Children’s book author Maggie Tokuda-Hall was thrilled when Scholastic, a giant publishing company, wanted to license her book “Love in the Library” for use in classrooms. However, she turned the company down when it asked her to delete references to racism in America from her author’s note. Scholastic apologised to Tokuda-Hall and illustrator Yas Imamura, and offered to publish the book with the original author’s note, but Tokuda-Hall turned them down. Scholastic then decided to delay the entire collection and brought in two outside experts to examine how the collection was curated and edited.
More than 650 librarians and educators, who make up a large segment of Scholastic’s customer base, sent a petition to Scholastic demanding that the company release the book in its original form and “take public responsibility for the decision to censor a book.” The company has done extensive publishing of diverse voices and stories, and the fact that this incident happened in the context of their diverse publishing was particularly disturbing to all of them. The review will look at not only the series that included “Love in the Library,” but the entire “Rising Voices” program, which includes other collections like “Elevating Latino Stories” and “Celebrating Girls of Color.”
Read The New York Times full article. https://www.nytimes.com/…/scholastic-book-racism-maggie…
