An article from Social Justice Books, a Teaching for Change project.

Highlights from Social Justice Books

Teaching for Change launched SocialJusticeBooks.org to identify and promote the best multicultural and social justice children’s books. We partnered with the See What We See (SWWS) coalition to create a database of critical children’s book reviews.

One year after launching in 2017, the SocialJusticeBooks site is now home to more than 50 recommended booklists on a variety of topics and 250+ reviews of children’s books using a multicultural and social justice lens. More than 175,000 people have accessed our booklists and reviews.

SWWS has played an instrumental role in calling attention to racism in the publishing industry ─ and our efforts have led to positive changes. Thanks to pressure from members of the SWWS coalition and people like you:

• Scholastic recalled the racist book A Cake for George Washington
• The Association for Library Service to Children changed the name of their Laura Ingalls Wilder award to be the Children’s Literature Legacy Award
• Penguin Books printed a revised version of Junot Díaz’s Islandborn
• Little, Brown revised the offensive cover of The Bad Mood and the Stick
• More than 1,000 people sent letters demanding that Scholastic recall their books for children celebrating Trump
• Hundreds of people sent letters to Knopf demanding they stop publishing the “Monkey” book series by Marc Brown
• In response to criticism from Indigenous people, Charlesbridge canceled publication of a book about a Mormon family’s fostering of a Native child

None of this would be possible without your support.

In the coming year, we will continue to put pressure on the book industry to publish better multicultural children’s literature and we will post many more book reviews on SocialJusticeBooks.org.

Please make a donation to support this work.