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About a year ago, The Conscious Kid published an article titled, " A Critical Race Reading of Dr. Seuss and Resource Guide for Read Across America Day 2018 ". The article was about the explicit racism that Dr. Seuss engaged in, including wearing blackface, participating in minstrel shows, depicting characters of color in racist ways, and creating anti-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) artwork and writing. It also analyzed the racism within some of his famous characters and books with the support of recent published research.

Recently, this article has attracted a large amount of attention from social media and media outlets because a couple weeks ago was Read Across America Week and the journal Research in Diversity of Youth Literature published an article titled, " The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, AntiBlackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books ".

Many people, especially people of color (including myself), were relieved to finally see this uncovering of racism attract more national attention. I did not learn about the racism of Dr. Seuss until 2018 when I saw his anti-Japanese cartoons and learned of his anti-Black behavior. Before I learned of it, I had read his books, helped my students make Cat-in-the-Hat crafts, and celebrated him. I feel bad that I exposed my students to a racist author with celebration and without doing a critical analysis of his work. However, as teachers, we always need to adapt and change our practices when we learn about new information.

Considering this, I stopped celebrating and reading Dr. Seuss, but I also explored alternatives to him and am trying to understand how to use his work to critically analyze racism with students (since we should not just ignore racism, but acknowledge and redress it). Throughout this work, I have heard several things that teachers will miss about Dr. Seuss or reasons why people wish they could still read/use it. To help everyone choose anti-racism over the "tradition" of using Dr. Seuss, I have composed three themes/reasons that people give for still using Dr. Seuss and amazing alternatives for them:

1. "What about the rhyming?"

2. "But I love the illustrations!"

3. "We've always celebrated Dr. Seuss!"

The rest of this article will briefly explore the themes/reasons and present the alternatives we can do instead. Now is the chance for us to choose anti-racism over "tradition"!

In the Twitter verse, many people have been worried about how they are going to teach or expose their children to rhyming without Dr. Seuss. While I understand that Dr. Seuss has some crafty rhyming, there are MANY other books that feature rhyming that are not written by authors with a racist history.

There are especially some amazing diverse books that have great rhyming! So, swap out Cat in the Hat with one of these to not only support anti-racism, but support diverse books!! Here are a list of several great diverse books with rhyming:

Within my own school district, I have overheard many educators and families talking about how much they loved the illustrations in Dr. Seuss's books. However, we need to acknowledge the racist themes within his illustrations. His iconic Cat-in-the-Hat illustration is based on " minstrel stereotypes" and his illustrations rarely depict a person of color ( and most of his POC illustrations have harmful and prejudicial stereotypes attached to them).

Therefore, instead of celebrating these illustrations that could harm our students, educators, and communities of color, let's replace them with some better illustrations! Help counteract the harm by showcasing positive and accurate depictions of diverse characters. And, who knows diverse characters better than diverse illustrators? Check out this list of some of my favorite illustrators of color:

With this article, I am not suggesting that we forget about Dr. Seuss, because, to forget Dr. Seuss is to not acknowledge the hurt that his illustrations and he have caused. However, we to STOP celebrating him! I understand it is our "tradition" and he has been ingrained in many of our own childhood memories. BUT, we do not want our students, children, families, educators, and communities of color to endure more harm and racism for the sake of "tradition".

Instead, let's use Dr. Seuss's books and racist history to teach our students about racism and the harm caused by stereotypical and false depictions. I wish that I could link a good lesson plan about how to guide your children and/or students through a racial analysis of his books and illustrations, but unfortunately I could not find one.

It is possible to teach this though! I have had many conversations with my first graders about racism. Our students live in a world with racism. Instead of censoring it and letting history repeat itself, we to teach anti-racism and show our students how to debunk the racism that often lies within "tradition".
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I hope this helps educators, librarians, and families who are on the fence about choosing anti-racism over Dr. Seuss! Please pass this along to your colleagues so everyone can see that there are AMAZING alternatives to Dr. Seuss.

Native Hawaiian. Founder of Colorful Pages. Racial Equity Coach and Temporary Program Manager for the SEA Center for Racial Equity. Ethnic Studies Writer and Grades 2/3 Educator for SPS. View all posts by Kaitlin Kamalei Brandon

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View all posts by Kaitlin Kamalei Brandon

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Anti-Racism over "Tradition": Alternatives to Dr. Seuss and Racism

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About a year ago, The Conscious Kid published an article titled, " A Critical Race Reading of Dr. Seuss and Resource Guide for Read Across America Day 2018 ". The article was about the explicit racism that Dr. Seuss engaged in, including wearing blackface, participating in minstrel shows, depicting characters of color in racist ways, and creating anti-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) artwork and writing.

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A recent spat over Dr. Seuss' place in the children's literature canon has highlighted an uncomfortable truism about the books that children experience in their earliest school days: Some of the most classic and beloved titles, from The Wizard of Oz on down, draw on racist tropes and images.

The Oompa-Loompas in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, at least in its original version, were depicted as African pygmies who were happy to be working for cocoa beans at said chocolate factory. The eponymous Cat in the Hat, a new scholarly book argues, draws from the antics and costumes of minstrel shows.

This topic entered the mainstream again late last month, when first lady Melania Trump sent 10 Dr. Seuss books to a school in each state. In a response posted online, a librarian in Cambridge, Mass., Liz Phipps Soeiro, said she would not keep them, calling the choice of books a "cliché" and criticizing his illustrations in If I Ran the Zoo, among others, as "steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes."

She also took aim at the Trump administration's support for school choice programs. Trump's spokeswoman shot back that the "divisive" letter was unfortunate.

Hundreds of articles about the dust-up followed, some defending the librarian's decision and others criticizing her rejection of the books as churlish. But from a curricular perspective, the episode thrusts into the limelight a difficult question: What should teachers and parents do about the culturally insensitive imagery and text in some beloved classics-including the dog-eared favorites that still sit on their shelves?

