Introduction

Literature for children that includes multiracial characters is not easy to identify. In her study of literature for young adults, Nancy Reynolds comments on the variety of responses to her query in search of books with multiracial content. Respondents suggested titles that were about nonwhite characters, or written by writers of color, but not necessarily about multiracial experiences. Multiracial people are not a recent phenomenon, but the claiming of a multiracial identity is relatively new practice. Efforts to have literature become more representative of diverse experiences in the United States led to the emergence of multicultural literature in the 1960s with the growing awareness of the deleterious effects on children of school and social segregation. Maria Jose Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman articulate a theory of critical multicultural analysis (CMA) that moves beyond the celebratory tendency of conventional multiculturalism to look at intersections of power across race, culture, gender, and class.