Diverse Books Project

Harmful messages about race silently permeate children’s daily lives through segregated schools and neighborhoods, media lacking racial representation, and lack of racial diversity among people in positions of leadership. Many adults are surprised to learn that children quickly encode these harmful messages, and as a result develop racial biases. 

After decades of research, we have a good understanding of the developmental trajectory of racial biases, but we still lack evidence-based approaches that can interrupt their development and support the development of positive racial attitudes in young children. The goal of this project is to test the efficacy of a program that uses picture books to interrupt the development of racial biases in young children.  One novel aspect of this research project is that in assembling the book collection we considered not only whether but how characters from different racial backgrounds are represented in children’s books: in other words, what themes and messages are communicated through the books about characters from different backgrounds. This project focuses on children 3-6 years of age, the age at which racial biases begin to emerge and are ostensibly more malleable than later in development.

If you are an educator or parent and would like to join us in this project, please send us an email: csdl@andrew.cmu.edu.