A Complex History

The career of Dr. Seuss, whose full name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, is complex and not easily summarized. As a political cartoonist, he excoriated Jim Crow laws-but also drew racist cartoons depicting Japanese-Americans as the enemy. Some of his early books suffer from similar caricatures. If I Ran the Zoo contains stereotypical images of Africans and at one point references "helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant." (The book was not in the collection provided by Mrs. Trump.)

It can be hard to square such depictions with some of Seuss' other tales, which were often liberal on sociopolitical subjects. The Sneeches argues against prejudice based on physical characteristics; The Lorax is an unsubtle environmental lament; and The Butter Battle Book allegorizes the nuclear arms race.

The Cat In the Hat lies somewhere in the middle. Although less explicitly racist, the main character owes a debt to blackface vaudeville, and was based on a black woman who worked as an elevator operator, said Philip Nel, a professor of English as Kansas State University.

And while the cat brings liveliness to two children on a dreary day, he is also clearly marked as not belonging in their white household.

"It's actually kind of ordinary and that's part of the point-racism is ordinary, it's not aberrant, it's not strange-and that's why Seuss is useful to think about," said Nel, whose book-length study Was The Cat In the Hat Black?, was released in August. "He is an example of how even progressive, anti-racist people can act in ways that are racist. I don't think he's intentionally recycling stereotypes in his book from the '50s, but the imagination is influenced by the culture in which it grows, and it doesn't necessarily filter out the racism bits during artistic creation."

Critics of such analyses wonder if they say more about adults' baggage than kids' books. To echo those who have pushed back at the critical attention on Seuss-the mayor of Springfield, Mass., Geisel's hometown, among them-isn't the Cat in the Hat, well, just a cat in a hat?

Even those who acknowledge some of the troubling features in his book question the recent focus on his work.

"So Seuss had issues. But so did a vast array of other authors, including pretty much anyone writing before, say, 1930," one Washington Post columnist wrote.

But Nel counters that the images are powerful ones, a reminder of racism's capacity to adapt. "I think children notice on levels that they may not be able to articulate," he said. "The persistence of blackface minstrelry, even in subtle ways, has a normalizing effect."

It's tempting to think that only the subtler examples of racism persist in children's literature. But according to Michelle H. Martin, the Beverly Cleary professor for children and youth services at the information school at the University of Washington in Seattle, versions of Little Black Sambo, first published in 1899 and long since in the public domain, have been brought out as recently as 2004, though they are sometimes sanitized.

Meanwhile, despite some advances, the children's literature market remains dominated by white authors and depictions of white characters, according to annual data collected by the Cooperative Children's Book Center, a research library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's school of education.

In 2016, just 22 percent of the roughly 3,400 books reviewed by the center featured nonwhite characters, and only 13 percent were written by people of color-even though more than half of the United States' school-age population are children of color.

The spotlight on Seuss could bring some uncomfortable attention for organizations long tied to his work, among them the National Education Association. The nation's largest teachers' union has since 1997 celebrated Read Across America, an initiative centered on Geisel's birthday each year. And an associated symbol, the Cat in the Hat's red-and-white-striped stovepipe hat, has been sported by everyone from the NEA president to Barack and Michelle Obama.

In recent years, the NEA has broadened its focus from Seuss, highlighting more diverse children's books and expanding resources aimed at older children. And while it has gotten more queries and some criticism about Seuss as the author's background has become more widespread, those changes have been priorities for some time, said Steven Grant, an NEA spokesman and manager of Read Across America.

"I think there will always be a place for Seuss books-they are in every classroom and library in America-and in some cases, they're effective for younger readers," he said. "That said, it's not to the exclusion of all the other great books that are out there."

A Tough Balance

The harder question concerns teachers whose classrooms are stocked with the older books. The tendency is to avoid them altogether or to keep only those that don't have objectionable content ( Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?) But scholars like Nel and Martin argue there's another way to do it: Embrace the history in effective ways.

Martin said she's talked about one of the modern rewrites of the Sambo story, Anne Isaac's Pancakes for Supper, with her 5-year-old niece. (The book reworks the story as an American tall tale with a female protagonist.)

"The fact that it is still part of our culture-why are we still rewriting the story? Of what value is it?" she said. "Anne Isaac's story is a delightful story, and if you didn't know that it's derived from a little black Sambo story, it would stand on its own, but that's part of the argument we're making-bring that history out. Ask kids what they think. They might say, 'This is an awesome story,' but they should be informed while reading."

Martin, who has also been a teacher-educator, also believes that programs preparing teachers need to engage with similar questions and help teachers locate more diverse books, some of which have been published by smaller, independent presses. "If the teachers don't have training in cultural sensitivity and diverse children's books, they have a disconnect going into the classroom-and they have a disadvantage. And they don't know it," she said.

And adults of all professions should be open to taking a hard look at their favorite children's books, and embrace the discomfort it may bring.

"I don't think nostalgia is a defense. Affection is not a defense," Nel said. "What you have to do is take a deep breath, step back, and realize that the culture in which these books live and in which these books were written is a racist culture and a sexist culture."

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A spat over first lady Melania Trump's donation of Dr. Seuss books to schools points up the existence of culturally insensitive images in many well-loved children's classics.

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With more emphasis being placed on diverse children's books and scholars pointing to racist illustrations and characters in Dr. Seuss' work, the national reading celebration is moving away from the Seuss canon to highlighting different authors and diverse and contemporary titles.

Read Across America (RAA) and Dr. Seuss have always been linked. RAA events typically involve children in red-and-white striped hats, listening to a Dr. Seuss classic.

In past years at the premier event in Washington, DC, local elementary students have heard Michelle Obama read The Cat in the Hat and the National Education Association (NEA) president recite Green Eggs and Ham. This year, however, they will listen to author Jesse Holland read an excerpt from his novel Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther?

The 2018 Read Across America theme is "Celebrating a Nation of Diverse Readers" and the NEA press release notes that the hundreds of fourth graders in attendance on Thursday March 1 will be wearing "a rainbow of colors." NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia will be joined at the event by three authors of color-Holland, Kwame Alexander ( The Crossover) and Gene Luen Yang ( American Born Chinese).

