A Novel Way to Battle Anti-Wokeness

In an Anti-DEI Age, Children’s Books are a Perfect Weapon of Subversion

By Helen Lee

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I’ll never forget the moment I stumbled onto the book Bee-bim Bop! by celebrated children’s author Linda Sue Park. Told in the lilting, sing-song voice of a Korean American girl, building to the refrain, “Hungry, hungry, hungry for some BEE-BIM BOP!”, the book was a favorite with my boys when they were young, in part because there was no other children’s picture book like it, featuring a Korean American family and a favorite Korean dish, not to mention images of kimchi right on the cover. We read it so often that by the time my kids moved on from picture books, it was in well-loved tatters.

Part of the magic of reading is that we can be transported to other cultures, eras, and contexts. 

But the reverse is also true: we can imagine ourselves in the stories and pages of a book and experience the power of being seen. Hagar, the first person God addresses by name in Genesis 16, highlights this particular experience when she calls God El Roi, or “the God who sees.” Being seen is one of the four core foundational needs that all humans carry into this world, along with being safe, soothed, and secure (Michael John Cusick, Sacred Attachment, 4). And when we are in contexts where we should feel seen but instead are overlooked or invisible, we experience an unsettling in our soul, an unspoken insecurity in which we wonder, consciously or subconsciously, “Do I really belong here?”

For Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Christians here in the US, this experience of invisibility has been a dominant reality for much of the modern history of evangelicalism. 

As a twenty-something-year-old on the staff of Christianity Today magazine in the mid-1990s, I felt this keenly as month after month would pass without much attention paid to the news of the Asian American Christian community. When I proposed to our news team that it was time for the magazine to cover the generational dynamics that were causing stress among Asian immigrant churches in the US, I was only given space for 3,000 words to report on this reality in the article “Silent Exodus: Can the East Asian church in American reverse the flight of its next generation?” Published in 1996, it was the first time that a segment of the Asian American church had received any substantive coverage in what is considered evangelicalism’s flagship magazine.

To this day, Asian American Christians I meet still comment that they remember the article, and that it gave voice to their own experience.

Thankfully, some of the invisibility has begun to change over time. I was part of a group of Asian American leaders in 2013 who wrote an “Open Letter to the Evangelical Church” about our frustrations with the repeated examples of cultural and racial insensitivity in conferences, churches, and books that kept happening at the expense of the Asian American community. We garnered close to 1,000 signatories in the first month.

Fast forward seven years to 2020, when AACC released its “Statement on Anti-Asian Racism in the Time of COVID-19,” signed by more than 10,000 people. It was encouraging to see that progress had been made in raising awareness of Christian AANHPI experiences and understanding the ways in which stereotypes, bias, and xenophobia hamper the unity of the church.

But what a difference five years makes. Instead of continuing the hard, internal work to stand against and combat the sins of racism, our current leaders prefer to wallow in those sins.

As expressed by President Donald Trump in his recent March 2025 address to Congress, “We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. And our country will be 'woke' no longer.” As I watched the glee of Republican lawmakers responding to Trump's anti-DEI declarations with cheers and standing ovations, I wondered how many call themselves Christians. I wondered whether they comprehended that with every clap and yell, they were demonstrating that actually, the church and the nation haven't made any racial progress at all. We've just all gone backwards.

There is a reason that Jesus instructs his followers, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Once we become adults, our ability to embrace change and to open ourselves to new ways of thinking and living diminishes. But children have an inherent openness and malleability; with the exposure to the right kind of books, a child can be formed in ways that will last into adulthood.

I don’t have much hope that I can convince any adult who embraces the current anti-DEI zeitgeist to accept what is so apparent in Scripture, that diversity is God’s intentional blueprint for the world so that he can bring people from every tribe, tongue, and nation to himself. But children aren’t yet hardened by messages and forces both inside and outside the church that prefer a colorblind, whitewashed view of the world.

If you are feeling hopeless and frustrated by what you are seeing with the ways in which honoring and celebrating cultural and ethnic differences has been vilified and weaponized, I have a simple but powerful suggestion: buy children’s books, especially those by authors of color, and read them with the kids in your lives or in your churches. 

More than in any other genre, children’s literature has reflected a significant growth in diverse authors and subject matters. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, ethnic representation in kids’ books has been increasing since 2014; at that time, only 8 percent of books written for children were authored by people of color. By 2023, that number had risen to 47 percent. Even with the threats of book banning and the defunding of libraries which are all tactics intended to suppress and reduce the creation of diverse stories and characters, authors of color continue to be motivated to tell their tales, and church and world are better for it.

So give children’s books written by authors of color to people of influence in your life, such as a children’s pastor, librarian, or organizational leader. Rate and review books by authors of color that you know. Share your favorites on social media and tag friends who you think will appreciate finding out about these resources. All these actions can result in a strong collective impact to bolster the voices that need to be heard and amplify the stories that need to be told. 

As Nelson Mandela has famously said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” And one of the most wonderful, subversive ways that the next generation can experience this kind of education, see the realities around them, and stand against bias, insensitivity, racism, and hatred, is the humble picture book. Never underestimate the power that can lie within the pages of a tattered cover. 

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

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Helen Lee has been a Christian publishing professional since 1993, when she began her career working at Christianity Today (CT) magazine. She is the director of strategic initiatives at InterVarsity Press. An award-winning writer, she has frequently covered issues of race, ethnicity, and identity in her articles and books. Helen is the author of Kaylee Prays for the Children of the World, The Missional Mom, co-author of The Race-Wise Family, and co-editor and contributor of Growing Healthy Asian American Churches. Helen is a frequent conference speaker, the co-founder of Ink Creative Collective, and one of the original four founding members of Redbud Writers Guild. She is married to talented classical pianist Brian Lee, a professor of music at Moody Bible Institute and has three active, amazing teenage and young adult sons.

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