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As you may know, today is International Women’s Day. Although it has become a bit of a Valentine’s Day sequel in some communities, many countries are still recognizing the holiday for it’s original purpose. The United Nations created this day to recognize women who have impacted our world, as well as a way to focus public service efforts towards women in need around the world.

Each year since 1975 (when the United States began celebrating IWD), the United Nations selects a theme to focus the day’s efforts. This year’s theme is “Empower Rural Women- End Hunger and Poverty”, and I encourage you to find out more about what you can do to participate in this important cause.

Another way to celebrate women is by learning about a woman who has changed history, particularly those who have not received recognition for her contributions. Remembering these women, many of whom weren’t recognized in their own day or have since been forgotten, is an important aspect of realizing how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go, in terms of women’s rights. Click on the image below for a selection of Lee & Low titles that introduce you to some such women, each of whom, we believe, should have her own holiday.

From time to time, race issues pop up in advertising. Race is a tricky subject in advertising because common approaches tend to reinforce racial stereotypes and rub people the wrong way if not handled with care.

Sensibilities vary from city to city and from country to country. Since the United States went through the civil rights movement, many Americans are aware of race issues and may recognize on their own when people of color are depicted in an unfavorable light.

In 2010, a KFC ad ran in Australia depicting a lone white fan at a cricket game, surrounded by a rowdy bunch of black West Indians. To restore order, the white cricket fan placates the entire crowd with a bucket of fried chicken. I’ve read commentary from Australians rejecting claims that the ad perpetuates racial stereotypes, but the controversy raised enough public ire that KFC eventually pulled the ad.

In 2011, Nivea ran an ad depicting a preppy, groomed black man holding the head of his former self, who is sporting a beard, an Afro, and an angry expression. The ad clearly conveyed a message—the idea that natural hair on a black man is uncivilized, rather than simply being a style preference or a nod to Afrocentrism. The ad was pulled and the company issued an apology.

The main goal of some political ads is to spread fear and distrust of opposing candidates by focusing on differences that can be portrayed as “anti-American.” This ad for Pete Hoekstra’s Michigan Senate run was shown during the 2012 Super Bowl. The fact that this ad encouraged xenophobia caused such outrage against Pete Hoekstra that Hoekstra’s opponent Debbie Stabenow actually saw a rush of donations to her campaign as a direct result of the ad. The ad was pulled by the Hoekstra campaign soon after.

On the other hand, many ads that feature people of color are successful:

In the 1960s, Levy’s Jewish Rye ad campaign was an effort to expand the customer base of Levy’s Jewish Rye beyond the Jewish community. The ad campaign featured ordinary New Yorkers of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds and was groundbreaking for its inclusiveness.

In the 1980s, the clothing company United Colors of Benetton gained a reputation for pushing the envelope in areas of race and religion with some of the most memorable ad campaigns in advertising history. I’ve heard some people complain that some Benetton ads are racist, but provocative ads are designed to test the line of what is appropriate and to make people literally stop in their tracks and take notice.

In 2000, Ca

Oh, Arizona. Why are so many things happening in your beautiful state lately that give us reason to talk about you in these roundups? This time around, it’s a mural featuring the faces of local schoolchildren—but the schoolchildren are a diverse crowd, the mural was drawing racist slurs, and the school’s principal asked for a prominent Latino face to be lightened on the mural. He’s since reversed the decision, and the mural will stay. The Atlantic Wire has a good summary of the situation and the response to it.

The repercussions of Arizona’s anti-immigration law are still rippling outward. RaceWire elaborates with a look at the disappearing schoolchildren, as parents, particularly illegal immigrants, are keeping their kids—often natural-born citizens themselves—at home to protect the family.

Moving from the southwest to the southeast, The New York Times takes a look at jury selection in the south, and concludes that blacks are consistently barred from serving on juries. The racism behind this is disturbing enough, but it gets worse—studies have shown that “racially diverse juries deliberate longer, consider a wider variety of perspectives and make fewer factual errors than all-white juries.”

Much of the Gulf Coast is being hit hard by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but Cambodian and Vietnamese fishermen on the Louisiana coast, still recovering from Katrina’s damage, have been hit particularly hard, and the language barrier—many are not fluent English speakers—makes recovery harder.