Along with Holland reading the excerpt from his book, Alexander and Yang will help the students develop their own haiku. The event is "to kick off" Read Across America Day, which is March 2. Eskelsen Garcia and the authors will also participate in a Facebook Live event at 1 p.m.

"It's critical that all students see themselves represented in the popular culture," Eskelsen García said in a statement. "During this year's Read Across America and National Reading Month, our theme is 'Celebrating a Nation of Diverse Readers,' and we are emphasizing the importance of books that are telling children of color that they belong in the world and the world belongs to them. It can be a scary place out there right now for our students, but a book can transport them to a world that is safe, a world they feel they belong in, and a world in which they believe they can make a difference."

The first Read Across America Day was March 2, 1998. It is no coincidence that date also happens to be Theodor Geisel's birthday. When the NEA wanted to create a day to encourage children to read, it only made sense to pick the day Dr. Seuss was born. But a connection to the legendary children's author no longer comes without criticism.

Allegations that The Cat in the Hat and other Seuss books and illustrations are racist have created an emotional debate around the author and RAA. A September 2017 SLJ article "Is the Cat in the Hat Racist? Read Across America Shifts Away From Dr. Seuss and Toward Diverse Books" highlighted scholars who have analyzed Seuss' books and political cartoons and identified racism in his illustrations and character development.

Read Across America is a year-long program, but the highlight is Read Across America Week, which is typically centered around Dr. Seuss and his stories. It culminates with millions of students celebrating his March 2 birthday and Read Across America Day at elementary schools around the country.

This year is likely a turning point for the program and its annual events. The NEA has a contract with Seuss Enterprises through August 2018. They have not said if they will continue to use the images or connect the program to Dr. Seuss after that.

"This is really going to be a transitional year for us," Steven Grant, an NEA spokesperson, who has managed the Read Across America program since 2005, told SLJ in that September 2017 story. "We're going to be trying different things and moving in some different directions to see if that works."

It may prove to be a difficult transition for educators who have had their popular Seuss-centric Read Across America week activities set for years. "The goal is to encourage the educator, because we can't force him or her to do anything," Grant said

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NEA Focuses Read Across America on Diversity Not Dr. Seuss

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With more emphasis being placed on diverse children's books and scholars pointing to racist illustrations and characters in Dr. Seuss' work, the national reading celebration is moving away from the Seuss canon to highlighting different authors and diverse and contemporary titles.

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Before Theodor Seuss Geisel AKA Dr. Seuss convinced generations of children that a wocket might just be in their pocket, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM from 1940 to 1948. During his tenure he cranked out some 400 cartoons that, among other things, praised FDR's policies, chided isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and supported civil rights for blacks and Jews. He also staunchly supported America's war effort.

To that end, Dr. Seuss drew many cartoons that, to today's eyes, are breathtakingly racist. Check out the cartoon above. It shows an arrogant-looking Hitler next to a pig-nosed, slanted-eye caricature of a Japanese guy. The picture isn't really a likeness of either of the men responsible for the Japanese war effort - Emperor Hirohito and General Tojo. Instead, it's just an ugly representation of a people.

In the battle for homeland morale, American propaganda makers depicted Germany in a very different light than Japan. Germany was seen as a great nation gone mad. The Nazis might have been evil but there was still room for the "Good German." Japan, on the other hand, was depicted entirely as a brutal monolith; Hirohito and the guy on the street were uniformly evil. Such thinking paved the way for the U.S. Air Force firebombing of Tokyo, where over 100,000 civilians died, and for its nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it definitely laid the groundwork for one of the sorriest chapters of American 20th century history, the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese-Americans.

Geisel himself was vocally anti-Japanese during the war and had no trouble with rounding up an entire population of U.S. citizens and putting them in camps.

But right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: "Brothers!" It is a rather flabby battle cry. If we want to win, we've got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not. We can get palsy-walsy afterward with those that are left.

Geisel was hardly alone in such beliefs but it's still disconcerting to see ugly cartoons like these drawn in the same hand that did The Cat in the Hat.

In 1953, Geisel visited Japan where he met and talked with its people and witnessed the horrific aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. He soon started to rethink his anti-Japanese vehemence. So he issued an apology in the only way that Dr. Seuss could.

He wrote a children's book.

Horton Hears a Who!, published in 1954, is about an elephant that has to protect a speck of dust populated by little tiny people. The book's hopeful, inclusive refrain - "A person is a person no matter how small" - is about as far away as you can get from his ignoble words about the Japanese a decade earlier. He even dedicated the book to "My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan."

You can view an assortment of Dr. Seuss's wartime drawings in general, and his cartoons of the Japanese in particular, at the Dr. Went to War Archive hosted by UCSD.

via Dartmouth
Related Content: Private Snafu: The World War II Propaganda Cartoons Created by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc New Archive Showcases Dr. Seuss's Early Work as an Advertising Illustrator and Political Cartoonist Fake Bob Dylan Sings Real Dr. Seuss The Epistemology of Dr. Seuss & More Philosophy Lessons from Great Children's Stories Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.

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Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who!

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Before Theodor Seuss Geisel AKA Dr. Seuss convinced generations of children that a wocket might just be in their pocket, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM from 1940 to 1948.

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RAA yearly calendar with ideas for elementary, middle, and upper grades

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Reading and discussing books with a focus on speaking up can help build students' self-confidence and promote social justice.

For elementary readers

For middle-grade readers

For teen readers

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2020-2021 Read Across America Calendar - Read Across America

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Join schools across the country in reading NEA's book of the month! Our picks for elementary, middle school and YA readers celebrate our nation's diversity.

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Official NEA Read Across America website with resources

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DIVERSIFY YOUR SCHOOL'S BOOKSHELVES: ENTER THE 2022 READ ACROSS AMERICA SWEEPSTAKES

You could win a virtual author visit at the public school of your choice with an author from our Read Across America calendar.

Authors available for a virtual visit are: David Bowles, author of My Two Border Towns, is an award-winning writer, poet, and translator; J. Elle, the author of the New York Times and Indie bestseller Wings of Ebony; and Ellen Oh, who wrote Finding Junie Kim as well as the highly acclaimed, young-adult Prophecy Trilogy.

