Posted on 06/01/2016 10:59:05 AM PDT by Starman417
I remember reading about Marley Dias previously. She's back in the news:
Rescue people in another galaxy? Escape from a tower with a dragon's help? Visit England, China, and India, and still be back for dinnertime?That's all in a day's read for 11-year-old Marley Dias, who was featured in TODAY's "Can-Do Kids" series on Tuesday.
"When I get lost in a book, it's just, like, magical!" Dias told TODAY's Jenna Bush Hager.
The New Jersey sixth grader's love for reading was profound but not blind. After spending years of her life stepping into new worlds with every turn of a page, she noticed a common theme she felt needed to be addressed.
"All of the books that I was reading had white boys and dogs as the main character, and I was pretty sick of it," Dias said. "I'm pretty sure my other classmates were too, but I was just the one to speak up about it."
Or maybe she's the only one out of her classmates who was indoctrinated on a recipe of diversity/multiculturalism and the concept of institutionalized racism?
With the help of her mom, Dr. Janice Johnson Dias, the 11-year-old took action, in the form of a hashtag.The campaign, #1000BlackGirlBooks, was designed with the goal of collecting 1,000 books featuring black girls as the protagonists that would then be donated to schools and libraries. About 7,000 books later not only did Dias surpass her goal, but she started a conversation that she hopes to continue with kids across the country.
"I want them to understand that these voices matter and that there's not just one experience that people can learn from," Dias said.
Dias and her mother brought 1,600 books to her mother's former school in Jamaica last March. What the pair discovered is this was not a "Marley issue," or something isolated to "one little back girl." Johnson Dias, who holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University, realized it wasn't until college that she even read a book with a main character that looked like her.
Okay, I didn't grow up reading books and lamenting because the heroes and characters of a novel "didn't look like me"- why would I expect them to? What does that even mean, "a main character that looked like her"? Oh.....I get it: Meaning characters who are black. Stuck on skin color. *Sigh*
Marley sounds like a bright kid; and kudos to her for being activist and showing leadership and taking initiative. However, I truly feel the kid has been impoverished by her perception, placing self-imposed limitations and hang-ups over something we should all get over: The concept of "race". Of obsessing and being made self-conscious of "skin color".
I feel that I grew up well-adjusted. Despite (or because of) reading many books about heroes and characters who are not Asiatic but who I imagined myself as being or whose story and adventures I enjoyed reading about: Tarzan, Conan the Cimmerian, Encyclopedia Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Sydney Carton, D'Artagnan, Sir Gareth of Orkney, Perseus, Apollo, Siegfried, etc. Some weren't even human- Legolas, for instance (Dias probably wonders why Tolkien elves must all be "fair of skin").
Same with watching movies and television: James Bond, Captain Kirk, James West, Godzilla, Steve Austin the bionic man. Am I white-washed because I live in a pre-dominately white society? Call me a twinkie, and I'll laugh and shrug my shoulders. Although the U.S. embraces the "melting pot" concept of absorbing all cultures and ethnicities, its founding and early-years shaping is due to white Europeans/western civilization. Namely Britain. Today, I have no qualms about identifying with characters in entertainment who share my "skin hue"/ethnicity or who aren't white men, as there is more diversified character-heroes now (biggest money-making movie star today, I believe is Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson); but I don't need it "shoved down my throat" and forced merely for the sake of "diversity". Why continue to draw attention to and highlight a character's ethnicity and gender identity and sexual preference? Why make it a central issue?
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...
Rather than complain, rather than brainwash a child, write a book yourself.
I never cared whether the main character in a good book was Chinese, or Indian (”Native American” as the freaks put it these days), or sub-continent Indian, or black, or green, or even white. I didn’t care if the main character was male or female. The characters I identified were the ones who did brave or exciting things that I wasn’t doing and who thought like I do, not the ones who matched on something peripheral like skin color or genitals.
As a child, I didn’t want to hear about a character’s genitalia in a story, and that still hasn’t changed. Fictional sex is boring. As for skin color, I have always been disgusted by those who obsess over melanin, whether they are white supremacist racists or #BlackLivesMatter racists.
So we good hatin’ rap and hip hop, right?
“When I realized that “A Pocket for Corduroy” featured a black protagonist I threw the book away and swore I’d never read it to my child ever again”....Said no white person ever, except maybe LBJ.
I write this because I just recently realized that the protagonist in “A Pocket for Corduroy” is black as I was reading the story to my child. I did not throw the book away, and I am confident that the story still resonates with my little Caucasian towhead.
Who fills a child's head with such hatred?
Oh, I see it's the rayciss mom Janice.
Many books I have read, the skin coloration of the protagonist is never mentioned.
And is thus fully qualified to pull a plow.
That was my first thought. You simply imagine the characters as you choose to draw them in your head.
Oh FFS! The whole point to writing a book is to allow the reader to live vicariously through the characters therein. Why are all these special snowflakes ruining everything great about life?
“”All of the books that I was reading had white boys and dogs as the main character, and I was pretty sick of it,” “
Then imagine that they are NOT, dumbass.
I’ve read books where the lead was a FEMALE. Didnt hurt me at all.
So according to these lefties logic white kids should not be subjected to any book where the hero isn’t white? I suppose someone better tell the schools because I was made to read a number of books specifically because the author and/or main characters had a “diverse” skin color.
Kids should also learn to read books like critics of literature read books.
Chet Morton was my favorite Hardy boy.
I don’t buy the premise...
but it is pretty dumb to day, ‘kids want to read about people that look like them’, and then tell authors to write more books about minorities. If that was true, why would authors want to limit their audience? Clearly the way to sell more books would be to wrote majority protagonists.
Not that I buy the premise anyway. Leftists have been screaming for more diversity in fiction for years but what they mean by ‘diversity’ is narrowly defined categories of pigment and gender. They don’t want any diversity of ideas.
That was part of the appeal of Twilight, and by extension, 50 shades of Grey. The main female character is totally generic. Average height, brown hair, divorced parents and totally devoid of any personality.
The author did that purposefully, to make it easier for the readers to use her as a self-insert.
Perhaps Dwayne Johnson is the highest paid? I don’t know.
I heard that Chris Evans was the most efficiently paid (return on investment).
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