Representation in all walks of life has been in the spotlight recently. And one area that is full of controversy is what young people are exposed to in books that often help inform them during some of the most important years of their lives.
A study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that out of the 3,400 books that they received for 2015, 106 were by Black authors and 269 were about Black characters, and 58 were by Latino authors and 82 were about Latino characters.
Malinda Lo, a YA novelist, has been following the uptick in LGBT+ YA.
According to Lo, “In 2014, mainstream publishers published 47 LGBT YA books. This is a 59% increase from 2013, when only 29 LGBT YA books were published by mainstream publishers.”
Yes, these statistics look optimistic, but they are still not what they should be.
So what is the damage done when proper representation can’t be ascertained?
All groups suffer because such lack of representation fails to encapsulate the differences between different people; essentially, one person is not the whole.
“I think the tendency has been to reduce Latino characters as this one thing or Asian characters as this one thing, Muslim characters as one thing, and the fact is that we’re people,” Meg Medina, a Cuban-American writer of YA books and an Advisory Chair for the group We Need Diverse Books, said in a interview with RISE NEWS. “And all of those very specific identifiers and experiences shape how we move. It’s what makes us people.”
Meg Medina, a well known Cuban-American YA author. Photo Credit: Meg Medina/ Facebook.
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The effects of poor representation of minority groups are not limited to people of color.
Alex Gino uses the singular they pronoun and wrote George, a YA book about a trans girl that won the 2016 Stonewall Book Award.
“It’s important to remember that each trans experience is unique and different the way that each cis experience, the way that each trans experience, the way that each gay or queer experience is unique,” Gino said in an interview with RISE NEWS. “And so I wouldn’t even say that one trans story can cover it, or one gay story would cover it. There’s nothing quite like finding someone like yourself in a book.”
Leaps and bounds have been made in representation, however, despite this work, there are still advances to be made.
For example, Lo estimated that 1.9% to 2.4% of YA books published in 2013 had LGBT+ characters or dealt with LGBT+ issues.
YA author Alex Gino at a book signing in 2015. Photo Credit: Alex Gino/Facebook
“There is a lot of work to be done. I think that we only started to drill down into the many experiences that make up being a young person,” Medina said. “I think there are lots of questions in publishing now, like who’s writing these stories? Are they authentic, are they not authentic, are they written from sort of an outsider point of view, people imagining what it’s like to be x y or z, are they generally writers of color? I think when we have many people at the table with many points of view, the books that get published are richer, are more nuanced, are truer stories of real peoples’ lives.”
Gino seemed to agree with that sentiment.
“I think that we are scratching the surface of the stories that are available to be told, and the stories that are available to read,” Gino said. “I think that we need more books by diverse people and we also need more diverse groups of people publishing the books, so that stories that are being picked have more things to offer.”
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in the world. You can write for us.
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Mainstream Media Didn’t “Let” Trump Win, It Was Just Too Weak To Stop Him
Mainstream American journalism as we know it died in the wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016.
It is survived by click-bait shops and a few Macedonian kids who like to make up fake stories.
The funeral will be held at OH LOOK AT THAT LITTLE IGUANA ESCAPING FROM THOSE SNAKES!
I’ve talked to a bunch of distraught liberal friends since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.
All are angry by what has happened and many blame “the mainstream media” for the result.
I do too.
Despite what some say, this was in fact a failure of media.
But I don’t blame cable news or print sources for letting Trump get away with it.
He was relentlessly covered during the general election and many typically straight reporters got dangerously close to the line in their reports on him.
Newspapers again showed why they are the most important institutions during a political campaign (outside of the FBI, of course).
David Fahrenthold’s indefatigable reporting on Trump’s lack of private donations and his shady charitable foundation for the Washington Post is deserving of massive praise from all sensible people. He also first reported on Trump’s controversial comments in a now infamous Access Hollywood tape.
The New York Times deserves plaudits for reporting on a leaked copy of Trump’s 1995 tax returns. It showed that Trump had possibly not paid taxes for up to 18 years and that he lost $916 million in a single year.
