Social Justice Books

The best selection of multicultural and social justice books for children, YA, and educators.

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 […]

Despite National Outrage, Scholastic Defends Children’s Book Celebrating Trump

Earlier this month we published critical reviews of the Scholastic books for early and upper elementary students about the election of President Trump. Both books present Trump’s life and the election in a celebratory tone, as summarized by this poem in the book for first and second grade. More than 1,000 educators, parents, librarians, and concerned citizens […]

Scholastic Tells Children: Trump is Great

Update: More than 1,000 people have written to Scholastic to express their outrage about the 2017 children’s book, President Donald Trump. Read their letters and tweets and write your own. On June 16, Scholastic issued a statement, but they did not respond to any of the points in the review below. Read more in our post, Despite National Outrage, […]

Junot Díaz’s Islandborn: Before and After

The new children’s book Islandborn by Junot Díaz tells the story of a young girl, Lola, who learns from family and friends about the island where she was born. The island is not named in the book, but readers can deduce that the story is based on the history of the Dominican Republic. “Every kid in […]

Tell Knopf: Stop Publishing “Monkey” Book Series by Marc Brown

It is hard to believe that anyone looking at the Monkey early childhood book series by Marc Brown did not see the racist stereotypes it perpetuates. However, the reviewers gave it an enthusiastic thumbs up when it was first released in 2015, libraries have stocked the book, and number three in the series was released […]

CCBC 2017 Multicultural Statistics

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison has started to release the 2017 publishing statistics on children’s books about people of color and first/native nations and by people of color and first/native nations. The CCBC’s tracking information doesn’t consider the quality of the titles but does indicate the […]