Sure, black kids in picture books sometimes explore urban landscapes, encounter animals, garden, farm, or travel to new environments in their imagination, Martin found. Sometimes they learn to navigate the untamed outdoors as they escape from slavery. But by and large, according to children’s literature, black children don’t hike or camp or bird-watch for fun. In her research in the years since receiving her graduate degree, Martin has managed to locate only a handful of picture books in which they do partake in those kinds of activities. She counts The Snowy Day, the Ezra Jack Keats classic from 1962, among that group, as well as Where’s Rodney?, published in 2017, and Hiking Day and We Are Brothers, both published in 2018. And that’s ... pretty much it, Martin says. She recently presented her findings on the topic at the University of British Columbia.

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Martin, a native of South Carolina and a self-described “lifetime Girl Scout,” grew up relishing the time she spent outdoors. She participated in summer wilderness-survival programs as a teenager and spent some years working as an outdoor educator in California. Today she worries that the lack of children’s books about African American kids enjoying nature could send the message to young black readers with an interest in the outdoors, like she herself once was, “that black kids and black families don’t belong outdoors—on the Appalachian Trail, or hiking up in the Cascades, wherever,” she told me. “That that’s not something that black and brown people do, or that maybe the woods still aren't a safe place—that you don’t belong there.”

Martin hopes that drawing attention to this particular vacuum within children’s literature will help encourage authors and illustrators to fill it. But taking note of that particular gap in children’s literature, and its potentially detrimental side effects, is the easy part. Understanding why the gap exists is a much more complicated pursuit.

There’s a multitude of intertwining reasons why books about black children loving the outdoors are a rarity—and “black kids don’t love the outdoors” isn’t one of them, as Carolyn Finney, the author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, put it.

For starters, as both she and Martin pointed out, children’s literature is overwhelmingly written by white authors. The publishing industry, too, is mainly a white industry; in 2015, a survey of more than 40 publishers and review journals found that almost four out of every five staffers identified as white. Increases in the number of children’s books about kids of color in the past few years have brought the rate of children’s books with an African American character from 6 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2019, but even so, that’s still a pretty slim proportion. Writers often follow the common advice to “write what they know,” and gatekeepers tend to greenlight projects that tell stories about people like themselves—so to Finney, that black children are underrepresented in this particular subgenre of kids’ literature is not surprising, because black children have historically been underrepresented in kids’ literature, period.