Only one entry is allowed per person-but the more people who submit from your school, the more likely you are to win! So share this page with friends and colleagues and enter the sweepstakes today!
Get started

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You could win a virtual author visit at the public school of your choice with an author from our Read Across America calendar. Authors available for a virtual visit are: David Bowles, author of My Two Border Towns, is an award-winning writer, poet, and translator; J.

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New Study Published on Racism and Dr. Seuss

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Paper published in Research on Diversity in Youth Literaturequestions representation inDr. Seuss’s children’s books. ResearchersKatie Ishizukaand Ramón Stephens citedracist and other problematic depictions in classic Seuss picture books, ranging fromThe Sneetches toHorton Hears a Who!.

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Until recently, Read Across America Day was-in everything but title-National Dr. Seuss Day. It's even celebrated on March 2, his birthday. If you're like me, you remember teachers wearing the iconic Cat in the Hat top hat/tie combo. You might recall school librarians or administrators dressing up as Thing One and Thing Two or a school lunch when Green Eggs and Ham were served. This is America, and it's probably not much of a stretch to guess that you probably have a favorite Dr. Seuss book (mine is probably Hop on Pop).

You may have noticed that Read Across America has looked a little different for the last few years. Rather than exclusively celebrate the works of Dr. Seuss, as it had done since 1998, in 2017 the NEA shifted its focus to "Celebrating a Nation of Diverse Readers." They began prominently featuring titles focused on diverse American experiences.

This year, Read Across America Day was preceded by the publication of a new study. Researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens examined 50 children's books and 2,200 characters created over Theodore Seuss Geisel's nearly 70-year career "to evaluate the claims that his children's books are anti-racist." Their findings were shocking.

I get it. You grew up on Dr. Seuss. I did too! It's probably safe to assume that most people did and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But we have to recognize that two things can be true at the same time:

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Until recently, Read Across America Day was-in everything but title-National Dr. Seuss Day. It's even celebrated on March 2, his birthday. If you're like me, you remember teachers wearing the iconic Cat in the Hat top hat/tie combo.

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This week, millions of students and teachers are taking part in Read Across America, a national literacy program celebrated annually around the birthday of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. For over 20 years, teachers and students have donned costumes - often the Cat in the Hat's iconic red and white striped hat - and devoured books like Green Eggs and Ham.

But some of Seuss' classics have been criticized for the way they portray people of color. In And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example, a character described as Chinese has two lines for eyes, carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice, and wears traditional Japanese-style shoes. In If I Ran the Zoo, two men said to be from Africa are shown shirtless, shoeless and wearing grass skirts as they carry an exotic animal. Outside of his books, the author's personal legacy has come into question, too - Seuss wrote an entire minstrel show in high school and performed as the main character in full blackface.

In light of this, the National Education Association rebranded Read Across America in 2017, backing away from Seuss' books and Seuss-themed activities. It introduced a new theme of "celebrating a nation of diverse readers." Its website now highlights works by and about people of color.

But in many schools and libraries, the week is still synonymous with all things Seuss. Classrooms are decorated in colorful red and blue fish and children dress up as their favorite iconic characters, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, dreaming of the places they'll go.

That tension between Seuss and Seuss-free classrooms is emblematic of a bigger debate playing out across the country - should we continue to teach classic books that may be problematic, or eschew them in favor of works that more positively represent people of color?

Part of the reason this debate is so complicated is the staying power of classic books. Think back to the works lining your school bookshelves.In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the N-word appears more than 200 times. But for generations, people have argued that the book is vital to understanding race relations in America in the late 1800s. And the trope of Jews as greedy and money-hungry is pretty clear in The Merchant of Venice. Yet Shakespeare is hailed for his keen understanding of human nature that continues to be relevant today.

Jaya Saxena, a writer whose work examines inclusivity in young adult literature, is in favor of revamping the canon. But she understands why teachers might continue to teach it. She says when she was in high school, her teachers used the classics to teach literary devices and styles of writing, not necessarily to prioritize certain narratives or worldviews. The Merchant of Venice, for example, is a prime example of allegory.

"The point was, here's what this book does well," Saxena says. "Maybe they weren't everybody's favorite books, but they were good examples of ... the craft of writing."

And when planning lessons from year to year, it's easier for teachers to prioritize books they're already familiar with. But when these books include offensive stereotypes, teachers have to decide whether to continue teaching them and how.

"Not engaging [with problematic texts] at all runs too great a risk of not learning or understanding where the problems lie," says Larissa Pahomov, who teaches English at a high school in Philadelphia. "I believe there is a way to look at material that is stereotypical [and] racist and identify it for what it is, and then hopefully, in doing so, neutralize its effect."

When Pahomov read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with her seniors last fall, she was careful to teach students how to read the work through a critical lens that took the author's background into account. In class discussions, she made sure to emphasize that context to her students as they examined the work.

"What resources did he draw from to write this book, and this character? What has been the Native American reaction to this book specifically? What was the reaction of the psychiatric treatment community? How do we look at it now? What's the treatment of women? There were so many angles to discussing it," she says.

Pahomov notes that because her students are teenagers, having these conversations is possible. But books geared toward younger kids? Those discussions can get a lot more complicated.

Which brings us back to Dr. Seuss.

In a study published earlier this month in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens found that only 2 percent of the human characters in Seuss' books were people of color. And all of those characters, they say, were "depicted through racist caricatures."

Those caricatures have a potent effect, even at an early age. Research shows that even at the age of 3, children begin to form racial biases, and by the age of 7, those biases become fixed.

"One of the reasons for that is the images and experiences that they're exposed to regarding marginalized groups and people of color," Stephens says. "And so [Seuss' books] being mainstream, and being spread out all over the world, has large implications."

If kids open books and "the images they see [of themselves] are distorted, negative [or] laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society in which they are a part," Rudine Sims Bishop, a scholar of children's literature, wrote in a 1990 article.

But when they see themselves represented in a positive way, it can have a similarly powerful effect.

