Black Boy

Visitors acknowledge the wooden blocks, the cool red car that zooms at the lightest touch, comment about the water blocks and ask what the light panel is for.  I wait for people to say something about the elephant in the room.

This said elephant?  

A black doll gifted from Levi's grammy (my mother).  It's usually sitting on the rocking horse.  Sometimes it's lying underneath the table.  Once in a blue moon it can be found in Levi's embrace.  It's never quite out of sight, yet never quite acknowledged.

Yup.  We have a black doll for Levi.  I'd love to talk about it.  

The black doll is a nod to my mother's heritage.  We have books in Spanish, books that commemorate Tu B'Shevat, the Jewish celebration of trees.  Levi loves his bean tacos and his matzo ball soup.  

We are raising him Jewish and we have this running joke: if people ask him what he is, and he's busy, he could just say, "I'm Jewish," and people will leave it at that.  Douglas swears by it--he is of mixed Eastern Europe descent, but for some reason the answer "Jewish" satisfies people.

My super amazing brilliant and (sigh) eternally older sister assigned me the task of compiling a toddler's book list with black boys as the main character, which I did on Amazon.  Slim pickings.  Cristin then sent Levi a giftcard to buy those books.  When the books arrived, I was disappointed to find that some of those books were actually black girls with short hair.

Intrigued, I started looking for Hispanic and Jewish boys in children's literature.  This opened my eyes to the scant representation of boys of color in literature for toddlers.  My Amazon wishlist stops at "Black Boy." 

Levi is so multiracial and multicultural.  He is so modern.  So what modern books and toys would you use for a modern boy?