WRITING WRONGS
Former schoolteacher JULIET COLEY explains to Linda McTurk why she established a company that helps black children to publish books about characters who look like them
‘O Juliet’s son, Romeo, started writing from a young age
4 • War Cry • 18 July 2020
NE per cent of protagonists in children’s books are black – it’s an absolute disgrace,’ says Juliet Coley, founder of the publishing company BlackJac Media, which produces books written by black children. Juliet, a former senior deputy head teacher of a secondary school in Tottenham, is determined to address systemic racism by helping black children aged 7 to 13 to become self-published authors. To date, the company has published 12 books, including Jacob’s Day Trip to Jamaica, Cook with Me and
Nanny Hazel and Hey, Black Girl! Several more titles are due for release by the end of the year. Juliet hopes the books will ‘keep the heritage and culture going’. She believes that ‘it would have a massive effect’ if there was more children’s representation of diverse characters in children’s books. Juliet says that black people have historically been, and continue to be, underrepresented and misrepresented in children’s literature. ‘If you see yourself described in books as somebody that is substandard,’ she tells me, ‘then you grow up to believe that that’s all you can be. Seeing the underrepresentation and the racism, I recognised that I needed to be doing something for young black kids.’ Having taught for more than 20 years, Juliet believes in the power of education to change the lives of young people. But her reasons for starting her publishing company stemmed from a series of difficult events in her personal life. In 2013, while driving back from the hairdressers, Juliet suddenly felt a pain in
