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Tag: recommended books to celebrate diversity

Holiday Traditions for Transracial Families

Making and Breaking Traditions:

A Holiday Reflection for Our Extended Family

As the year draws to a close, it’s a perfect time to reflect on the traditions we hold dear and consider how we shape new ones to honor the diversity within our families. This month, we are thrilled to share our 2024-2025 Bibliography for the Giving Season and All Year Long, a curated collection of books that celebrate stories of identity, culture, and connection. This guide is a testament to the power of books in fostering understanding, self-discovery, and belonging for adopted persons and their families.  We thank Avril for always curating such an amazing list!  

The Power of Stories to Build Bridges

For families extended through adoption, especially transracial adoption, holidays can bring unique opportunities to navigate the balance between celebrating inherited traditions and creating new ones that honor a child's racial and cultural heritage. This is no small task, but it’s also one of the greatest gifts we can give our children: the chance to see themselves reflected in the stories we tell and the celebrations we share.

Our 2024 Bibliography encourages families to explore books that:

  • Support authors and illustrators who are people of color to ensure diverse voices are celebrated and heard.
  • Highlight the experiences of adopted persons, offering powerful insights for families and a sense of connection for children.
  • Provide mirrors and windows: Books where children can see themselves and their experiences reflected, while also opening windows into the lives of others.

Whether you’re raising Black children in a white family, nurturing a child with queer identities, or simply working to foster empathy and inclusivity in your home, books are an invaluable resource.

Holiday Giving Guide: A Few Quick Tips

When selecting books this season, consider these tips to make your giving even more impactful:

  1. Shop Independent: Support Black-owned and independent bookstores whenever possible. Not sure where to start? Ask your local librarian for recommendations or visit bookshop.org.
  2. Think Broadly: Don’t just gift books to the children in your life—share them with educators, neighbors, and friends to help spark broader conversations.
  3. Pair Books with Action: Use stories as a springboard to learn more about your child’s cultural heritage or to find ways to celebrate their traditions.

This post is from our December, 2024, newsletter. If you would like to get our newsletter in your inbox each month, as well as information about our annual Transracial Journeys Family Camp and our monthly Zoom call to provide support for our transracial adoption parents please subscribe.

Book Recommendation for Transracial Adoptive Families

Book Corner-November 2023

Our Little Kitchen

By Jillian Tamaki
Ages 4-8

This is a beautifully-illustrated, warm and cozy read with a focus on preparing food with love and with a group of diverse children and adults. Highly recommended not just for Thanksgiving but for any part of the year when you want to pull comfort from the words you read along with the pictures you see.

Jillian Tamaki is an award winning, Canadian author who shows how to build community, love and nurture around the preparation of food in a fun and whimsical manner.As the characters ask the following questions, you could ask the same of the children you’re reading the book with:

● Is your body warm?
● Is your belly full?
● Would you like seconds?

Book Recommendation for Transracial Adoptive Families

Book Recommendations for Families Created in Transracial Adoption

The Book Corner is a regular feature in our Transracial Journeys monthly newsletters. If you would like to receive monthly book recommendations via email, please subscribe.

simone biles black excellence

Simone Biles – Black Excellence

On the Transracial Journeys Facebook Page, we recently asked for Black Excellence nominations. You did not disappoint! With nominees such as Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, Resmaa Menakem and Simone Biles, it was tough to choose. However, there’s one candidate who strongly represents this month’s themes of love and history (in the making) and she is Simone Biles! Thank you for your nomination Nicole Zistler, and please keep your nominees coming.

Simone’s strength and grace is not simply about her gymnastics but it’s also present as she has had to navigate inappropriate discreditation of her family structure. Born in 1997, Simone and her three siblings spent their early childhood in foster care until her maternal grandparents adopted Simone and her younger sister, Adria. Her two older siblings were adopted by her grandfather Ron Biles’s sister, Harriet.

Inspired by Gabby Douglas at a young age, Simone has said, “Growing up, I didn’t see very many Black gymnasts…So whenever I did, I felt really inspired to go out there and want to be as good as them. I remember watching Gabby Douglas win the 2012 Olympics, and I was like, if she can do it, I can do it.”.

Simone Biles is not only the most decorated gymnast of all time with 7 Olympic medals and 25 World Medals, but she’s also known for mental health advocacy on behalf of herself and others. Under incredible pressure and under the world’s spotlight, she stepped out of the Tokyo Olympics to take care of her own mental health. She stated,

“I have to put my pride aside. I have to do what’s right for me and focus on my mental health and not jeopardize my health and well-being. That’s why I decided to step back.”

At past Transracial Journeys  Family Camps and Zoom meetings, several of our kids have excitedly voiced their love for Simone. There are many books about her available at your local library, but only one of them is written by her “Courage to soar: a body in motion, a life in balance”. Check it out!

Reading Recommendations for Interracial Families

Recommendations for Giving Books this Holiday Season

 - by Avril McInally, member of the TRJ Board since 2016

On a personal note, I’d like to share a story about a book my daughter, Mary, enjoyed when she was a wee girl. When I discovered the board book “Shades of Black” by Sandra Pinkney, I bought a copy (I should have bought two so I could share one with her White best friend). Mary and I read it many times and until it became tattered and too young for her. The last line in the book read “I am black, I am unique.” Mary often read that sentence aloud. It sounded like “I am black, I am yougique.” Reading this book is a happy reminiscence for us, but it also takes me back to a time when I hardly saw any reflections of our children in books. If they did appear, they were often secondary characters.

Recommended Books

In memory of this experience, I created an annotated bibliography for our children that came in your care packages just before camp this summer. As I think about all the characters in the books I recommended, I am thankful that we have a much wider representation of families, of children and of their many different intersectionalities. It’s not so difficult for our children to open up books today and see a reflection of themselves, but this was hard to find when my children were young.

If you are purchasing gifts this season, I would like to recommend to you that you use this bibliography as a tool to share our children’s experiences and let others have the experience where characters representing them are secondary in these books, for once. Let them experience a little of what it is to be a young, Black human being by reading about it from a young Black person’s perspective. Share this window into our children’s world with White children as well as Black ones, and support wonderful authors and illustrators who are people of color as well as LGBTQIA2S+.

This post is from our December, 2021, e-newsletter. If you would like to get our newsletter in your inbox each month, please subscribe.