Check out this amazing list of books featuring mixed race families:

50+ Picture Books about Mixed Race Families

Almost all the of these books are on Amazon for purchase. They’re also now on my son’s birthday wish list as there is almost nothing he likes to do more than “read” books to himself or have books read to him.

My son is a only a little darker than my husband me. And I never saw faces like mine in books. Sure, it’s difficult for Mickey Mouse to share my racial and ethnic identities but far and beyond, anthropomorphic or not, most of the characters of the books I read were white. In fact, correction, ALL of the characters were white. However this did not hold true for television, where I saw the Cosby family and Will Smith as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. And of course, television was also the one place to see other Hispanics on Univision. But I was too young or too sheltered to even expect to be represented in books.

In my mid-teens, my aunt pointed out that when I drew portraits or other figures from life or magazine, I drew only white women. At that point in my life, I was in high school studying fashion illustration. My first response in all cluelessness was “Well, the paper’s white.”  As it turned out after her comment, I started to love draw striking people of all ethnicities and races. I started drawing African-Americans and Latinas more and more.