![]() The statistics are dismal, but diversifying your bookshelf is a first step toward change. If it’s not portrayed as a possibility, then it makes it harder for you to see yourself doing that.” “It’s the same thing with being outdoors. “We probably wouldn’t have thought about going to the country to pick blueberries if it hadn’t been for that book,” Martin says. For a while, Blueberries for Sal was Martin’s daughter’s favorite book. For example, Breau suggests pairing relevant reading with candid discussions about the national parks’ racist history. Whether books with Black protagonists are a mirror or a window for your child, parents can help kids make the leap from the pages to real life. Of the nine books she found that feature Black families, Breau wrote, only three “portray Black parents who actively foster the relationship between their child and nature.” Her survey identified just 16 books-out of more than 3,000 in Diverse BookFinder’s collection of diverse picture books-in which Black children “actively explore the outdoors with no purpose other than to convene with nature.” (She excluded stories about slavery or outdoor labor.) Only four of the books Breau identified qualify as #ownvoices, a hashtag coined by YA author Corinne Duyvis to identify kids’ books “about diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group.” More disturbingly, when Breau analyzed the narratives, she found that even when the child’s own parents feature in the story, it’s white characters who often introduce the child to nature or facilitate their experience in the outdoors. “I was not surprised but definitely disappointed,” she says. ![]() Breau is a project coordinator at Diverse BookFinder, an organization dedicated to collecting, researching, and promoting children’s books with diverse characters. It prepares you to be a better citizen of the world.”Īfter children’s literature researcher Andrea Breau read about Martin’s work in The Atlantic last year, she dug into the data. “If you have a diverse diet of books that introduce you to all kinds of different ways of being,” Martin says, “you develop more empathy. Children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop famously wrote that books serve as “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors.” They let young readers understand others, see themselves, and escape into other worlds as they build an identity and locate themselves in our planet’s tangle of life. Today, as a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School, she researches and draws attention to the dearth of Black protagonists in children’s books about nature. ![]() ![]() She’d felt at home in nature since she was a little girl, collecting toads with her cousins in the red clay of the South Carolina Midlands. In the days of slavery, the men and women who set out north for freedom were stalked by terror, death, and dogs. (John Muir, by contrast, walked from Indiana to Florida on a lark just two years after Appomattox.) This year, when Amy Cooper called the police on Black birder Christian Cooper in Central Park, the age-old message was clear: you don’t belong here.ĭespite her mom’s concern, Martin went west anyway in the late eighties. ![]() Why are you going into the woods? It’s not a safe place,’” Martin recalls. Not many titles are readily available on the shelves of our major retailers, and if they ARE available, we don't always know the authors and titles to search for.When professor and children’s book critic Michelle Martin announced that she wanted to move to California to pursue outdoor education, her mother was skeptical. “She was like, ‘Black people have been trying to get out of the woods for generations. Out of resistance to this reality, the idea for Little Black Library was born! In Australia, it can be hard to source books that feature characters of colour or show traditions, beliefs and practices of other cultures. At LITTLE BLACK LIBRARY, we understand that “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” ![]()
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