That's one of the reasons first-grade teacher Emily Petersen says she won't be reading Dr. Seuss with her students this week, or ever.

"If I'm looking at a 6-year-old and choosing what story [I'm] going to teach them how to read through, I'm definitely going to choose the one that affirms and celebrates identities in a new way," she says.

For other teachers who want to help students affirm their identities, the NEA is offering grants and resources to help schools highlight literary works by and about people of color.

But the forces that have kept Dr. Seuss on the bookshelf for decades are strong. Often, schools plan their Read Across America events months in advance. Costumes, books and activities from previous years are ready to go. It can be difficult for teachers to deviate from these plans, especially when they have celebrated in the same way year after year after year. And with over 650 million of his books in circulation worldwide, just like his infamous cat, it looks like Dr. Seuss will keep coming back.

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Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students Keep Reading Them

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A recent study found that Dr. Seuss books can be pretty racist. It's highlighted a growing debate: Should schools teach classic books that may be problematic or trade them for socially conscious ones?

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Most texts feature white characters

For decades, children's books in school libraries and classrooms have overwhelmingly featured white faces. And as the U.S. school-age population grows more diverse, students of color are less likely than white students to see books with characters that look like them or share their cultural background.

Some educators and children's book authors are trying to change that.

Nonprofits like We Need Diverse Books advocate for children's literature that better reflects the experiences of all young readers. In online communities, such as those formed around Twitter hashtags #DisruptTexts and #DiversityJedi, teachers, authors, and critics discuss which books are given to students in classrooms and what messages they convey. Even DonorsChoose.org, the school crowdfunding platform, recently pledged to match donations to teacher requests for diverse learning materials.

The ripples of this ongoing conversation have reached a lot of classrooms, said Jess Lifshitz, a 5th grade teacher at Meadowbrook Elementary School in Northbrook, Ill.

"More teachers now know it's the right thing to have books that represent a wide variety of people," said Lifshitz. But, she added, "I think people do that, and they kind of want to check it off the checklist."

Important Messages

Supporters of diverse books say that it's important for children of color to see their own identities and experiences reflected in literature. And studies have shown that black children who receive messages emphasizing cultural pride-though not necessarily through books-have higher self-esteem, better social-emotional functioning, and increased classroom engagement.

But developing a truly inclusive classroom library goes beyond bringing in diverse books. "Just having them on the shelf does not ... do that teaching or unlearning of the stereotypes that we are barragged with all the time," said Laura Jiménez, a lecturer in Boston University's education school.

Following the civil rights and women's rights movements, a call for multicultural education in the 1970s and '80s drove schools to incorporate texts that would challenge stereotypes about people of color and shed light on the historical injustices perpetrated against those groups, said Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, an associate professor in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

Those texts were meant to repair distorted narratives, said Thomas, but they can be painful for children of color to read because they often deal with traumatic events. Thomas has seen these patterns persist in the literature that students have access to today-many of the books about black people cover slavery or the civil rights movement.

"The white child gets all kinds of mirrors of the self in literature," said Thomas. "Endless, countless adventures. The full range of history-the good, bad, and the ugly. Whereas other children only get a very narrow slice of that history."

Now, some educators are examining the composition of their classroom libraries as a whole and the stories that these books tell. And they're asking their students to examine the stereotypes that they hold as readers.

Auditing the Classroom

The Cooperative Children's Book Center, a library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, has tracked diversity in children's books since the 1980s. Last year, 11 percent of children's books published in the United States featured main characters who were African or African-American, about 9 percent were about Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders, about 7 percent featured Latino main characters, and only 1 percent were about native peoples. That's in contrast to the demographics of public schools today, where there are now more students of color than white students.

Even when teachers bring diverse books into their lessons, the broader context of a classroom or school library might still disproportionately favor white characters.

Noelle Mapes, a 2nd grade teacher at PS 142 in New York City, has found that to be true in her own classroom.

Three years ago, when she was teaching 3rd grade at a different school, she started conducting an annual diversity audit of her classroom library with her students. First, they looked at national trends in the racial diversity of children's books, using the cooperative center's data. Then, the elementary schoolers did their own tally in the classroom, recording the race of the protagonist of each book.

Mapes now does this activity every April, after introducing her students to the idea that books can be both "windows," exposing readers to new worlds and perspectives, and "mirrors," reflecting readers' own experiences-a framework developed by author and education researcher Rudine Sims Bishop, a professor emerita of education at Ohio State University.

Every year, the highest percentage of books feature white protagonists. And every year, students are surprised-and disappointed.

In Mapes' classroom, the overrepresentation of white characters isn't for lack of trying to improve. The first year Mapes did the audit in her old school, students started bringing in books with protagonists of color to donate. As a result of her project, the PTA allocated funds for teachers to buy more titles. She also uses school-provided funds for her classroom to buy diverse books every year.

Over time, the percentage of diverse books in her old classroom increased, Mapes said. But when she left the school, books with white main characters still outnumbered books featuring characters of color in her classroom library. "Each year, as that initiative grows, as awareness grows around what kinds of books we want to buy and have donated, the margins should decrease," she said.

Perpetuating Stereotypes?

In examining her classroom library, Mapes said, she's also noticed some of the narratives that her collection shapes. In years when she has had the time, she's gone through some of the categories of books with her students after the audit. When they looked at the books about Native Americans one year, she noticed a theme: All were set in the past.

That trend holds true across children's books about native people, conveying the myth that they don't exist anymore, said Debbie Reese, the founder of the American Indians in Children's Literature blog.

"The idea that we can have present-day culture, modern-day society as part of our lives and still have our traditional religion and culture intact-it's a no-brainer to me as a native person, but society has a hard time understanding that," said Reese, who is tribally enrolled at Nambé Pueblo. Characters also often aren't named by their tribal affiliation, Reese said, which obscures the fact that there are more than 500 different federally recognized native nations, all with unique languages and cultures.

Some educators are asking students to interrogate these "single story" narratives that they may carry.

