Why are so many characters in kids books white and middle-class?

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When Australian-Lebanese author Huda Hayek was growing up in Perth, no children’s stories reflected her reality. Her book Huda and Me is for all Australian kids but particularly for those like her: who eat falafels for lunch, whose parents have Middle E...

When Australian-Lebanese author Huda Hayek was growing up in Perth, no children’s stories reflected her reality. The second youngest of seven children, her name was different to everyone around her, as was her religion and her food.Author Huda Hayek says we need more diverse characters in children’s literature.for all Australian kids but particularly for those like her: who eat falafels for lunch, whose parents have Middle Eastern accents.

“I’m super lucky it landed on the right desk. [The publisher] said write this book for the Muslim child, the Lebanese child.”Growing up in country Victoria, Julianne Negri didn’t see much of her reality in the books she read either. She wishes there’d been something likeThe Narnia books were a well-thumbed favourite but depicted a completely different world to hers.

An African-American born and raised in Virginia, now a writer, poet and lecturer in literacy at Monash University, Chapman says she wasn’t a strong reader as a child but she vividly remembers the time she found a book with a character on the cover who looked like her. “That book was in the library and I took it home and didn’t take it back. I honestly felt that no one would take care of that book as well as I did.”She says having a range of imagined possibilities is important for all children.

For Chapman, as well as being able to see yourself, readers need to see others as the main characters. “It’s important for us to be able to see there can be many protagonists, many different points of view.”in the school production. “The first story that she saw ofwas Will Smith’s production, where the little girl looked like her. I grew up in the 70s where Annie was always the little girl with red hair,” she says.

 

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And I suppose most of the European background boys will have stories where they are pansies, have women bosses, hold hands with each other, and are always apologising because their forebears were colonialists, chauvinistic and slave owning!!

Because Australians back then weren’t from the Middle East?🤔

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