Race and ethnicity in children's books

Chee Chee Leung:

CHILDREN'S book illustrator Terry Denton is no stranger to controversy. Over a 25-year career, he's contributed to popular books featuring nose picking, dog poo and runny vomit.

But it is not just excrement that can raise eyebrows. When he was illustrating an American school reader a few years ago, Denton was asked by a US publisher to redraw a picture of a multi-race couple. Denton's drawing of a black person married to an Hispanic was for some reason deemed inappropriate. He was asked to draw a black couple instead.

Denton is one of a growing number of Victorian illustrators who say restrictions on educational books for children have intensified as the publishing market expands globally.

One highly successful book was not accepted in the US because it showed a bare baby's bottom. Another illustrator was asked not to draw any udders in a book about cows.

Illustrators have been asked to avoid showing uncut loaves of bread and freestanding wardrobes because they might be unfamiliar to American readers.

Others report being given strict ratios about the gender and multicultural balance of characters, but without too much physical detail.

"(Large) lips on any blacks are completely out, the eyes on any Asian child have to not look Asian at all and the colour for any black child has got to be the softest brown," explains Craig Smith, who drew the udderless cows.

"It's unreal, that's what I think the most despairing thing is. It means a book does not necessarily reflect what kids patently see around them, they see a cleaned-up version."

Fellow illustrator Roland Harvey, who abandoned an educational project several years ago because of what he believed were excessive demands, described it as political correctness gone mad.

"It's not only gone mad, I think it's completely irrational … to start to think that portraying a race in a true and honest way is somehow derogatory or demeaning."

Political correctness seems to be based on the idea that if you ignore reality for long enough it will eventually go away.