Every spring, Lifshitz, the Illinois teacher, does an activity around bias in books. She covers the titles on a handful of picture books in her classroom and poses some statements describing what the books are about-sentences like: "This is a book dealing with sadness and struggle and loss," or "This is a book about the love and joy that exists between family members."

Lifhsitz's students, who are majority white, are asked to match up each book with each statement, relying on cover art alone. Usually, the children guess that the covers featuring black families are about struggle, pain, or trauma-even when they aren't.

Once the titles and summaries of the books are revealed, the students can usually explain what has happened in the exercise. "They're willing to say, 'Oh you know what, I was totally using skin color to make an assumption, and that's what led me to the wrong answer,'" she said.

Teaching students to think critically about the kinds of stories books are telling is just as important as having a diverse array of literature in the classroom, said Lifshitz.

No matter how much she works to confront stereotypes in her classroom, students are still going to confront them out in the world, she said. "If I don't give them tools to recognize that, having the books in my classroom isn't really doing much to change how they're reading outside of the classroom."

Published in Print: June 12, 2019, as Teachers Push for More Diverse Books, Fewer Stereotypes

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Teachers Push for Books With More Diversity, Fewer Stereotypes

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For decades, children's books in school libraries and classrooms have overwhelmingly featured white faces. And as the U.S. school-age population grows more diverse, students of color are less likely than white students to see books with characters that look like them or share their cultural background.

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One afternoon last fall, I found myself reading my picture book The Sea Serpent and Me to a group of schoolchildren in the island nation of Grenada. The story is about a little girl who befriends a tiny serpent that falls out of her bathroom faucet. I had thought it would appeal to children who lived by the sea, but as I looked at their uncomprehending faces, I realized how wrong I was. It wasn't just my American accent and unfamiliar vocabulary, but the story's central dilemma: The girl wants to keep the serpent at home with her, but as each day passes, he grows larger and larger.

"What do you think she should do?" I asked, holding up an illustration of the serpent's coils spilling out of the bathtub.

"Kill him and cook him," one kid suggested.

It took me a few seconds to understand that he wasn't joking. If an enormous sea creature presented itself to you, of course you'd eat it! Talk about first-world problems.

Roughly 80 percent of the children's book world-authors and illustrators, editors, execs, marketers, and reviewers-is white.

I think of that kid from time to time when I need to remind myself that my worldview is pretty limited. Within five years, more than half of America's children and teenagers will have at least one nonwhite parent. But when the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at 3,200 children's books published in the United States last year, it found that only 14 percent had black, Latino, Asian, or Native American main characters. Meanwhile, industry data collected by publisher Lee & Low and others suggest that roughly 80 percent of the children's book world-authors and illustrators, editors, execs, marketers, and reviewers-is white, like me.

Writers and scholars have bemoaned the whiteness of children's books for decades, but the topic took on new life in 2014, when the influential black author Walter Dean Myers and his son, the author and illustrator Christopher Myers, wrote companion pieces in the New York Times ' Sunday Review asking, "Where are the people of color in children's books?" A month later, unwittingly twisting the knife, the industry convention BookCon featured an all-white, all-male panel of "superstar" children's book authors. Novelist Ellen Oh and like-minded literary types responded with a Twitter campaign-#WeNeedDiverseBooks-that spawned more than 100,000 tweets.

Most hashtag campaigns go nowhere, but Oh managed to harness the momentum. We Need Diverse Books is now a nonprofit that offers awards, grants, and mentorships for authors, internships aimed at making the industry more inclusive, and tools for promoting diverse books. Among the first batch of grant recipients was A.C. Thomas, a former teen rapper who sold her young-adult Black Lives Matter narrative in a 13-house auction. (A feature film is already in the works.)

The market for diverse books "can't just be people of color," says Crown Books VP Phoebe Yeh. "It has to be everyone."

Problem solved? Not so fast. For years, well-meaning people up and down the publishing food chain agreed that diverse books are nice and all, but-and here voices were lowered to just-between-us volume- they don't sell. People of color, it was said, simply don't purchase enough children's books. But after studying the market last year, the consumer research firm Nielsen urged publishers to embrace "multicultural characters and content." Nielsen found that even though 77 percent of children's book buyers were white, ethnic minorities purchased more than their populations would predict-Hispanics, for example, were 27 percent more likely than the average American bookworm to take home a kids' book. Yet the market for diverse books "can't just be people of color," says Phoebe Yeh, the Chinese American VP and publisher at Crown Books for Young Readers. "It has to be everyone."

In an essay this spring, the book-review journal revealed that its reviewers had started mentioning the race of main characters in young-adult and children's books. The goal, its editor wrote, was to help librarians, bookstores, and parents find stories with diverse characters-and to challenge the notion of white as the default. Many applauded the move, but others were incensed, among them author Christine Taylor-Butler. For The Lost Tribes, her book about a kid who discovers his parents are aliens, she and her editor consciously chose not to reveal upfront that her main character (like her) is black. Highlighting the race of a nonwhite protagonist, she believes, will lead many buyers to conclude that the book isn't for them-or the children they cater to.

Last year, after Kwame Alexander's The Crossover won the Newbery Medal and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming was selected as one of the two runners-up, a white school librarian named Amy Koester blogged about the sotto voce grumbling she heard from other librarians who felt these books, with their black protagonists, would be a "hard sell" in their white districts. "If we argue that only black youth will want to read about black youth," Koester countered, "we are really saying that the experiences of black youth have no relevance or meaning to youth of any other race."

The biggest threat to literary diversity, says author Christine Taylor-Butler, is the "feeling that it is okay to destroy people on social media."

Color-coding our bookshelves doesn't just shortchange the black kids. It is well established that reading literary fiction enhances our empathy and our ability to gauge the emotions of others, so what happens to white kids who are raised solely on stories about white kids? Economists note that the ability to grasp the perspectives of people who don't look like us is increasingly crucial in a nation riven by race and growing more heterogeneous by the day. In a recent TEDx Talk, Chinese American author Grace Lin recalled hearing from a school librarian whose students stopped teasing an Asian classmate after they read Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Lin's adventure story starring a Chinese girl named Minli. The book, Lin said, had made being Asian "kind of cool."

