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Grace Lin giving a TED-style talk. Unfortunately, there's no transcript, and it turns out that Grace Lin habitually gives talks as though her audience is composed of small children (well, she is a children's book author), but the content therein is still worth a listen.

 

Although the theme isn't quite the same, it reminded me of another TED talk I listened to (well, read the transcript of) a few years ago, The Danger of the Single Story.

 

It's talks like this, and blogposts on the same subject, and articles, that have led me to my constant quest to diversify my bookshelves for the girls. When I was young, I actually read several books with Asian protagonists... but that was mostly because of the prolific and amazing Laurence Yep. As for books with Black protagonists, well, once we set aside the BSC club books there were approximately bupkis. The Egypt Game, maybe. A few more books with Latina protagonists - Felita, I guess, and Kit from the Young Wizards series, and a few more books the titles of which escape me. And I certainly read a lot of books about Jews, not all of whom were running from the Holocaust!

 

And that's what passed for diversity in literature when I was a kid, and I *know* my parents cared about this sort of thing. The stats might be better now, but they're still pretty dismal, and you still need to make an effort to fill your shelves with a variety of perspectives. I find that often, the books might exist, but they're not on the shelves, so I have to specially order them, or buy them off of Amazon. Very frustrating, but at least I have that option!

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