the truth behind the story

18 Dec 2020 news 0 Comments

9781524770457When The Star agreed to publish my essay on Black fantasy fiction in 2019, I was thrilled. After quitting my job and struggling for several years to earn a living as a writer, I was finally making it work. With a few small awards under my belt, a couple of modest book deals, and a whole lot of paid school visits, I had managed to match my comfortable professor’s salary. And after a decade of invisibility, I was also gaining recognition as a children’s author in Canada; my middle grade novel Dragons in a Bag was nominated for the Forest of Reading’s Silver Birch Express Award, and my Penguin Random House publicist booked me on Canadian television shows and CBC Radio programs.

In that first essay, I shared the challenges I faced as a child in Toronto; no Black role models and a school curriculum that erased Black contributions to Canadian history and culture left me with a thoroughly colonized imagination. I also argued—not for the first time—for the collection of data so we could measure diversity in Canadian children’s literature:

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison annually tracks race in over three thousand books for young readers; in 2017, only 3 per cent of the books submitted by publishers were created by African Americans. As far as I know, Canadian kid lit scholars don’t track race in publishing — but they should.

I was impressed when, shortly after that essay was published, The Star‘s Books Editor Deborah Dundas took the initiative and began gathering diversity data from Canadian publishers. In 2011, I had attempted my own survey to determine how many Black Canadian authors were creating children’s literature. The results were abysmal: from 2000-2010, an average of 3 Black authors per year had a book for children published in Canada. So when Deborah shared with me the results of her first survey last year, I was stunned—and skeptical. She reached out again to ask if I wanted to comment on the second survey, but I declined. I suspected most of the 51 books with a Black main character were either authored by Whites or by someone like me—a Black author whose book was acquired and published in the US but distributed north of the border by a transnational publisher (in my case, Penguin Random House). My publisher has assured me that my two dragon novels were never submitted to The Star for their survey, but I suspect that my inclusion in other Canadian lists is as much related to the sudden desire to appear inclusive as it is related to the quality of my books. It’s no doubt easier to reach across the border for a Black expat than it is to take a stand against anti-Blackness in Canadian publishing.

cover_final02I am Canadian; no matter where I live, that fact won’t change and I think it’s fair to call me a Canadian author even if I’ve lived in the US for most of my life at this point. But my forty titles for young readers really aren’t Canadian books. Even at this stage in my career, I face continued rejection from Canadian editors. I had a middle grade novel published in 2019, The Dragon Thief, but including my titles in a survey like this misrepresents what the Canadian publishing industry is actually doing when it comes to equity (ensuring everyone has an equal opportunity to tell their story, their way).

The Star ‘s survey purports to “tell the story” about diversity in Canadian children’s literature. It asks publishers to self-report their titles but without a more granular approach, the survey presents an incomplete and potentially distorted image of diversity and inclusion in Canadian kid lit. In 2019, out of a total of 419 books, 51 had a Black main character; yet when I contacted colleagues in the field (authors, booksellers, scholars) they could only name two Black Canadian authors with a children’s book published in Canada in 2019: Nadia Hohn’s A Like Miss Lou (Owlkids) and Shauntay Grant’s My Hair is Beautiful (Nimbus).

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The Star survey also makes a point of introducing demographics: “So, in picture books this year, 11.5 per cent of main characters were Black, compared to 3.5 per cent of the population.” This might lead one to conclude that Black children are actually over-represented in Canadian children’s literature and/or that imgCanadian publishers demonstrate a notable commitment to producing narratives about Blacks. By contrast, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that in the US in 2019, the number of books with Black main characters was 441 out of 3,716 or 11.9% of total books (Blacks represent 13% of the US population). But the CCBC doesn’t just look at the total number of books about different racial groups; they also indicate how many of those books are by authors of different races. US disability activist and author Corinne Duyvis coined the term #ownvoices to distinguish between books by cultural/community insiders and those created by outsiders. The latter are more likely to be inaccurate/inauthentic and the privileging of these books limits opportunities for creators from marginalized groups. The CCBC noted that in 2019, less than half of the books about Blacks were created by Blacks (212 out of 452). Additionally, only 5.7% of the total books they received were written and/or illustrated by at least one person who is Black. This crucial data is what’s missing from The Star’s survey. If only 2 of the 419 books for young readers published in Canada were created by Black Canadians, that’s 0.48%. Less than half of one percent—appalling and unacceptable. Maybe I’ve got it wrong—perhaps we missed a number of other titles by Black Canadian kid lit creators. Crowdsourcing that kind of data isn’t ideal; asking publishers to report the details about each title they publish instead of the overall number would make the survey more complete and the story about diversity in Canadian kid lit far more convincing.

book-cover-my-hair-is-beautiful-by-shauntay-grantCanadians like to think of themselves as more progressive and enlightened on matters of race than their neighbors to the south, and have even congratulated themselves on having a progressive publishing industry. In a 2016 School Library Journal essay titled “How Canada Publishes So Many Diverse Books,” Ken Setterington argues that “publishers in Canada are building a worldwide reputation for originality, quality, and diversity in children’s literature.” Yet the article’s dozen accompanying photographs reveal the overwhelming Whiteness of Canadian publishing professionals, proving it’s possible (and for some, perhaps, preferable) to publish “diverse books” without diversifying the publishing community itself. Here in the US, multicultural publisher Lee & Low has taken the lead by conducting two surveys of publishing professionals; the results are grim but nonetheless provide a clear picture of the industry as a whole.

Lee and Low

Who has measured Black representation in the Canadian publishing industry? Acknowledging 2020 as “a year when Black Lives Matter and social activism have been front and centre in the media,” Deborah Dundas suggests that the Canadian publishing community “has been forcefully nudged” to address racism in its ranks. She points to the hiring of Sue Kuruvilla as head of Random House Canada as a sign of progress, and that does make me cautiously hopeful. But true equity cannot be achieved until the full story of race and publishing in Canada has been told.