Ezra Keats and Gyo Fujikawa, who blazed a trail for diversity in picture books in the early 1960s, made it look so easy. Why is it still a struggle in publishing to acknowledge the full spectrum of children who read and adore books?
I found this dismaying: “[D]ata analyzed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center in 2010 found that only nine per cent of the three thousand four hundred children’s books published that year contained significant cultural or ethnic diversity…[T]he white default—in books, as in other forms of mass media—is learned and internalized early, including by children of color.”
Read the full article here.
