NYT: "Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?"

...when I was growing up, Guyana was a British colony, British Guiana, and our culture was very much influenced by Britain; in fact, our culture was, fundamentally, British. That meant that everything we were given to read, was of British source. I was a voracious reader, yet even as a child I noticed that not one of the books I read came with a setting or characters familiar to me.

I grew up in a society that was a melange of six races, predominantly of African or Indian ethnicity; yet every single book I read was populated by homogenously Caucasian characters; their problems and issues had to do with British (or, sometimes, American) society. They ate strawberries and cream and crumpets and Yorkshire pudding. They celebrated Christmas with snow and reindeer, and rejoiced at the break of spring and the first daffodils. Where were the palm trees, the mangoes and fish curries, the bougainvilleas and kiskadees (a local bird) so familiar to me? Why was everyone lily-white? Where were the books set in our own country, among our own people?

Black people were so invisible in books that one sentence in an Enid Blyton books hit me hard in the gut, and I never forgot it. It was one of the Famous Five books – which I loved, and devoured one after the other. In this book, Anne, the youngest and most timid of the Five, was woken up at night by a noise and saw the outline of a man’s head in the window. Trembling in fear, she said to her elder brother: “Oh Julian, suppose it was a black man!”

I’m sure that scene has since been edited out of new editions of the book, but it made an enormous impression on me at the time, and just goes to show how marginalised non-white characters were.

Sometimes, Europeans find it hard to understand this need for more diverse character casts, and accuse us of whining when we speak of this phenomenen. But think of it this way. Imagine you, as a white European, had grown up in Europe, among people who mostly looked like you; and yet every single book you read, from childhood on, hat ONLY black characters, and was set exclusively in Africa. Can you imagine how odd that would begin to feel? And how you would yearn for books that more reflected your own reality? That’s how it was for me and many others

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Ken said:

The article writer lost credibility right at the start.

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But the remainder didn't all feature whites. They featured a beautiful mix of nationalities. Chinese, (((Japanese))), Spanish, etc. The remainder also didn't feature people all of the time. A lot of kids books star animals as characters, like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which the article writer went on to mention, while failing to connect the dots.

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Is 93 still unsettling a figure out of 3200. Yes. But far less so in view of the above.

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Ken said:

Again. 93 is still unsettling no matter how you slice and dice it. It's just that when you use stats as the basis of an article you've gotta give an accurate measure. Otherwise readers won't be able to take it seriously, even if things still add up to the general impression you're relaying. "What's up with this #%&@ under-representation?!"

And like you and Hapax say, giving the complete picture wouldn't really have undermined the article writer's argument. It would have helped it as well as assuring readers he was being fair in his assessment.

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Hapax Legomenon said:

I mean it would have been better to give an exact proportion of white people and animal books so people could not possibly imagine there was just a very high proportion of animal books.

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kuwisdelu said:

Of those 34 children's books about American Indians, this post goes through the 14 by US publishers, and could only recommend 8 of them as being good and responsible representations of Native Americans.

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