It's Just Skin, Silly!
- Based on a collective 40+ years of peer-reviewed research from two leading experts on race, and illustrated with sweet, goofy illustrations kids will love, It’s Just Skin, Silly!The co-authors of the book, Dr. Jablonski and Dr. McGee, are highly specialized experts in their fields. This book combines their two research areas—how evolutionary adaptations created a vast array of human skin colors, and how the illusory concept of “race” has been weaponized as a means for disempowerment and classification—to create a children’s book intended to stop mythmaking about skin color early, and provide children with the information they need to challenge misinformation about race in their daily lives.
- Celebrated historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has provided a foreword and a glowing endorsement of the book.
- The emotional appeal of “loving the skin you’re in” is highly saturated in the children’s book industry at the moment, and while this message is imperative, there is a major deficiency in early childhood education and in the publishing industry about why we’re in the skin we’re in (What even is skin? Why do we have it? Why do we all have different colored skin anyways?).It's Just Skin, Silly!is distinct in addressing the actual science behind skin and skin color, and not just the social and cultural associations we have with race, making it a must-have not just for parents, but also for classrooms and public libraries.
- With an interactive reading experience—where readers are instructed to ask genderless narrator Epi questions, point out various skin colors, and raise their hands at certain parts of the story—and including a word bank and several info boxes throughout giving curious readers special insights to concepts like climate, vitamins, and hair, It’s Just Skin, Silly! is crafted using both Dr. Jablonski and Dr. McGee’s tested pedagogical methods for creating engaging and impactful scientific curriculum for children.
- The book includes an illustrated educational essay in the back to assist adults in discussing the book with children and teaching it in the classroom. We will also be releasing a companion curriculum on the Catalyst Press website available for all parents, librarians and educators to use free of charge.
- We expect this to be one of our biggest titles yet, because nothing like it exists on the market (a strictly scientific look at skin color for very young audiences), but it’s closely enough related to anti-racism, BLM, and Black & Brown kid self-love titles to be included in that category and marketed to that audience. It will bridge the trade and academic markets, and with the authors very well connected in the popular science and social justice spaces, we expect big names to blurb the book and publicize it on social media. Besides the traditional literary, school & library (we intend to coordinate a school tour for the authors), and trade channels for publicity, we’ll also be reaching out to citizen science organizations and seeking special sales at medical facilities, science museums, and children’s book subscription boxes.
Dr. Nina Jablonski is an anthropologist and paleobiologist whose research on the evolution of skin color has been published in many scholarly journals including Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Nature, and American Psychologist. She is the author of several books, including Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color and Skin: A Natural History. She has also been a featured TED Talk speaker, and has appeared as a guest on shows such as The Colbert Report and Bill Nye’s Science Rules! podcast. Dr. Jablonski has extensive experience in the development of science-related youth curriculum from grades K-12.
Dr. Holly Y. McGeeis a historian at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. McGee’s research, teaching, and publishing in the fields of African American History, comparative black politics, and South African history provide critical insight into historical narratives regarding the social creation of “race” and subsequent proliferation of racism in modern society. She is the author of "One Day We Are Going Home": The Long Exile of Elizabeth Mafeking, and founder of the nonprofit National Black Teachers Association.
Karen Vermeulen is an artist, illustrator and teacher living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her work is happy, uplifting and quirky. When she is not busy with some creative project, she is probably playing with her cat, Sir Henry. You can find more of her work at www.karenvermeulen.com.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, and the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Professor Gates’s most recent books are Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. He has also produced and hosted more than 20 documentary films, most recently The Black Church on PBS and Black Art: In the Absence of Light for HBO. Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy and genetics series, is now in its eighth season on PBS.