Many local papers chipped away at Trump’s lies and business failures in a daily beat that was impressive.
57 of the largest papers in America endorsed Clinton. Two endorsed Trump.
But none of it mattered.
People weren’t interested in the truth because they didn’t believe it when they saw it.
They either didn’t have the ability to see it or they did and chose not to anyway.
Many have simply lost faith in mainstream media and the form of journalism that emits from them.
It was a failure of media, not because reporters didn’t do a terrific job, but rather do to the fact that those reporters hold less influence that they did even four years ago.
Our media landscape is more cluttered and confused than at any time since the Tower of Babel hosted an economics reporting conference.
Social media is in part the culprit of this.
Fake news stories frequently run rampant through the ether, inciting anger and hardening views of people and issues that is unmoored to fact.
Proprietary partisan content mills churn out dozens of stories, videos, memes and pictures a day that only seeks to score points for the red or blue teams.
Some of the more irresponsible “Breaking News” twitter feeds keep people who follow them in a perpetual state of terror about the state of the world. Death and chaos is always around the corner and the decay of our culture is a foregone conclusion there.
News aggregators have trained us to only read the headlines and have stunted our ability to read pieces for depth and nuance. This started in broadcast media decades ago (rewrites and readers) and has reached a virulent level on the web.
By the time cable news outlets started doing serious reporting on Trump, it had already allowed him near unlimited amounts of free airtime during the GOP primary.
Sure Trump was horrific, but damn if he isn’t entertaining, the logic of executives seemed to go.
This cognitive dissidence on cable clearly impacted the way he was viewed by many.
But in the end, the biggest element that allowed Trump to outflank the media was the very fact that the media has been democratized and Brexited in its own way.
For example, the Times reports that one particular fake news story of Pope Francis endorsing Trump was shared millions of times.
When the news wasn’t totally fake, it was certainly skewed beyond recognition.
Breitbart has given voice to the Alt-Right, a force that has been circling under the waves of news website comment sections for decades and who forged beachheads on Reddit and 4chan. Breitbart is one of the worst offenders and it is only poised to get more popular as the go to voice box of the impending Trump administration.
Other sites feed into the worst fears and strangest parts of our brains.
Alex Jones and his Infowars outlet, for example claim that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are literal demons who smell of sulfur. Jones has one of the most popular Youtube pages out there as a result of his lunacy.
With all of this noise swirling out there, the delegitimization of mainstream media is somewhat inevitable.
Most people don’t know a journalist in their personal life and aren’t able to discern between truth and junk.
In that environment, mainstream media cannot possibly wield the same level of influence it once did.
Welcome to our post-fact reality.
It is whatever you want it to be.
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It’s Snowing In Tallahassee For The First Time In 28 Years
For the first time in 28 years, Tallahassee has seen significant snow fall.
But in Florida our idea of significant snow fall is a bit different than most.
The National Weather Service in Tallahassee was reporting 0.1 inches of “snow/sleet accumulation” on the roof of their building according to FOX 13.
People around the region snapped videos of what they saw- a winter wonderland to be sure!
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Broward County Will Start The 2018-2019 School Year WAY Earlier Than Usual
What’s New With This Story:
-Broward County will start the next school year nearly a week earlier than usual.
-The first day of class for the 2018-2019 school year will be on Wednesday August 15.
– The last day of class is scheduled for June 4, 2019.
The Broward County School Board voted to start the 2018-2019 school year a bit earlier than usual.
The first day of class will be on Wednesday August 15, in contrast to the August 21 start date for the current school year.
There will also be 10 teacher planning days, 6 early release days and students will have Election Day off on November 6.
WSVN reports that the School Board has also set aside five hurricane make up days in case they are needed.
You can see the entire 2018-2019 Broward School Calendar online.
RISE NEWS is South Florida’s digital news magazine. Follow us on Facebook to make sure you never miss a story!
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