Racial diversity displayed in families continues to expand as people from different racial backgrounds overcome the hurdles and stigma of mixed race relationships, marriage, and children. Often these stories reveal themes involving racism and prejudice.
Browse by Racial Diversity:
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Black is Brown is Tan
Arnold Adoff
Describes in verse a family with a brown-skinned mother, white-skinned father, two children, and their various relatives.
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Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin
The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.
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Black Means…
Barney Grossman
Records the feelings of New York elementary school children toward the word "black."
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Blackout
John Rocco
When a busy family's activities come to a halt because of a blackout, they find they enjoy spending time together and not being too busy for once.
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Black, White and Tan
Nicole C. Mullen
Nicole C. Mullen’s book reminds children “Together we are beautiful!” God loves all the kids in his family―no matter what color they are.
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Black, White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
Rebecca Walker
In a memoir about the power of race to share one's personal identity, the daughter of Jewish father and African-American mother recalls her confusing but ultimately rewarding life lived between two conflicting ethnic identities. When Mel Leventhal married Alice Walker during the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, his mother declared him dead and did not reconcile until after the birth of her first grandchild.
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Black, White, Just Right!
Marguerite W. Davol
A girl explains how her parents differ in color, tastes in art and food, and pet preferences, and how she herself is different too but just right.
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Blended
Sharon M. Draper
Piano-prodigy Isabella, eleven, whose black father and white mother struggle to share custody, never feels whole, especially as racial tensions affect her school, her parents both become engaged, and she and her stepbrother are stopped by police.
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Bo at Ballard Creek
Kirkpatrick Hill
It's the 1920s, and Bo was headed for an Alaska orphanage when she won the hearts of two tough gold miners who set out to raise her, enthusiastically helped by all the kind people of the nearby Eskimo village.
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Bobby the Brave (Sometimes)
Lisa Yee
Fourth-grader Bobby is hurt when he hears his father, a former professional football player, say that the two of them are nothing alike, but finally summons the courage to talk about it after he suffers a public asthma attack.
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Bonjour, Lonnie
Faith Ringgold
An African-American Jewish boy traces his ancestry with the help of the Love Bird of Paris.
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Booker T. Washington (Biographies of Biracial Achievers)
Jim Whiting
Biography of the African American slave who was freed, got an education, and opened Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and devoted his life to black education.
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Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Trevor Noah
Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life....
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Breadcrumbs
Anne Ursu
Hazel and Jack are best friends until an accident with a magical mirror and a run-in with a villainous queen find Hazel on her own, entering an enchanted wood in the hopes of saving Jack's life.
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Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment
Sundee Tucker Frazier
As biracial Brendan Buckley enters middle school, he deals with issues with his African American father, a new girl at school, and his changing friendship with his best friend.
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Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It
Sundee Tucker Frazier
Brendan Buckley, a biracial ten-year-old, applies his scientific problem-solving ability and newfound interest in rocks and minerals to connect with his white grandfather, the president of Puyallup Rock Club, and to learn why he and Brendan's mother are estranged.
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Bright April
Marguerite De Angeli
Bright April is set in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. The story addresses the problem of racial prejudice and how children are able to gain understanding and tolerance through their own natural devices.
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Bright Lights, Dark Nights
Stephen Edmond
Walter Wilcox's first love, Naomi, happens to be African American, so when Walter's policeman father is caught in a racial profiling scandal, the teens' bond and mutual love of the Foo Fighters may not be enough to keep them together through the pressures they face at school, at home, and online.
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Bringing Asha Home
Uma Krishnaswami
Eight-year-old Arun waits impatiently while international adoption paperwork is completed so that he can meet his new baby sister from India.
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Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.
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Brown Like Me
Noelle Lamperti
A little girl named Noelle tells how she likes to go looking for things that are brown like her.
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Call Me By My Name
John Ed Bradley
Growing up in Louisiana in the late 1960s, where segregation and prejudice still thrive, two high school football players, one white, one black, become friends, but some changes are too difficult to accept.
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Camo Girl
Kekla Magoon
Ella, a biracial girl with a patchy and uneven skin tone, and her friend Z, a boy who is very different, have been on the bottom of the social order at Caldera Junior High School in Las Vegas, but when the only other African-American student enters their sixth grade class, Ella longs to be friends with him and join the popular group, but does not want to leave Z all alone.
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Can I Touch Your Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship
Irene Latham and Charles Waters
How can Irene and Charles work together on their fifth grade poetry project? They don't know each other... and they're not sure they want to. Irene Latham, who is white, and Charles Waters, who is black, use this fictional setup to delve into different experiences of race in a relatable way, exploring such topics as hair, hobbies, and family dinners.
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Cardboard Kingdom
Chad Sell
Welcome to a neighborhood of kids who transform ordinary boxes into colorful costumes, and their ordinary block into cardboard kingdom. This is the summer when sixteen kids encounter knights and rogues, robots and monsters—and their own inner demons—on one last quest before school starts again. In the Cardboard Kingdom, you can be anything you want to be—imagine that! The Cardboard Kingdom was created, organized, and drawn by Chad Sell with writing from ten other authors: Jay Fuller, David DeMeo, Katie Schenkel, Kris Moore, Molly Muldoon, Vid Alliger, Manuel Betancourt, Michael Cole, Cloud Jacobs, and Barbara Perez Marquez. The Cardboard Kingdom affirms the power of imagination and play during the most important years of adolescent identity-searching and emotional growth.