Jersey City. NJ resident and award winning children's author, Walter Dean Myers and his son,also an award winning artist and author tackled the question of representations of children of color in youth literature in the Sunday New York Times dated March 16. 2014.
Walter Dean Myers article, " Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?" stressed the need and importance of having protagonists of color in books for youth and recounted his discovery and love of literature as a child and his dissatisfaction as an adolescent when he could not find literature that reflected his life experiences.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrens-books.html?_r=0
Christopher Myers article, "The Apartheid of Children’s Literature", examined the background reasons for the dearth of youth literature by and about people of color.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
Many will remember that these issues have been visited before in the classic article, "The All-White world of children's books" by Nancy Larrick published in the Saturday Review (1965, September 11) that raised many of these issues.
Other books such as the The all-white world of children's books and African American children's literature, edited by Osayimwense Osa (1995) [PS153 .N5 A399 1995] and Free within ourselves : the development of African American children's literature by Rudine Sims Bishop (2007) ,[ PS153 .N5 B526 2007b] also examined these issues.
See also
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2013/06/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html