3 Children’s Books that Help Explain Prejudice

In the aftermath of Orlando, I have been thinking anew about how to explain prejudice and hate to children. Here are three children’s books that may help.

Patricia Polacco’s In Our Mothers’ House is told from the perspective of an adopted black child, who narrates the story of life with her two White moms, Marmee and Meema, and her younger siblings, an Asian American brother and White sister. She starts with the creation of their family, and discusses celebrations, neighborhood block parties, and other memories of childhood. She then tells of herself and her siblings leaving the house for careers and families of their own.

It is a gentle tale about the treasures of everyday life, but includes one prejudiced neighbor who repeatedly refuses to interact with the family. Finally, she says to the mothers, “I don’t appreciate what you two are.” Meema explains to the children, “She is full of fear. . . . She’s afraid of what she cannot understand. She doesn’t understand us.” Parents may want to be ready with fuller explanations about what exactly is not understandable—but the book offers a way into that conversation.

The story ends with the mothers growing old and being buried next to each other on the same hillside. It is a fitting closure, but parents should consider whether younger children will be frightened by the thought of parents dying. This book is probably best for older elementary school children.

For the same age range, Duncan Tonatiuh’s Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation tells the story of Mendez, who, along with her parents, helped end school segregation in California, 10 years before Brown v. Board of Education did so nationally. It starts with Mendez (later a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner), being teased at her new school and told to go back to the “Mexican school.” When she later tells her mother that she doesn’t want to go back there, her mother reminds her that her family has fought for her to be able to go there, a better school than the one to which she had been relegated because of her heritage. (Her father was from Mexico and her mother from Puerto Rico.) After hearing her mother relate the tale, Sylvia goes back to the new school, and ultimately makes friends with a variety of students.

The text is taken from actual court transcripts and a conversation Tonatiuh had with Mendez, “shortened and edited for clarity and pacing,” he says in a note. The book is a 2015 Pura Belpré Illustrator Honor Book (“presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth”), a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book (for “the most distinguished informational book”), and Jane Addams Honor Book (for books “that effectively promote the cause of peace, social justice, world community, and the equality of the sexes and all races as well as meeting conventional standards for excellence”). It is well worth having on any child’s bookshelf.

For slightly older children, Jennifer Gennari’s My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer gives us a coming-of-age tale about 12-year-old June Farrell, who lives on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont with her mother and her mother’s soon-to-be fiancée, Eva. It is the summer of 2000, just after Vermont has approved civil unions for same-sex couples. June must deal not only with the skepticism and resentment any child with a new stepparent might have, but also with her local community’s not-always-positive response to the civil union law and the lesbian family in their midst.

Gennari avoids preachiness by making civil unions only one of the many issues that June must grapple with during her summer (a pie-baking contest among them), and by showing the diversity of opinions on the matter within the community, within families, and even within individuals. Despite the potentially heavy subject matter, she maintains a light, but never flippant, tone. Her heroine is thoughtful but not moody; spirited but not pollyanna-ish. By setting the novel in 2000, not during more recent marriage equality debates, she also gives readers something that few other fiction writers have—a sense of the history of LGBTQ families.

These are not the only books that tackle prejudice, by any means—and no book can do so alone. They may, however, help to start a conversation, and in that, they are invaluable.

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