‘Painfully offensive’ racial stereotypes lead school district to recall books
Minneapolis Public Schools shelled out more than $1.2 million as part of a contract that included new books aimed at closing the district’s yawning racial achievement gap. But over the summer, some teachers preparing for the new school year opened the books to find them riddled with problems, including glaring racial and gender stereotypes.
There was “Lazy Lucy,” a young black child. “Nieko, the Hunting Girl,” a Native American carrying a quiver of arrows. And a description of Kenya as a place where people are able to “run very fast.”
Word spread among teachers online, then made their way to the independent education blog Bright Lights Small City, which wrote a series of posts detailing teachers’ concerns with the new books and the district’s reading curriculum.
“I saw the book called ‘Nieko, the Hunting Girl,’ and I just said, Oh my f—— God,” said one teacher, Shana Dickson, who was initially given a pseudonym by the blog before deciding to go public with her concerns. “I started taking pictures of what I was seeing, and posting it on Facebook.”
The books, created by Utah-based publisher Reading Horizons, described the Native child and her father hunting a woolly mammoth, a long-extinct animal. Lazy Lucy is from some unspecified part of Africa, according to the blog. And in the 54 books in the series, only one Asian character is depicted — and that character was adopted by a white family.
Teachers also complained that the books failed to reflect any diversity of sexual orientation and reinforced gender stereotypes. One story highlighted by teachers, “The Raccoon in Mushroom Forest,” describes a character, Gilda, who lives a life of blissful domesticity:
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