Response to "The Apartheid of Children's Literature"

Christopher Myers, an author and illustrator of children's books, wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times called "The Apartheid of Children's Literature." He wrote so poignantly about the message we send to children of this generation by excluding African American characters from children's books. The characters in these children's stories have been and are continuing to be predominantly centered around white communities and a world where only white people live and succeed. Even decades after the civil rights movement and those hard years in our nation's history where we fought for equality among different races, racism still exists today, and it has evidently even seeped into the way we educate our children.

Myers refers to books as "maps" to children. They learn to navigate the world based on the stories they read. What lessons do we teach kids when books don't even reflect the diversity of our world, which we all want our children to learn to appreciate? How can we expect the world to change, to shake ourselves free from the dust of racial prejudice and pick ourselves up again when we aren't teaching the young generation to appreciate differences, to find beauty in our differences?

Cleverly weaving in references to famous works of children's literature (for example, expressing that there is an elusive villain to this issue and it's up to us to be the James Bond/Black Dynamite to fight against the message we are sending to kids by excluding members of non-white races), Christopher Myers makes a call to action to all writers, authors, parents, teachers, and guardians to join hands in opening the eyes of the younger generation to be more aware of what a diverse world we live in--and to appreciate the beauty within those differences.