Black Kids Don’t Want to Read About Harriet Tubman All the Time [nytimes.com]

Alicia Doktor 3/11/181:00 PM

Atlanta — I’m pretty sure I hadn’t even wiped the sonogram goop off my belly before I rushed off to pick out dresses and books for my unborn child. I was on a mission: My daughter was going to need all the pink dresses and all the books with brown babies.

Finding adorable dresses was easy. Finding children’s literature with pictures of children of color was not.

Books with white children and, like, ducks, were de rigueur, which I guess was fine for parents who were having white babies or ducks. But this was not going to work for my brown baby, who would spend a lifetime looking for her image in a pop cultural landscape that all but ignored children who looked like her. I wanted — needed — her to see her beautiful brown self reflected in the music and stories I hoped to feed to her as consistently as food. In my house, she would be visible.

[For more on this story by DENENE MILLNER, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...re-books-blacks.html]

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