Ellen Oh, the Korean American founder of We Need Diverse Books, points out that librarians don't fret over whether kids will relate to a title like The One and Only Ivan, told from a gorilla's perspective, yet faced with a book about a Chinese kid, the literary gatekeepers-from agents all the way down to parents-may balk. "Some of our most popular books deal with worlds that aren't Earth and people who aren't human," Oh says. "But the people you walk beside on this Earth have stories too." To complicate matters, a shrinking publishing world has consolidated its marketing budgets. "Readers are led by publishers into fewer and fewer books," observes Kevin Lewis, a black picture-book author who spent 23 years as an editor at major publishing houses. The result, he says, is that publishers often use a single narrative to represent an entire group's experience.

This puts intense pressure on authors to get it exactly right, even though nobody can quite agree what that means. Over the past year, the creators of two picture books were harshly criticized for their failure to convey the grim brutality of slavery. A Fine Dessert, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Sophie Blackall, both white, showed the same dessert (blackberry fool) being made at different times in history. The book received standout reviews, but after it was eviscerated on social media for its portrayal of a slave woman and her daughter serving the dessert on a South Carolina plantation, a contrite Jenkins donated her writing fee to We Need Diverse Books. (Blackall stood by her work.)

A Birthday Cake for George Washington-written by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, both women of color-told the story of Hercules, the late president's enslaved household cook, but glossed over the horrors of captivity and consigned to an author's note the fact that Hercules eventually ran away (on Washington's birthday, no less). In the face of internet outrage (# SlaveryWithASmile), Scholastic made the controversial choice to recall the picture book, because "without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves."

(Since this article went to press, two more books-by award-winning children's authors-have been subject to allegations of racial insensitivity. Lane Smith's There Was a Tribe of Kids was viewed by some observers as demeaning to Native Americans. The other title, When We Was Fierce, by e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, initially drew high praise, only to have its publication date pushed back indefinitely in response to online outcry.)

Some diversity advocates fear that the vitriol of the internet attacks will give pause to skittish writers and publishers. "For me, the biggest issue is the chill on diversity that is happening because of the feeling that it is okay to destroy people on social media," Taylor-Butler told me. "We have lost the perspective that these are books and they are going to be imperfect."

The questions roiling the children's publishing world are among the pressing cultural questions of our time: Whose story gets told, and who gets to tell it? How do you acknowledge oppression without being defined by it? And to what extent should writers bow to popular opinion? There are no simple answers. But what seems clear to me, as a writer struggling to find the best way to tell stories to kids, is that my inevitable mistakes are well worth making. Children, it turns out, are the best critics of all. They read carefully and passionately, and when they sense you have missed an essential aspect of the story, they will be more than happy to point it out to you.

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The uncomfortable truth about children's books

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One afternoon last fall, I found myself reading my picture book The Sea Serpent and Me to a group of schoolchildren in the island nation of Grenada. The story is about a little girl who befriends a tiny serpent that falls out of her bathroom faucet.

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Finding the Best Diverse Books for Your Classroom

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In this guest post originally posted at Achieve the Core, Jill Eisenberg , our Director of Curriculum & Literacy Strategy, shares resources and guidance for teachers on finding high-quality di…

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by Valentina Gonzalez

As the numbers of ELs in classrooms in the United States continue to rise, in some parts of our nation it may even be unusual to have English learners. And like all students, ELs bring to our classrooms unique experiences reflecting their traditions and cultures.

And just like our diverse students, the books on our shelves should be reflective of those unique experiences. Yet on many classroom shelves, that may not be the case.

I remember a few years ago reading an article and seeing the visual below on how diverse classroom bookshelves were. I was shocked and upset over the study. I examined my own bookshelf and conducted an "audit." I categorized each book: books with white main characters, black main characters, Asian main characters, animals, inanimate objects, etc. The results were disappointing. And I was an ESL teacher, an advocate for diversity and inclusion. My bookshelf did nothing to reflect the students that I served. At that moment I made a conscious effort to make a change. I began to intentionally seek out books that my students could connect with. When funds became available, that's what I purchased. It became my mission.

Just a few years later, in this article Sarah Park wrote that, " Children's literature continues to misrepresent underrepresented communities, and we wanted this infographic to show not just the low quantity of existing literature, but also the inaccuracy and uneven quality of some of those books."

As you can see from the new visual, in 2018 there was an increased number of diverse books published. However, in many classrooms we still aren't reflecting our student demographics. Lee & Low Books report that while 37 percent of the U.S. population are people of color, only 13 percent of children's books in the past 24 years include multicultural content.
Why is representation important?
The need to belong in a social group is strong. And research shows that humans are strongly motivated to remain in good standing with their social groups. When people feel left out, they feel unrecognized ( Rock, 2009).

Feeling validated is a basic psychological need. In the classroom, students have a strong urge to feel seen, heard, and represented. We can create opportunities for these experiences through the books on our shelves, and research shows that students are more likely to be engaged in independent reading when they have access to culturally relevant text ( Freeman & Freeman, 2004). In her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares her early reading experiences. She shares how as young readers we are impressionable and vulnerable. Stories can convince us, and they have the power to stir our imagination. But if we only have a single story of a certain people, we limit our world and our thoughts about them.

It's often said that books should serve as mirrors and window for students. Mirrors so they can see themselves and feel validated, represented, heard, seen; windows so they can learn about others and their experiences and build empathy.
How does having a culturally inclusive library build empathy?
The books we share with students can serve as windows into others' lives. Studies have shown a remarkable decline in Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking across the country ( Konrath, O'Brien, Hsing, 2011). If we can give our students (no matter the age/grade level) opportunities to build community together by reading books about people who are different than they are, we have a chance to build empathy. The more our students relate to one another and realize that each of us is unique, that we are all different, and that differences make us powerful, the stronger our chances are that they will embrace each other. A particular book may serve as a mirror for one student while it is a window for others.

One way to share these perspectives is by reading a book as a whole-group read aloud and holding a class discussion. This allows for everyone to hear the same story and then to connect with it their own way. After the story has been read aloud and discussed, it can be placed in the classroom library for anyone to read independently. Typically, it becomes the most popular book for a while.