Nationwide, there remain very few successful black politicians—Barack Obama aside, of course. There are only three—three!—African Americans holding major statewide offices now, and that number is likely to drop even further, with the possibility of not a single black governor or senator next year.

In sports, despite the legacy of Jackie Robinson and other African American baseball greats, the number of American-born black players in major league baseball has been dropping, and that trend starts young—many black boys who play baseball are pressured to switch to football or basketball when they reach middle school. The Times looks into the trend, and profiles a player who’s stuck with baseball anyway.

A pair of posts sheds some light on interracial dating. First there was a piece offering advice for non-South Asian people who want to date Indians. It’s a really problematic piece, stereotyping Indians as a model minority and recommending nothing short of cultural appropriation for wooing them. Luckily, Feministing has a rebuttal: simple guidelines for determining if you’re dating a racist.

Lastly, Racialicious has a great piece on

Racialicious starts us off this week with a thoughtful look at books about black southerners written by white authors, and street-lit written by black writers.

The Washington Monthly takes a look at some disturbing rhetoric that’s come up in the Elena Kagan hearings—not rhetoric about Kagan, but about Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

A group of “Gullah/Geechee, descendants of West African slaves who became some of the nation’s earliest black landowners” are fighting to regain ancestral land in Georgia, from which they were displaced in 1942 and which is now a National Wildlife Refuge.

Ta-Nahisi Coates is also looking at his ancestral heritage; not land but genealogy. He’s sharing his finding and his feelings, including his awe and the strangeness of talking to a white man who may well be a relative.

Most migrant farm workers are undocumented, so when there are anti-immigrant complaints about undocumented workers taking jobs that should go to Americans, these are the jobs they’re talking about, right? Colorlines brings us the story of an organization daring complainers to take those jobs—some of the most dangerous and lowest paying jobs in the country.

Lastly, School Library Journal shares a summer reading poster in Toronto that’s causing a ruckus because “the people depicted with darker skin . . . had very little clothing or were barefoot while the paler characters were fully dressed.” What do you think?

Some interesting essays round the blogosphere this week touching on all kinds of diversity—race and more!

Cynic’s blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates, and he has a really interesting look at the progression of ethnic groups through his neighborhood: first the Irish, then the Jews, now the African Americans. Each group starts as outsiders, whom the insiders swear never to accept, so they create their own institutions and maintain their culture but eventually assimilate, spread out and leave the enclave available for the next group of outsiders—and with the vibrant African American community there now, he wonders, what comes next for them?

Jonathan Rauch looks at changing patterns of life, adulthood, and marriage in different American communities—communities that are generally either liberal or conservative—and how they influence the debate about gay marriage. It’s a long essay, but it’s worth the time to get such a good read on both sides of the debate, and where they’re coming from.

On The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer talks about why it’s good to add a few strangers to your Twitter feed—and by extension, why it’s good to expose ourselves to people who don’t look and think and sound just like we do.

And lastly, ColorLines brings us news from an insufficiently-recognized community. An Iroquois lacrosse team composed of Iroquois citizens residing in the US and Canada were unable to attend the World Lacrosse Championships because their Iroquois passports—issued by the sovereign Iroquois nation—weren’t accepted by JFK airport or, later, the British government.

Greetings on another Friday afternoon!

The New Cover

The Original Cover

Guest blogging at Feministe, Shani Hilton talks about her hair journey as a Black woman, from one who relaxed her hair to one with natural hair. It’s a great personal look at the highly-politicized cultures of Black women’s hair.

Arizona’s racially-charged anti-immigrant bill has lost some of its teeth, but the fallout continues, in Arizona and in other states. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval is running to become the state’s first Hispanic governor—but he says he’s not worried about laws like Arizona’s because “my children don’t look Hispanic.”

The words we use to describe people reflects and shapes how we think about them. Sara Mayeux takes a look at one specific example: the term “illegal alien” and its variant, “illegal” used as a noun.

Enjoy the reading and enjoy the weekend, folks!

Just a couple links for you on this fine August Friday!

