Perhaps this exclusivity, in which children of color are at best background characters, and more often than not absent, is in fact part of the imaginative aspect of these books. But what it means is that when kids today face the realities of our world, our global economies, our integrations and overlappings, they all do so without a proper map. They are navigating the streets and avenues of their lives with an inadequate, outdated chart, and we wonder why they feel lost.

– The Apartheid of Children’s Literature Christopher Myers.

When I read as I was growing up, it never occurred to me to question why nearly all the kids in the stories looked like me. Why wouldn’t they? I’m normal, right? That’s what I learned from the heroes I looked up to in the books I read, anyway. . Boy protagonists may out weigh heroines, but Hermione Granger taught me that I could be smart and brave despite being (much like Hermione) a small, some what bossy, girl with messy brown hair.  It never occurred to me that there might be girls who wouldn’t learn that they could be smart and brave because when they looked at Hermione they didn’t see themselves. Now, as a young adult I realize how privileged I am to have had so many role models that I could easily identify with, because they were important to me.

As a child born into an entirely white family it didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me that the worlds I read about were almost entirely white, even though people around me were of all different colors. It’s obvious that over time I’ve been trained by various media to picture the default character as white, because (I’m rather ashamed to say) for example, it wasn’t until the movies that I realized the Rue in the Hunger Games was black. She’s explicitly described as having dark skin, yet for some reason that didn’t make her not-white in my mind. Looking back, I can’t believe I was so naive and I can’t believe that I considered it to be perfectly normal for there to not be a single person of color in my imagined reality of this book I was reading.  The consequences for me is that it gave me a skewed view of reality and has kept me shielded from the reality of others oppression, but how has it affected my peers who are of color? I’ve had the privilege to see myself everywhere I look in media, so I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to not be represented in the books I read. But I also can’t imagine what my life would be like now  with out those role models, both real and fictional.

There are a lot of different things we can blame for the lack of representation of minorities in fiction, such as lack of minority authors or demographics. All of those things are factors to be sure, but the main culprit is our culture. There are plenty of women and men of color who are authors, but white men are still over represented in the New York Times best seller list. Are the publishers biased? Are the publishers biased because they are reacting to a perceived to be biased audience? It’s a very complicated situation, and I don’t think there is any way to find a singular cause other than simply hundreds of years of prejudice. Representation is important in all media, but I think it’s especially important in children and young adult literature, because those are the stories and characters that will truly stick with a person as they grow up.

Think about all of your favorite novels and stories from when you were young and count how many people of color were in them. Did you ever notice how few there were before?