Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, writes at The Huffington Post—
It's Hard to Be What You Can't See:
“When we think about what it is to be ‘connected,’ we think about memory. We think about history. We think about storytelling. All of these words that we hear—‘literacy,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘diversity’—those are all words for connection . . . When I say to people ‘why do we need to have diverse books?’ it’s not because necessarily everybody needs to see themselves reflected in every book, but because we need that sense of connection. We need to live in a global sense.”
As a new school year starts, many parents are making sure their children have the right supplies from their back-to-school lists and double-checking their courses and schedules. But are we thinking about what books our children are reading? Children of color are now a majority of all public school students and will soon be a majority of all children in America yet children’s books and the publishing industry have failed to keep up with the rainbow of our children’s faces and cultures and needs and the wide variety of their daily experiences. As award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Christopher Myers says above, this matters in order to give all children a deeper sense of connection to the books they’re reading and to each other and to prepare them to live in a rapidly globalizing, multicultural, multiracial, and multi-faith nation and world. [...]
The “all-white world of children’s books” is nothing new. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, the moderator of the children’s book roundtable, noted that was the title of a landmark study fifty years ago “calling out the children’s book world not only for failing to include African Americans in children’s books, but also for feeding White children ‘gentle doses of racism through their books.’” The old books were guilty of sins of commission and omission, and of course Black children were not the only ones left out. Bishop said since 1994 the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin has been counting the number of new children’s books featuring African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans each year. But even as the number of Americans of color has continued to grow rapidly, the percentage of books reflecting them has not: the annual total has hovered around 10 percent.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—We Must Stop Not Talking About Afghanistan:
In the United States, however, there has been comparatively little coverage of Afghanistan, a bare whisper of debate. Funerals of the scores of Americans killed in the Afghan surge have not made it to the front page. Worse, most of the left blogosphere, once alive with fierce daily discussion of war, has had only brief flurries of commentary and analysis on Afghanistan since President Obama’s speech about his new policy in March to "dismantle, disrupt, and defeat" al-Qaida. It’s become the invisible war. That’s in spite of the fact that far more Americans are now dying there than in Iraq, and this year the Pentagon is slated to spend $65 billion there, as opposed to $61 billion in Iraq.
Part of this inattention may be chalked up to the on-going fight over health care, a subject which has, quite understandably, sucked most of the oxygen out of the room as activists try to salvage a reform that has been sabotaged by dilution, capitulation to insurance interests, poor messaging and officious sneering at the people who have objected to all three. Nonetheless, with a couple of weeks or so remaining before the commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, publicly delivers his strategic assessment of the situation, the silence is, as the cliché has it, deafening. McChrystal's assessment will not specifically ask for more troops, according to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. But shortly after it’s released we can almost certainly expect the general to request thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars.
Under the circumstances, the near silence from progressives is deplorable. A good leader, as our new President said during the campaign, must multitask. Nothing gives us immunity from that admonition. Given that 70% of Democrats polled now say the war isn’t worth fighting, and a plurality of 45% of Americans say the number of troops should be reduced, while only 24% say they should be increased, what's stopped our tongues?
Tweet of the Day
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in
here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio."
The Week's High Impact Posts • High Impact Posts
Top Comments • The Evening Blues