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Another holiday, another uncomfortable intrusion of the culture war by psychos into my child's life.
Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now. Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby. We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda. We wanted books about nature, farming, the seasons, the months, learning to read, numbers, etc. And yet here we are.
And like I said, maybe I was oblivious as a kid. But then again, I actually got my daughter a lot of the classics I grew up with, and I still don't see it. Goodnight Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, The Hungry Caterpillar, etc still seem like straightforward children's books to me.
It's just baffling to me that books like that appear to be the default option when you tell family "We want books about X" and they search the internet for "Children's Books about X" and just click Buy on the first 5 results. We got like, 12 pseudo random children's books for Christmas, and not one single family in any of them looks like her, despite us being the majority demographic of our nation. It's one thing to be an adult, seeing the precise opposite of reality being crammed down your throat by our cultural overlords. You can by and large tune it out, thanks to the decades of actual life you've lived standing in opposition to pretend nonsense. There is something profoundly disturbing about watching them attempt to brainwash your child any which way they can into believing the world is the opposite of the way it is.
Ah well, Merry Christmas I guess. She liked the stool I built her, and although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.
I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.
I suspect most people are not thinking about the plausibility of genetic relationship between depicted family members when buying children's books. For one, people can have family members whom they are not genetically related to. For two, children's book authors are known to take creative liberties with reality for the purpose of telling an entertaining story or imparting a moral. For example, they may depict an animal doing something it is quite unlikely for it to do in reality (like a caterpillar eating chocolate cake) or imagine entirely new creatures which do not exist (like large furred horned hominids or dragons).
Ah come on mate, a caterpillar eating chocolate cake is fantasy anthropomorphism of the traditional sort in children's books from "A Wind in the Willows" to "Winnie the Pooh". White person and Latino person marry and have kids is reality, and in reality unless they are adopting, they won't end up with "Asian kid and black kid". If the book is about 'adopted families are real families', great fine that's a wholesome message, but if it's just meant to be ordinary typical "mommy and daddy and brother and sister" then it is pushing a message. "White mommy and Latino daddy have brown baby" is not a problem, but "White mommy and Latino daddy have Chinese baby" is, unless the text is explicit about "Mommy and Daddy couldn't have a baby of their own, so they adopted you and they love you just as much as if you were their born baby".
Well, at least it wasn't Anti-Racist Baby.
I thought that you were making it up, or that it was a parody, or something. But no, that book is dead serious. And it has overwhelmingly positive reviews, no less. I think that any hope I had for the US as a functional society has just died. :(
I wouldn’t read too much into overwhelmingly positive reviews- my priors are distinctly that the overwhelming majority of reviews are fake anyways.
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I couldn't believe it either, but no, it's a real thing. Why am I still surprised at the entire industry around Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Mongering?
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