The same can be done with poetry. After selecting a poem, you can either provide all students with a copy or project it for all to see. The poem can begin as a teacher read aloud and then move to a shared reading. After discussion, it can become independent reading as well.

Chapter books can also be culturally inclusive. Some teachers elect to read whole class novels while others prefer to have students read in book clubs. Either way, the key is to be selective about the chapter books. Do they accurately represent the variety of students in your classroom?
What are your favorite culturally inclusive books? Picture Books: Chapter Books: Poems:
For a more extensive list check out Amazon's Bestseller List: Best Children's Multicultural Story Books.

Please share other picture books, novels, and poems you would add to this list.

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Why Representation in Classroom Books is Important: Culturally Inclusive Books

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by Valentina Gonzalez As the numbers of ELs in classrooms in the United States continue to rise, in some parts of our nation it may even be unusual not to have English learners. And like all students, ELs bring to our classrooms unique experiences reflecting their traditions and cultures.

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In this guest post, Taun M. Wright, C EO of Equal Read, lays out some of the arguments for using diverse books in all schools, regardless of student demographics.
DeAvian was a disengaged student, more interested in socializing than academics. Her school had well-known books like Ramona but it wasn't until her Big Sister gave her a book with an African-American girl on the cover that suddenly, "DeAvian's eyes opened wide with excitement and a smile filled her face. She held the book tightly, looking up as if to say: 'Here I am, at last!'" Now, DeAvian continues to read, and her academic performance has improved dramatically. The impact of representative literature can be profound.

In a year with so much important attention to discrimination, the call for diverse children's books is clear. However, diverse books aren't just essential to students from minority or marginalized backgrounds. We need diverse books in schools with students representing fewer identity groups just as much as we need them in more diverse schools.

Research shows that the less contact students have with people from other racial groups, the more likely they are to retain higher levels of prejudice. While equity and inclusion are necessary, especially for those of us too long without them, social change is more likely to happen when everyone understands how they will benefit directly from increased diversity and, what's more, why their ability to embrace the benefits of diversity will be a key determinant of their future success. Here are a few key benefits to adding diverse books to a collection, regardless of the demographics of students:

INCREASED ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: In their book Identity-Safe Classrooms, Drs. Dorothy Steele and Becki Cohn-Vargas show that "Identity-Safe Classrooms" result in increased achievement for all students, not just those from marginalized groups. Stereotype threat - anticipating being negatively stereotyped based on negative attributes associated with an identity group you represent - has a direct impact on achievement for students from all identity groups. Having many diverse books can offer a "density of cues" to counter stereotypes and reduce stereotype threat, increasing identity-safety for all students.

ENGAGEMENT IN READING: Everyone agrees reading ability is a key predictor of future success. The key route to engaging kids in reading is to offer them books they find interesting and kids want to read about what they don't know, not merely what they know. As part of its Classrooms program, Equal Read assesses students' interest in diverse books, as well as their feelings of identity-safety and other measures. Students overwhelmingly answer, "I like reading about people that are different than me" and say that "books about kids that are different than the kids in my class are interesting."*

BETTER PROSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT: In 2012, Loris Vezalli and his colleagues demonstrated that adolescents who read a book concerning intercultural topics showed not only a reduction in stereotyping and more positive feelings about students representing identities other than their own, but also an increased desire to engage in future contact. Clearly, diverse books are a powerful tool for improved prosocial development.

COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS: Educators at all levels recognize the need for students to develop key "21st Century Skills." While their lists may differ around the edges, all include collaboration and communication as essential 21st Century Skills. As the total number of Latino, African-American, and Asian students will be over 50% this fall, all students will need to be able to collaborate and communicate with people from multiple identity groups, if they are to succeed. Businesses are well aware of research that shows diverse teams are more creative, innovative, and productive than homogenous teams. Silicon Valley companies, for instance, are now investing significantly in recruitment efforts geared to diverse employees. A recent study by professors from Cornell, UC Berkeley, Washington and Vanderbilt Universities even demonstrated that "political correctness" has a positive influence on creativity. Students accustomed to respectfully collaborating and communicating with people from many different identity groups will be better prepared for college and career success.

Just because a school's population is not very diverse, does not mean it should be similarly restricted in the books available to its students. Kids like great stories. All kids deserve to read the most engaging books available, books that expand their imagination of what's possible by telling a wide variety of stories, featuring characters with differences beyond phenotype (observable differences) to include different ethnicities, nationalities, languages, gender expression, family structures, abilities, sexual orientations, socioeconomic backgrounds, education levels, religions and beliefs, ages, body types, learning styles, and experiences.

Through its Classrooms program, Equal Read creates broadly diverse book collections that are balanced for gender and representative of all of a classroom's learners, offering teacher professional development and parent education about the role diverse books can play in increasing cultural competency.

Because every child deserves an equal read.

*Note: Equal Read also surveys parents and teachers, and overwhelmingly, both groups say they want to know more about diverse children's books. Clearly, they already recognize the benefits of diverse books to the students they serve, yet it is difficult for them to find these books - this is no surprise considering how few children's books feature diverse characters. We're also working on ways to help parents and teachers more readily find the most outstanding books featuring diverse characters through Equal Read's Books program.
Taun Wright founded Equal Read in 2013 as a nonprofit organization to increase diversity in children's literature, so all kids can "see themselves and a world of possibility in the books they read." A former teacher, nonprofit consultant and administrator, and a parent and grandparent of a multi-racial family with multiple and varied abilities, nationalities, ethnicities, family structures, socio-economic backgrounds, languages, sexual orientations, ages, body types, education levels, learning styles, and experiences, she has first-hand appreciation for the wonders of different identities and the value of diverse children's books in sharing them.

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Why Do We Need Diverse Books in Non-Diverse Schools?

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In this guest post, Taun M. Wright, C EO of Equal Read, lays out some of the arguments for using diverse books in all schools, regardless of student demographics. DeAvian was a disengaged student, more interested in socializing than academics.