> One of the cartoonists I worked with told me about what he had to go through to be published in one university's newspaper. He said it was similar to a casting call for a play or musical -- all the cartoonists came out one at a time and fielded questions from the entire newspaper staff who have looked at submitted work. He was asked a question similar to this one: "I don't see any black characters in your strip. Are you being racist?"
>

That reminds me of the chapter I was reading for my Early Childhood Learning Lab class. It was talking about selecting materials for the classroom and said something like: "Omission implies that certain groups have less value than others by not including their presence." Yeah, I'm too lazy to go look up the exact quote. Apparently, every single book I read to the children must include every racial group in the world, or I'm implying the groups not in the book have "less value".

Well, forgive me, but if I find a good book that shows only white people, I'm not going to exclude it from my curriculum. I wouldn't purposely exclude books showing blacks, Asians, etc, but I will not throw out perfectly good materials just because they have the so-called "omission bias".

Am I being racist, or just sensible?