AT The Heritage American, Stephen Hopewell has a fascinating post on his experience at the local library with the latest board books for babies. The books aggressively assert racial diversity, even to the point of depicting animals as black or white, and yet ironically it is white parents who are the most frequent borrowers. Hopewell writes:

[A]m I the only one who feels like I am being targeted or manipulated when I am presented with book after book with a black child on the cover, to take home and read to my white baby?

But like so many features of our culture today, the new norms for children’s books were established with no honest public debate and no understanding of what was being given up. There is an opportunity cost to every choice made; energy expended on making children’s books “diverse” is then not used for some other creative purpose. And these products, in my mind, are very unsatisfactory.

— Comments —

James N. writes:

The use of children’s books for leftist indoctrination is not new.

The avalanche of minority role models follows the “be happy when mommy goes to work” genre. There is not one decent board book or early reader with a father depicted positively published in the last 30 years. The Newberry medal was given in the 90s to a book where a child becomes disabled after his father runs him over because he’s late for a poker game.

All of our children’s books are old. We have not arrived at Fahrenheit 451 (yet).

Buck writes:

The stated purpose and goal of diversity – the Supreme court’s rationalization of a “state interest” – is that it will benefit whites. The court has made the case that affirmative action or rather forced diversity can not benefit minorities, and is actually prohibited from directly benefiting blacks and other minorities. The “state interest” is narrowly defined by its deemed benefit to whites. It is only whites that need diversity and only whites who can benefit from diversity. Blacks and other minorities have no need and since they can not derive any benefit, there is no “state interest” and therefore it holds no social or cultural value for them, other than the submission of whites to it. It must, and will only be forced on whites for their benefit and to meet their special needs.

So, there’s is no need for blacks and other minorities to read a racially and ethnically diverse selection of books. It can’t possibly benefit them, it can only benefit whites.

James P. writes:

It’s not so bad when the book “just” has a white characters with black friends in it, with no other obvious ideological message — for example, the Max and Ruby books have brown bunnies as well as white ones, but the ones I’ve read lack any overtly obnoxious Leftist messages.

There is a series that really annoys me — I’m blanking on the name because I always find a way to avoid reading the books when my son hands them to me at the library — in which the protagonist is an environmentally conscious Hispanic boy.

I refuse to read The Lorax because I detest its inane anti-Capitalist message.

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