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conuly
There's a funny story my mother tells where my dad never got a ticket as a cabdriver in New Orleans because all the politicians and whatever had been elected on a civil rights platform, and when they saw his arrest record they let everything drop. My mother eventually figured this out for him.
So, you know, if I look at a book (as I often do when reviewing them online) and say "Great book, but out of a cast of 1000 odd characters there's only white folks", it's not because of my nieces that I pay attention (although I certainly keep them in mind when choosing books for them, because the last thing I want is for most of their books to only feature kids who look nothing like them), but because I was taught at a young age to pay some sort of attention to these things. I doubt I'm such a better person for it, although I try, but I can at least say I make the effort to notice, if nothing else, if there's a general lack of representation going on.
For Christmas, the nieces got new scooters. Evangeline's was from Radio Flyer and I, bored, picked up the catalog to flip through it today.
Wouldn't you know it - 61 children, and out of them all but three are white. And, as my mother said when she finished counting after I pointed this out to her, the three black kids (there are no Hispanics or Asians or god forbid Arabs in Toyland, remember!) aren't very dark-skinned either.
If ~20% of the US population is black, you would expect to see... um... 12 black kids. 3 is not 12. 3 is much less than 12. In the past, I've heard people commenting sardonically on how "activists" insist on "full proportional representation" in books and whatnot. Well, this is why. If you don't keep kicking and screaming and carrying on about having the pictures match reality, what happens is you don't even get those three kids in the little pamphlet. It'd be all white kids all over.
And it seems like a stupid thing to complain over, but it's such a little thing! How hard is it to get this stuff right?
So, you know, if I look at a book (as I often do when reviewing them online) and say "Great book, but out of a cast of 1000 odd characters there's only white folks", it's not because of my nieces that I pay attention (although I certainly keep them in mind when choosing books for them, because the last thing I want is for most of their books to only feature kids who look nothing like them), but because I was taught at a young age to pay some sort of attention to these things. I doubt I'm such a better person for it, although I try, but I can at least say I make the effort to notice, if nothing else, if there's a general lack of representation going on.
For Christmas, the nieces got new scooters. Evangeline's was from Radio Flyer and I, bored, picked up the catalog to flip through it today.
Wouldn't you know it - 61 children, and out of them all but three are white. And, as my mother said when she finished counting after I pointed this out to her, the three black kids (there are no Hispanics or Asians or god forbid Arabs in Toyland, remember!) aren't very dark-skinned either.
If ~20% of the US population is black, you would expect to see... um... 12 black kids. 3 is not 12. 3 is much less than 12. In the past, I've heard people commenting sardonically on how "activists" insist on "full proportional representation" in books and whatnot. Well, this is why. If you don't keep kicking and screaming and carrying on about having the pictures match reality, what happens is you don't even get those three kids in the little pamphlet. It'd be all white kids all over.
And it seems like a stupid thing to complain over, but it's such a little thing! How hard is it to get this stuff right?
