Saturday Afternoon at Barnes and Noble

This past Saturday I was able to spend a good amount of time in the Barnes and Noble in downtown Bethesda, MD. The heart of this affluent DC suburb was bustling with families running their weekend errands, grabbing their afternoon coffee, or simply going out for a walk in the posh downtown area. The bookstore was just as happening as the sidewalks outside. I quickly found the children's book section, and began to scour the area for diverse, multicultural books.

I looked....and looked....and found quite a few titles which seemed to be fairly multicultural, and one's that I would especially like to use in my classroom. Here are the names and titles of those books:

Black is Brown is Tan
Adoff, A

Amazing Grace
Hoffman, M

Are you There God, its me Margaret
Blume, J

Going Home
Bunting, E

Is there really a human race?
Curtis, J

Ruby's Wish
Bridges, S

It's Okay to Be Different
Parr, T

If the World Were a Village
Smith

These texts were all locacted in the children's section of the book store, in the picture books section. What was interesting was that they are all somewhat scattered around, some out of place, others right where they had belonged. My initial thoughts in going into the bookstore, would be that I could ask an associate (bookseller) about where the multicultural children's section was...but quickly found that I would be presented with a blank stare, and told to rummage through the regular picture book shelves for anything that I may be looking for. As a future teacher, I would think that bookstores would take multicultural books out, and place them in their own section so that teachers, parents, and kids could easily access them and learn from them.

Along with the books themselves, the authors who write them seemed to be multicultural as well, from what I could tell. After reading the inside sleeve, it was sometimes hard tell the background of the author, and in that case, Google came in very handy. I find that the most credible people to write a childrens book on a certain subject are those people who can directly relate to what they are writing about. For example, if an author was to write about a biracial child, I would find it more helpful, and credible if the author themself was biracial, or had a child who was biracial. That is simply this bloggers opinion. However, in all these texts the portrayl of the characters was fairly accurate. One of my goals going into the observation was to see if I could find consistent stereotypes, such as that we have discussed in "Loud Lipped Lucy." Luckily, none were found, at least in the books that I browsed through.

As always I think that multicultural/ social justice literature is vital introduce to students at the earliest age. This type of literature will be sure to build a firm foundation for tolerance, understanding, and accuracy in their judgements. This bookstore, although in a highly white, affluent suburb was suprisingly full of multicultural texts and stories of people from different backgrounds.