One of the blogs I like reading is TJIC. And while some people here may be reading what he's writing, I found a particular post there very interesting/entertaining, so I'll share it with everyone.

You're a publisher of children’s textbooks, and you have a problem. ... Kids confined to wheelchairs often suffer from afflictions that affect their appearance. ... You can always do what Houghton Mifflin does ... keep a wheelchair on hand as a prop and hire able-bodied children. ...

A Houghton Mifflin spokesman claimed that able-bodied models are presented as handicapped only as a last resort. But according to one of the company’s regular photographers ... publishers have to keep track of all the models they use for such pictures, so that a child posing as disabled in one chapter isn’t shown running or climbing a tree in another. ...

The cofounder of PhotoEdit Inc., a commercial archive that specializes in pictures of what it calls “ethnic and minority people in all walks of life,” [ says that ] pictures of authentic Hispanics who happen to have blond hair or blue eyes don’t count toward the Hispanic quota “because their background would not be apparent to readers.” In other words, rather than expose schoolchildren to the fact that “Hispanic” is an artificial classification that encompasses people of every color, publishers promote the fiction that all Hispanics look the same. ...

Some images are banned from textbooks because they are deemed stereotypical or offensive. ... McGraw-Hill’s guidelines specify that Asians not be portrayed wearing glasses or as intellectuals. ... “One major publisher vetoed a photo of a barefoot child in an African village, ... on the grounds that the lack of footwear reinforced the stereotype of poverty on that continent.”

Pure gold!