the real deal

Here are the stats on diversity in children’s literature (taken from the last post’s article on the CCBC):

“In 1985, they noted with shock that just 18 children’s books were eligible for the American Library Association’s Coretta Scott King award, given annually to the year’s best work, published in the United States, by an African-American author or illustrator. That was out of more than 2,500 total children’s books published that year.

“We were so appalled at that statistic,” Horning recalls. “But I can’t say we were completely surprised.”

The center highlighted its findings the following year in “CCBC Choices,” an annual publication in which staff members pick the year’s best books and reflect on current publishing trends.

In 1989, USA Today published a prominent article about the findings. In 1991, at the urging of UW-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala, the center published the first of two volumes entitled “Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults,” listing 400 notable U.S. and Canadian children’s titles by and about people of color. A second volume was published in 1997.

Things have since gotten better — but not much.

In its 2008 edition of “CCBC Choices” the center noted that among the 3,000 newly published titles on its shelves in 2007, 181 were by minority authors and illustrators, including Africans, African Americans, American Indians, Asians, Asian Americans and Latinos. That’s only about 4 percent of the 5,000 children’s books published in the United States that year.

Neither are white authors jumping in to fill the multicultural gap. In 2007, the center counted just 321 total kids’ titles, by authors and illustrators of all races, that made significant mention of minorities. And rather than picture books or novels children might pick up at random, more than half of those were broad “formulaic” titles profiling various countries around the world.

“I think there’s a perception that there are more than there are. There really aren’t,” Horning said.