Scholastic wanted to license her children's book — if she cut a part about 'racism'

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/ [login to see] /scholastic-childrens-book-racism
Maggie Tokuda-Hall was thrilled when she first saw the offer from the publishing giant.

Scholastic wanted to license her 2022 children's book Love in the Library. The deal would draw a wider audience to her book — a love story set in a World War II incarceration camp for Japanese Americans and inspired by her grandparents, about the improbable joy found "in a place built to make people feel like they weren't human."

Then she read Scholastic's suggested revisions to her book, included in the same email as the offer news. Her excitement at the opportunity was almost immediately tempered.

The publisher's only suggested edit was to the author's note: Scholastic had crossed out a key section that references "the deeply American tradition of racism" to describe the tale's real-life historical backdrop — a time when the U.S. government forcibly relocated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to dozens of internment sites from 1942-1945.