Diversity in the News

July 11th - July 18th, 2013

CBC DIVERSITY/COMMITTEE MEMBERS IN THE NEWS

• Children's literature lacks diversity, say authors, librarians at The Tennessean – includes thoughts from Alvina Ling, Executive Editorial Director at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and CBC Diversity Committee Member

ON OUR RADAR

• Kids React Adorably To Cheerios Ad That Sparked Racist Backlash (VIDEO) at the Huffington Post
• Related:  The Cheerios ad (VIDEO); an interview (VIDEO) with the young star of the ad and her family about the controversy on MSNBC
• Part IV: Are All Book Covers Created Equal? Bank Street 6th-Graders Talk With Knopf Editors!
• Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning? at the New York Times
• 'Fat Angie' Author Reaches Out to At-Risk Kids at PW – the author has embarked on an At-Risk tour, using her book as a springboard for “conversations with at-risk youngsters, including those who are economically disadvantaged, bullied, and LGBTQ.”
• Community Angered by Tossed Black History Collection at School Library Journal

Diversity 101: The Sidekick Syndrome

Contributed to CBC Diversity by our very own Andrea Davis Pinkney 

My Personal Connection
My teenagers are some opinionated people! I love this about them. It means they have strong ideas and that they’re speaking up about what’s important to them. That’s why I was very eager to write this blog post about clichés and stereotypes. As the mom of two teens, my daughter and son waste no time telling me what needs to be fixed in the YA books they read. As an editor and author, my kids like to stick it to me, thinking I have some magical power to correct each and every societal stereotype that exists in books for young people. While I don’t have a magic wand, I do know there is one cliché that annoys the heck out of me and my teens. Hopefully this post will shine some light on it.

Stereotypes/Cliches/Tropes/Errors

I’ll pose it in the way my kids put it to me ― in a question: “Why, in contemporary YA novels that feature groups of kids as friends, the black girl or boy is always a sidekick, secondary character, or nonentity?”

The way my daughter and son see it, this is the kid with no character development, no backstory, no emotional growth, no family, and dialogue one-liners that don’t amount to much. 

Diversity in the News

February 28^th – March 7^th, 2013

CBC Diversity felt it was time to step up our game when it came to participating in the conversations outside our blog concerning children's books and the representation of people within them. We want you, our readers, to know that you can rely on the CBC Diversity blog to provide links to news stories, discussion threads, tweet trends, and blog posts about these important conversations. We'll be posting weekly roundups to keep everyone abreast of the conversation and we'll be entering into a few more ourselves. We hope you do too! 

If you'd rather look at everything all at once, you'll still be able to find the links to these news articles and blog posts on our all-inclusive News & ... page as well as event details on our CBC Diversity Google calendar located on our Events page.

Andrea Davis Pinkney: How I Got Into Publishing

Guest post by the Vice President, Executive Editor at Scholastic. She has been named one of the "25 Most Influential Black Women in Business" by the Network Journal and is one of the "25 Most Influential People in our Children's Lives" cited by Children's Health Magazine.

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Andrea Davis Pinkney

I fell into bookmaking completely by accident. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, where I majored in journalism, I pursued my one big career dream, which was to work at a high-profile magazine. Fortunately, that dream came true ― and it led me to children’s publishing!

Soon after my last day of college, I went straight to midtown Manhattan, and got a job in the editorial offices of Mechanix Illustrated magazine. It didn’t matter to me that the magazine was all-things-automotive. In my mind, I’d “made it”. I was working in publishing and living in New York. There was an unexpected bonus to the job. I met my husband, children’s book illustrator Brian Pinkney, who worked in the art department of Field & Stream magazine, across the hall. 

Learning to generate new ideas constantly, and looking for ways to pitch and position these ideas [...] would help me become a book editor.

In addition to meeting Brian, two important things happened around this time.

While I was at Mechanix Illustrated, I was also writing for several major women’s magazines and the New York Times. One of the gifts of being a magazine editor and writer is learning to generate new ideas constantly, and looking for ways to pitch and position these ideas, in the hope that a magazine wants to publish your articles. I didn’t know it then, but this practice would help me become a book editor.