It never fails. It never, ever fails.
Dec. 8th, 2014 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulySomebody asks for books "for a beginning reader", "for an eight year old girl", "for a 14 year old sci-fi fan", "American historical fiction for middle school", and I check out what people have suggested. Might find something new... right?
Naaaah, just rehashes of the same 5 books per category, all featuring an unvarying cast of white folk, primarily boys and men.
So I use my prodigious library and trusty google and find a few more options that fit the bill but that have some diversity, and everybody thanks me (or they don't) and I go about my day, and tomorrow there's another person looking for books, and I check, and it's ALL THE SAME BOOKS.
Why do they even bother asking? So I reply with a different set of books with non-white or Jewish or disabled characters, and I wonder if anybody ever notices that my booklists are as filled with Asians/Hispanics/Blacks as theirs are devoid of them. I wonder if they even notice that they only ever suggest books about white kids.
And I could post my own request asking specifically for a diverse cast, and people would respond... and then tomorrow, when asked for historical fiction or fantasy or books about ballerinas it would be the same old list, back to normal.
Part of the problem is that people tend to continually recommend only those books they read as kids, and many times those books were just like that. The rest of it... I don't know. I was raised in such a way that even as a child I habitually counted up the characters on TV and movies and in books and sorted them by race and gender. (Then again, my favorite game was sorting my crayons by color, followed by sorting my MLPs. Maybe it's just an offshoot of an aspie thing.) Maybe they weren't. Maybe that's it.
All I know is sometimes I want to shake people.
Also: Sooner or later I have to make my own masterlist. I'm tired of having to go to five different sites to find PoC's in early chapter books, another three sites to find Jews in American historical fiction, two for disabilities in sci-fi/fantasy....
Naaaah, just rehashes of the same 5 books per category, all featuring an unvarying cast of white folk, primarily boys and men.
So I use my prodigious library and trusty google and find a few more options that fit the bill but that have some diversity, and everybody thanks me (or they don't) and I go about my day, and tomorrow there's another person looking for books, and I check, and it's ALL THE SAME BOOKS.
Why do they even bother asking? So I reply with a different set of books with non-white or Jewish or disabled characters, and I wonder if anybody ever notices that my booklists are as filled with Asians/Hispanics/Blacks as theirs are devoid of them. I wonder if they even notice that they only ever suggest books about white kids.
And I could post my own request asking specifically for a diverse cast, and people would respond... and then tomorrow, when asked for historical fiction or fantasy or books about ballerinas it would be the same old list, back to normal.
Part of the problem is that people tend to continually recommend only those books they read as kids, and many times those books were just like that. The rest of it... I don't know. I was raised in such a way that even as a child I habitually counted up the characters on TV and movies and in books and sorted them by race and gender. (Then again, my favorite game was sorting my crayons by color, followed by sorting my MLPs. Maybe it's just an offshoot of an aspie thing.) Maybe they weren't. Maybe that's it.
All I know is sometimes I want to shake people.
Also: Sooner or later I have to make my own masterlist. I'm tired of having to go to five different sites to find PoC's in early chapter books, another three sites to find Jews in American historical fiction, two for disabilities in sci-fi/fantasy....
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no subject
Date: 2014-12-09 02:30 am (UTC)I was in a bookshop on Saturday, buying books for the nephews for Christmas, and a member of staff saw me leafing through the gorgeous The Storm Whale (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Storm-Whale-Benji-Davies/dp/1471115682) and she said that she gets a lot of primary school teachers coming in asking for recommendations of books from different cultures. It's good to know that there are people out there trying to broaden children's views of the world around them.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-09 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 01:19 am (UTC)When I was looking for that article, I saw another called "Quentin Blake, the man who illustrated childhood". But really, you needn't have the past tense there - he's still going strong.