Stacie wrote:

It was the funniest book ever!

Posted 22 Feb 2007 at 8:25 pm ¶
Amy wrote:

I know this isn’t a chapter bood, but what about DAISY COMES HOME by Jan Brett. The little girl is Chinese and she raises “happy” hens. One of the hens gets lost and it tells of her adventures. It is a very cute story.

Posted 28 Feb 2007 at 11:38 am ¶
Marie Lamba wrote:

Found this thread while researching this very topic for a talk I’m giving to librarians! As a parent of biracial kids, I’ve long felt the need for books portraying a biracial kid as the hero of a story where race wasn’t the problem. Sorry to plug my YA novel (I feel a little cheesy doing so), but WHAT I MEANT… just came out through Random House in 2007 and it is a mainstream story. Even its cover design is mainstream, signaling that this is a book for anyone. I hope publishers champion many more books like these in the future…

Posted 08 Apr 2008 at 2:44 pm ¶