by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

About Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is an expert on diversity in children’s literature, youth media, and fan studies. Thomas is the author of The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2019) and co-editor of Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (2012).

Diversity

book Keywords for Children's Literature

While the word diversity is old, the way that we are using it today in children’s literature is quite new. Diversity came into contemporary English usage from the medieval French word diversité, which at the time meant “difference” (OED). However, the ultimate origin of the word comes from the Latin diversitatem, which means “contrariety, contradiction, disagreement.” The very etymology of the term captures its inherent polarities. Conversations about diversity unwittingly appropriate a very old word for new purposes during our age of discursive volatility.