A statement officially adopted by the Board of Directors of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is presented. The position is taken that the amount and effects of racism and bias in English and Language Arts educational materials cannot be ignored. Specifically, educational materials now suffer from the following crucial deficiencies: (1) inadequate representation of literary works by members of non-white minorities in general anthologies, (2) representation of minority groups which is demeaning, insensitive, or unflattering to the culture, (3) inclusion of only popular and proven works by a limited number of "acceptable" writers, (4) biased commentaries which gloss over or flatly ignore the oppression suffered by non-white minority persons, and (5) other commentaries in anthologies which depict inaccurately the influence of non-white minority persons on literary, cultural, and historical developments in America. It is recommended that: (1) Literature anthologies commit themselves to fair and balanced inclusion of the work of non-white minority group members; (2) Illustrations and photographs present as accurate and balanced a picture of non-white minorities and their environments as is possible in the total context of the educational materials; (3) Dialect be appropriate to the setting and characters; and (4) Literary criticism draw as heavily as possible from the critical writers of non-white minorities. (CK)