Colorlines reminds us that the 45th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and they present some amazing photos of courage and determination from the Selma to Montgomery Right to Vote March.

Global Post takes a fascinating look at Afro-Mexican culture, a concentration of black Mexicans on the western coast of the country. The article looks at how the community, probably the descended from slaves, still shows ties to Africa but has mostly lost the knowledge of their history.

Enjoy the reading and your weekend!

We’re starting this week with author Mitali Perkins, who has some great suggestions on selling diverse children’s books. It’s mostly aimed at booksellers, but it has a lot that’s of interest to everyone, like its reminder about the many children on US military bases abroad. It’s also a great reminder that if one thing doesn’t work, try something new—for one store, it works best to have displays tied to heritage months; for another, it works best to spread the books throughout the store. That’s true of readers, too: what works best for one may not work for another, so find something new and try again.

Remember when we pointed out Amy Bowllan’s project to get pictures of readers with books by authors of color? Well, we got caught reading.

Enjoy your weekend—and a good book!

There’s been a lot of chatter about prizes lately!

The ALA has added another children’s book award—and more diversity. The new Stonewall Award for Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award will be recognizing books for young readers relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience.

There could also be a prize for you! To raise money for the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, which sends emerging writers of color to workshops, the Carl Brandon Society is giving away five e-readers preloaded with short stories, essays, and poetry by science fiction and fantasy writers of color. They’re not children’s books, but we may just read them anyway.

Prizes done, we turn to something more solemn. Yesterday, of course, was veteran’s day. In honor of the occasion, we leave you with an image from Quiet Hero: The Ira Hayes Story:

Another Friday is here, and we have another round of links to articles we think you’ll appreciate. Enjoy, and feel free to come back and comment on what you thought.

Our first reading suggestion comes from the New York Times. This year is the 150th anniversary of the start of the civil war, and the Times has a new column, disunion, that follows the war’s developments, day by day but a century and a half later. You can start at the beginning, or you may be particularly interested in Jim Crow on West Broadway, about a young African American man who refused to get off a whites-only streetcar, a hundred years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks.

History sometimes gets a late bit of resolution. ColorLines brings us a story about the killing of a civil rights marcher, Jimmy Lee Jackson, in 1965. After forty-five years, the killer is going to jail.

Maybe if the face is on a book, you'll remember it?

We’re moving from history to modern science and from diversity to reading for our last link. Are you a good reader? Are you terrible at remembering faces? A new study shows that reading and facial memory use the same parts of the brain, and being good at one means being bad at the other. Comforting news, isn’t it . . . wait, who are you and why are am I talking to you?

And that’s all for today, folks!

Welcome to Black History Month!

Heritage Months have their bad sides and good sides, but we’re starting out this week’s linkup with one of the good things to come out of Black History Month: The Brown Bookshelf’s Twenty-Eight Days Later project, highlighting a Black children’s book author or illustrator every day in February. Check their blog for great contributors to the field. Today they’re talking with one of our own authors, Natasha Anastasia Tarpley. Shadra Strickalnd, Tony Medina, and Christine Taylor-Butler will be featured later in the month.

Also in diversity-related projects, there’s a new challenge for book bloggers: The People of Color Reading Challenge, encouraging online book reviewers to read and review books by and about people of color. They’re collecting suggestions and reviews.

Moving on to essays looking at the racism and racial tension that often lurk under the surface, we have Andrew Grant-Thomas at race-TALK writing on what wasn’t said in Obama’s State of the Union: how disproportionately the recession has hit women and racial minorities, largely through unconscious bias and barriers built into institutions.

On a similar theme, Ta-Nahisi Coates writes about how race relations in the U.S. are like obesity in the U.S.. It’s a powerful look at how culture and mindset affect actions and outcomes.

Lastly, Love Isn’t Enough brings us an essay on why exposing children to people of different backgrounds isn’t enough: “In this thinking, the very presence of people of color in a community is enough to prove the absence of racism. It is centered on the reality of white people; there is no consideration for the experiences of people of color in so-called diverse environments, whether they indeed face racism.”

If you’re on the East Coast, enjoy the snow this weekend! If you’re not, enjoy not needing to shovel the snow.

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