In Do Girls of Color Survive Dystopia?, Law talks about the difficulty she has had finding dystopian YA that features a girl of color protagonist for her 12-year old daughter. She mentions Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson and the short story collection Diverse Energies as two exceptions in a sea of dystopia featuring white female protagonists.
In Young Adult Books Too Often Present a World Without People of Color, Law examines the first two books in Lauren Oliver's Delirium series in which she found no characters who are explicitly described as people of color--even after the protagonist leaves her hometown of Portland, Maine (a predominately white town in the world of today) and ventures to New York City. She laments the lack of racial diversity in these popular books saying "It's like the people of color have somehow disappeared." Needless to say a vision of the future with no people of color is very alarming and disturbing, to say the least.
We plan to keep up with Law's blog entries and recommend you do, too! She's also mentioned whitewashing and we'll be very interested to read about her findings and thoughts on that issue as well. Here are the links again in case you missed them:
Girls of Color in Dystopia (you can find links to all the posts from the series on this page)
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