Who are Multicultural Children’s Books For, Anyway?

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By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president

As a white early elementary-school-age child living in Kansas, there were few non-white people living in my neighborhood. Over time, as I changed schools, there were many Hispanic and African American children in my classes. While I was then surrounded by kids from other races and cultures, the values and family practices presented in school “reading” books were utterly 1950s white middle-class America featuring working dads wearing a full brimmed hat, and stay-at-home moms wearing aprons. That did not mean that was the middle of anything, however. I had no idea what I was. Early on I was just Irish Catholic... me.

For historical perspective, I had not even seen a TV set until I was 7 years old. The elementary school I first attended was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and my classmates were kids like me, white and Catholic. Books at my school, featuring white Dick and Jane, were provided by women teachers called nuns. They were dressed in floor length medieval looking black dresses with white head and hair coverings, revealing only their hands and faces. Hearing the nuns’ long rosaries (beaded prayer belts) clatter as they walked down the hall was totally normal to me.

I first became aware of other cultures when I was 10 and we moved to Des Moines, Iowa. The children there included Latines (always referred to as Mexicans regardless of their various family heritages) and African American kids, who were not always referred to respectfully as “Negroes.” (At that time, calling children “Black” was considered unpleasant.) It soon began to dawn on me that there were significant differences between me and many of my classmates. Most importantly, there were cultural differences. We had no clue about what a culture even was, except regarding religion or ethnicity. And in those days, discussions about other religious cultures were considered in bad taste, so those topics were avoided. Except for our own religion, there were no books about culture in general. It was barely noteworthy that we were each somehow different from one another. My brother and I were simply who our parents told us we were: Irish.

For my family’s eighth move in as many years, I was placed mid-year into a 5th-grade public school, in the suburbs of Kansas City, Mo. There, all my classmates were “white,” though they came from a variety of cultures including Italian, Hispanic, and even Native American.  It wasn’t until half-way through the second half of that 5th-grade year, having moved to my first “public” school, had I met children of other faiths who attended other churches, synagogues, and temples–or who did not attend any religious services at all.

While my family continued to go to “mass,” not “church” on Sunday, I didn’t go to mass each morning as in my prior schools, nor knelt in class to pray. There were no nuns who led us in celebrating the “Holy Days” throughout the year with focused lessons on how to live a “good Catholic” life. By then, my father had disappeared, and consequently we and our mother had been invited to live with our larger family. Our grandmother, granduncle and two of my mother’s unmarried older sisters welcomed us warmly and became our new immediate family.

So, by age 10, my 12-year-old brother and I had experienced at least nine waves of dramatic cultural and family change.

Wherever my family lived we visited the library regularly, but there were never any books that presented life as I had led it. Had I been born many decades later, there would have been available hundreds of books that could have helped me make sense of and even celebrate my uniqueness and those of my classmates.

What happens when kids are provided with opportunities to read and learn about children and life in homes unlike their own? Or children who live in foster care? Or children whose families have been separated due to immigration challenges? Children who have lost siblings, or parents, or best friends? Children who have been bullied or excluded by classmates because of “differences” --race, physical challenges, all things that they cannot change?  Children who have had to move far away from beloved places and friends? 

Unless children are provided with books or other ways to showcase all races and cultures and life histories, they run the risk of growing up with their own narrow sense of what’s normal, thinking that wearing masks for COVID is what everyone always had always done to be safe from disease, that there was always a climate crisis, and that everyone’s TVs were always the size of dining tables that seat six.

So, we urge parents to ask any children’s librarian or bookstore clerk to recommend multicultural books for your kids or kids you love. In each one of these books, children will find that every youngster is both like and unlike them. Reading along with a sensitive adult, those books will provide children with the opportunity to discuss, reflect on and celebrate their own cultures and uniqueness. It will allow them to expand upon their appreciation of individual experiences and the personal qualities that will allow them comfortably to build their own strong connections with others from any and every background.