To keep this on topic, I'm going to focus on how when publishers do not actively fight racism and white supremacy they wind up supporting it.
If anyone wants to talk about how school choice, volunteer screening, state testing, and other systems embedded in the American education system are also super racist, feel free to PM me.
I teach 3rd Grade (8 - 9 year olds), and our standards focus on eras of settlement in local history. We work with the local Historical Society, who supply us with a free textbook and field trips. The Historical Society is a group of very, very nice older locals with a real passion for history. However, their textbooks focus 90% on white settlers. The coastal town I teach in was inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years; Mexicans and Portuguese for hundreds of years, and had the very first fully integrated government housing during the shipbuilding era of World War II. But the Historical Society based their textbooks off of the records they have, and the records that survived history are mostly those of wealthy white inhabitants. The historical society is not intentionally supporting white supremacy, but their textbook communicates that white people are more worth learning about than others. As a teacher, I use the textbook, but I supplement it with other lessons on how immigration and fights for civil rights have impacted our town.
I use a really wonderful Reading and Writing curriculum that promotes a real love of language arts. I really like it. However, our Reading curriculum suggests using Stone Fox as a read aloud. Stone Fox is well-known in young literature circles as portraying a false history of Native Americans and American settlement, and also portraying harmful stereotypes of Native Americans. Recently the Reading curriculum suggested an alternative book to read (Indian Shoes), and gave out curriculum to support it. I don't think anyone who created the curriculum purposefully chose a book that supports the idea that white people are more worthy of being a main character than others, but the very fact that they've amended that choice shows that publishers must actively fight against racism.
One more example. Racism and white supremacy have even affected the choices I have made as a teacher. Recently I reorganized my classroom library, placing all the picture books on a few shelves, and all the chapter series books on another shelf. I realized that 100% of my chapter series books, literally every single series had white protagonists. I did not have a single series that showed the experiences of children of color. Any of my students who looked at that shelf would be viewing the white supremacist idea that white children are more worthy of being written about and read. I am absolutely not a white supremacist. But by not actively fighting against racism as I made my book purchases, even I supported racist ideologies.
I do not think every publisher has to actively fight against racism and white supremacy. But I do think it's the responsibility of every human to do so.
