Ties: Mirrors for My Daughter’s Bookshelf

While fixing my 4-year-old daughter’s bookshelf, I noticed something missing on the glossy covers of her picture books: girls of color. There were talking cars, imaginary creatures and stories about white men, women and children. I started counting and discovered that only 4 percent of our books featured minorities as main characters, and only one was a black girl like my daughter.

I needed to do more than fix the bookshelf; I needed to remedy the contents.

It wasn’t that my daughter never heard stories featuring characters that look like her. I’m a kindergarten teacher, and I often borrow books with diverse characters from both the school and local libraries. But once I noticed the imbalance in our personal collection, I felt the books we actually owned should reflect her. The lack of representation should have been obvious much sooner, but I realized that as a white mother, white privilege afforded me a certain level of oblivion to the racial makeup of our book characters. Part of adopting transracially is learning what to pay attention to. As soon as I was aware of what was missing, I committed myself to filling our bookshelves with stories about smart, talented, strong black females.

In the mid 1960s, the children’s book editor Nancy Larrick found that the publishing houses putting out the most children’s books containing black characters still featured them less than 5 percent of the time (and not necessarily main characters or positive images). Ms. Larrick was among the first in children’s publishing to say that it was a problem for black children to learn about their world through books that do not represent them.

The diversity gap in children’s publishing persists today. Of children’s books published from 1994 to 2014, an average of 10 percent featured multicultural content, though that may be slowly increasing: The 2014 rate reached 14 percent. The campaign We Need Diverse Books was established in 2014 to advocate for more diverse representation in children’s literature. And in 2015, at age 11, Marley Dias started the Twitter hashtag #1000blackgirlbooks. Frustrated by the homogeneity of stories she read in class, Marley collected books featuring black girls to benefit underprivileged students.

The education professor Rudine Sims Bishop uses the metaphor of windows, sliding glass doors and mirrors to illustrate why diverse literature is so important. Books can be windows into worlds previously unknown to the reader; they open like sliding glass doors to allow the reader inside. But books can also be mirrors. When books reflect back to us our own experiences, when scenes and sentences strike us as so true they are anchors mooring us to the text, it tells readers their lives and experiences are valued. When children do not see themselves in books, the message is just as clear.

Of course, my daughter relates to characters for many reasons that have nothing to do with race. She identifies with Sal’s insatiable hunger for blueberries and Harold’s love of his purple crayon. Enamored by wild things at wild rumpuses, she dressed as Max for Halloween. In Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading, individuals bring their own experiences to a text to understand and draw meaning from it. There are multiple ways to identify with a text and racially is only one. But if a child’s race or ethnicity is underrepresented in books, it says something about how those pieces of their identities are valued.

My daughter notices mirrors, not just in books, but all around her. Watching the ballerina Michaela DePrince, who lived through the civil war in Sierra Leone, perform in “The Nutcracker,” she exclaimed over the hushed audience, “I like the brown girl!” She notices equally when groups are underrepresented in certain roles. I once asked her to give her train ticket to the conductor and she replied, “That’s not a conductor, that’s a lady!” It was her first time seeing a female conductor.