Article 7: Over One Hundred Years of Misrepresentation: American Minority Groups in Children’s Books

Today’s education standards require teachers to have cultural understanding and global perspectives. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, includes two thematic standards focusing on these topics. In addition, the U.S. has more ethnic minorities than ever before, and these groups are expected to increase in the future. Black and Hispanic students, for example, constituted for approximately half of all students in public schools in the U.S. in 2000 but are projected to increase to two-thirds of all students in 2015 (Ornstein and Hunkins 2009, 175). For these reasons, many educators today urge for a culturally relevant curriculum that portrays all groups accurately and authentically. Many educational researchers emphasize the need for teachers to provide an environment encouraging acceptance and promoting self-esteem for all young students, and this will be difficult to achieve if children’s books fail to represent people from diverse cultural minority groups or include descriptions portraying these groups as inferior, foreign, undesirable, or strange. High quality multicultural children’s literature helps young students to develop cross-cultural understanding (Norton 2009, 1).