Just because you don't see the agenda

[conuly]

doesn't mean there isn't one. Yeah, pretty much any literature worth reading has some sort of political agenda, and just because you want to go "lalala that's not the point of literature" doesn't make you right. Every time an author makes the choice not to have any black people in a setting where black people ought to exist, that's their agenda you're looking at. Every time you watch a movie, and there's eight guys and two women and the women never talk to each other, that's their agenda talking. Every time you read a story about settlers in the West, and first of all there are no black people or Asians and secondly Indians are always either Chaotic Evil or just gone away somewhere, probably pursued by a bear, that's their agenda. If you don't want politics in your fiction, stick to Pat the Bunny.

Also, I don't believe for one minute that your book-diet as a child in the 1980s or whenever was chock full of a demographically appropriate amount of diversity. You can't say that with a straight face.

In other book related news, I read But Not The Aardvark, and it's a worthy follow-up to But Not The Hippopotamus. Some of us aren't joiners, and that's okay.

************

Before Banana Republic Was Mainstream Fashion, It Was a Weirdly Wonderful Safari Brand

The Mystery of Babies’ First Words

The origins of children’s literature

The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity

Wearable sensor detects child motor deficits (Starts with an anecdote of a young man who had had a massive stroke as an infant, and nobody knew until he was almost grown. On the one hand, that's a bit scary. On the other, it's amazing how the brain can recover!)

“Probably New to Science”: Locating Indigenous Knowledge in Colonial Archives

These women got married. But it wasn't for love

Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden

Conservatives Have a Different Definition of ‘Fair’

Prison of The Mind

We Prosecute Murder Without the Victim’s Help. Why Not Domestic Violence?

Pentagon report shows sharp rise in military sexual assaults

Bodies in the Borderlands

Comments

[bladespark]

...now I need to get But Not The Aardvark for the kiddo, she likes But Not The Hippopotamus.

[conuly]

Yes, we now have an answer as to why not the aardvark - they aren't excluding the aardvark! The aardvark just wants to be solitary for a while!

[gingicat]

Well, Mom had an agenda, and so did Cricket Magazine, so I hope I got more books about nonwhite people than you’d expect.

[conuly]

I do too.

[rhoda_rants]

I'd argue that even "Pat the Bunny" has an agenda, and that's Promoting Early Literacy. Agendas can be good!

I'm reading Claudia Gray's latest Star Wars book, because she's awesome, and so is her agenda. <3

[oracne]

I used to LOVE the Banana Republic catalog. I had three pairs of their many-pocketed shorts in different colors, which I wore while working an archaeological dig.

[author_by_night]

Did I miss some drama? Or are you just referring to a random person/people?


Also, I don't believe for one minute that your book-diet as a child in the 1980s or whenever was chock full of a demographically appropriate amount of diversity. You can't say that with a straight face.

80's books had a lot of tokenization, IIRC.

[author_by_night]

I'd argue that even "Pat the Bunny" has an agenda, and that's Promoting Early Literacy. Agendas can be good!

Hey, there you go. :)

[conuly]

Homeschool forum.

[larryhammer]

wordlike forms wriggle one by one from the phonological mush like proto–land animals crawling from Cretaceous seas

Ha!

[nodrog]

Meanwhile, nervously totting up the PC checklist of required identity-group quotas and ensuring their adherence to Approved Behavior is an agenda too, and a stifling, Soviet Socialist one at that.

It also dates your story like a newspaper.  Nothing so risible as yesterday’s trendy fads…

[conuly]

How shocking, that we would like to see our fiction represent the real world!

But you know, if minorities in your fiction make you nervous, I can always have my mom crochet you a security blanket.

[baronjanus]

Amen.

“An intellectual mildew blighting the West”

[nodrog]

Now that the hot spotlight has moved on, I would like to expand upon and clarify just what I was talking about.  I wasn’t being snide; this is a real issue about which others besides myself have sounded a warning.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Every time you read a story about settlers in the West, and first of all there are no black people or Asians and secondly Indians are always either Chaotic Evil or just gone away somewhere, probably pursued by a bear, that's their agenda."

Um. My family were settlers in Nebraska in the 1890's, after the railroad came through. There were no black people or Asians. My mother, born in 1926, never laid eyes on any non-white person until she went to college. There weren't even any Irish or Polish or Italians; when my parents were growing up, there was one Jewish man in the whole county.

The Indians were indeed 'gone away somewhere', but not pursued by a bear. They'd been driven away by the U.S. Cavalry before ever the railroad was built, and the European settlers who came after them never saw them or knew very much about them.

"Every time an author makes the choice not to have any black people in a setting where black people ought to exist, that's their agenda you're looking at."

Granted, but black people did not in fact exist in all historical settings, and they don't exist in all cultural settings now. Until I moved to New Jersey when I was 9, I'd only ever seen one black person, a girl who walked home from school past my house. There were two or three black kids in my NJ school, but none in my grade; I was 14 before I ever actually met anybody non-white. In 30 years living on the Olympic Peninsula, I've only met a handful of black people who live here, and we're more diverse than a lot of other places in the rural West. I wouldn't be surprised if, even now, there are counties where a significant percentage of adults have never in their lives spoken to a black person face to face.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Also, I don't believe for one minute that your book-diet as a child in the 1980s or whenever was chock full of a demographically appropriate amount of diversity. You can't say that with a straight face."

Well... depends what you mean by 'demographically appropriate'. I CAN say with a straight face that my book-diet as a child in the 1960's had considerably more diversity in it than my actual life had: The Jungle Books, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Lilies of the Field, Black Like Me, A Patch of Blue, To Sir, With Love, Podkayne of Mars... I knew lots of black fictional characters before I ever met a real black person.