![]() ![]() Yet it seems reasonable to wish that children see people of all backgrounds as an ordinary part of everyday literature. ![]() Often when they do encounter characters racialised as other than white, it is tied in with the celebration of a holiday such as Diwali, or in connection with Black History Month. Many primary school children have encountered only books with white human characters. And the award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls her childhood in Nigeria where, “because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify”. More than 25 years ago, Verna Wilkins founded Tamarind Press because her child believed that characters had to be white “to be in a book”. ![]() “You can’t do that! Stories have to be about white people,” he said. When it came to sharing what they had written, one boy, who had recently arrived from Nigeria, was eager to read his work to the class.Īs he read out his protagonist’s name - I had suggested that children might use the names of people in their family - another boy, who was born in Britain and identified as Congolese, interrupted him. A few years ago, I was teaching a Year 2 class in East London. ![]()
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