#WeNeedDiverseBooks: Badly, and More Than Ever

By Taylor Dashiell on April 30, 2016

http://diversebooks.org

My parents would read to me and my sisters the same way other parents sang lullabies; they recited the stories lovingly and lavishly, opening our minds to endless possibilities before we closed our eyes for the night. It was because of this ritual that I discovered my love for storytelling. I started reading picture books on my own rather early as a result, including Good Night Moon and The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and Happy to be Nappy by Belle Hooks. Funny enough, all three of these books are still in print; Brown’s works have not stopped production since their debuts in the 1940s, and Hooks’ work has been going strong since 1999.  These authors showed me two things: Brown, with her bedtime tales of restless baby bunnies, taught me that anyone can be the protagonist of a story, no matter how seemingly small or unimportant. And Hooks, with her colorful, carefree ode to the nappy hair of black girls everywhere, let me know that not only could I write my own stories, but the people in those stories could look like me.

Right now the world of children and teen literature is severely lacking in diversity. Ashley Strickland, in her article Where’s the African-American Harry Potter or the Mexican Katniss?,  points out that “lead characters of color or characters who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are still slow to appear in popular mainstream young adult fiction” though the genre has been “enjoying a golden age”. And this is completely true. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported that fewer children’s books were authored by African Americans and Latinos in 2013 than in previous years, while numbers only increased slightly for American Indians and Asian Americans. In addition, less authors of color were deemed as best-sellers or prize recipients and are not being asked to speak at book panels and signings. Like just recently at the Book Expo of America’s (BEA) Book-con, where an all-white, all male panel was introduced as “luminaries of children’s literature” (qtd. in TheGuardian.com). For anyone not counting, there are one hundred-seven days until 2015. Fifteen years into the new millennium, there still are not a fair amount of fiction with people of color or other minorities. What this means is that the same story is being written over and over again, describing characters with Euro-centric features and names, heterosexual norms, and other ‘typical’ behaviors.

A lot of young adult fiction has become interchangeable due to the seeming repetitiveness in not only storyline but in character profile, lumping each work together to create a genre with very few options. Teen vampires are untouchable now and the wizarding world has been conquered because of the success of two book franchises.  But they do not have to be only options. A push for more diverse children and teen literature would not only allow for the underrepresented populations to see their stories being told, it would also permit for members of the majority group to expand their knowledge on everyday people who are different from them.  Let’s shake it up a bit, because “all children deserve books in which they can see themselves and the world in which they live” (CCBC.education.wis.edu).

As one of four black kids at elementary and middle school age in a New Jersey suburb, liking books as much as I did was considered a little weird by my peers at school. I didn’t ‘sound black’, I wasn’t particularly loud, and by 8th grade I was always writing in a notebook or on the back of worksheets every chance I got. I wasn’t ignored, but I wasn’t in the popular crowd which I didn’t mind. What I did mind was the never ending list of stereotypes I didn’t fit and not having a scholarly answer for why I didn’t fit them. Why was it so peculiar that I liked books?  Were my classmates being racist? It was not an outward racism nor do I believe they had intended to hurt me in anyway. They were simply trying to fit me into the few boxes they had been given. But I was different and looking back their misunderstandings and my constant frustration could have been curbed if we all had had some diverse reading material.

Today, “Of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only ninety-three were about black people, thirty-four about Native Americans, sixty-nine about Asians and fifty-seven about Latinos” (Flood, ‘We Need Diverse Books’). Out of 3,200 books, 253 of them were about people of color. Yikes. Does this mean that the remaining number were exclusively about white people? “No” is the answer the CCBC gives saying that they know “there are certainly picture books published every year featuring animal characters or trucks or other high-interest topics” (CCBC.org).  But there is clearly a disproportionate representation. What would be an accurate one? The combined minority population of the U.S., including African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders, and American Indians or Alaskan Natives, is 36.3% as of the 2010 census (CDC.gov). If the number of children’s books written could at the very least mirror the demographic of the country, the multicultural representation in bookstores and on library shelves would be noticeably different. The market would be open for books about black girls who like to read, and this fictitious character can affirm a young girl’s confidence in being a bookworm and help other children understand that a black girl liking books is not weird at all: the notion that she can indeed enjoy books as much as her blonde counterpart can. A diverse group of protagonists can ultimately, change a chuld’s life and even validate their existence.

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