What do Katniss Everdeen, Max from Where the Wild Things Are, Junie B. Jones, Flat Stanley, Ramona Quimby, and Amelia Bedelia all have in common? Like over 90 percent of the characters in U.S. children's and young adult books, these classic characters are white. This year, for the first time ever, white students make up less than half of the U.S. public school population, but you would never know that from scanning library shelves.
Increasingly, however, people are noticing the discrepancy. In recent months, articles addressing the lack of diversity in children's books have appeared in publications as diverse as The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. A grassroots organization, aptly named We Need Diverse Books, gained notoriety when its eponymous hashtag (#WeNeedDiverseBooks) went viral, generating thousands of tweets from students, educators, and others hungry for change. The group convened a distinguished panel of children's and young adult authors at the BookCon festival in New York City in May that included Matt de la Peña, Grace Lin, Jacqueline Woodson, and others to discuss the issue.
These concerns are nothing new. Noted educator Nancy Larrick brought the issue to public attention in 1965 with her article "The All-White World of Children's Books" in The Saturday Review. Nearly 50 years later, little has changed.
Following the article's publication, groups such as the Council on Interracial Books for Children championed diversity issues, giving cause for hope. Meanwhile, in 1969 the Coretta Scott King Book Award was established to honor outstanding African American literature. Awards spotlighting other ethnicities followed, helping to nurture a more diverse group of authors and illustrators.
"We saw a flowering of diverse children's books for several years," says Kathleen Horning, director of the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin. Over time, however, the emphasis faded.
The CCBC started keeping statistics about ethnicity in children's and young adult literature in the mid-1980s. Just 18 of the 2,500 children's books published in 1985 were written or illustrated by African American authors. Later the CCBC expanded its survey to include other ethnicities. Of the 3,200 books CCBC examined in 2013, only 253 were by or about African Americans, Asians, Latinos, or American Indians.
In reviewing long-term trends, the number of books spotlighting African Americans plateaued around 100 in the late 1980s and early 1990s, says Horning. That era also brought the establishment of small presses such as Lee & Low and Just Us Books dedicated to multicultural literature, but overall gains remained modest.
Lack of diversity becomes a vicious cycle. Publishers say books featuring ethnic characters don't sell. Therefore, they tend not to publish such books. This discourages ethnic authors from entering or staying in the field. "We are not finding a commitment from the publishing industry to find and nurture authors and illustrators of color," notes Horning.
"We see a lot of demand from teachers and libraries who want to reflect the diversity in their classrooms," Horning adds. However, as school and public library budgets continue to shrink, these institutional markets don't have the effect they once did.
Seeing Themselves: Why It's Important
In today's increasingly diverse society, it's vital to provide literature featuring a variety of ethnicities and viewpoints. During the BookCon presentation, author Grace Lin recalled that as a youth she was "very hungry for a book that had somebody like me in it." When she finally found a book series with an Asian character, "it was all horrible stereotypes, but I didn't care, because it was just someone who looked like me."
Alfred Tatum, dean of the College of Education and director of the Reading Clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says that when students read about characters that look like them, it can reinforce and strengthen their cultural identity. With such material scarce, Tatum decided to create it—he challenged high school students to write stories for younger readers. "They wrote in ways that had resonance because the stories came from their own lives," he says.
For instance, one young writer created a character named Juice Jones, a young jazz musician who shaped his identity through music. Other students wrote about childhood events such as losing a tooth, which the younger students could really identify with. "We need to share the power of children's literature," Tatum concludes. "Powerful language, powerful text, and powerful instruction make all the difference."
Using a Cultural Studies Approach
Allen Webb, a professor at Western Michigan University and former high school teacher, suggests using a "cultural studies approach" to literature, looking at the human and social questions that literature raises. "Literature invites the reader to enter the experience of others and often leads to a better understanding of the world," Webb says.
Webb likes to pair classic works with diverse contemporary books. For instance, to examine the theme of forbidden romance, Webb calls Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye "a perfect book" to put in the curriculum next to Romeo and Juliet.
Webb also relies on texts that elicit emotion and stimulate discussion around controversial topics. To address immigration issues, he uses Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami, a book about Moroccan immigrants desperately trying to reach Europe in a small inflatable boat. He says reading this book helps students develop empathy for immigrants.
"We live in an increasingly multicultural and global world," Webb explains, "and we need to prepare students with a deep understanding of people who are different from them."
Engaging Reluctant Readers
When Sarah Waddell, a 7th grade teacher at White Horse Middle School in the Madison (Wisc.) Metropolitan School District, approached classes of struggling readers with the idea of combining summer literature circle discussions and the opportunity to make film trailers about books, she had 80 volunteers for 15 slots. Students met regularly to discuss the books and then had an intensive weeklong "film camp" to create their book trailers. The project was run in cooperation with the CCBC and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Roughly two-thirds of those participating were students of color, and most qualified for the district's free and reduced-price lunch program. "We deliberately set up this program as a way to close the achievement gap between our students of color and our white students," says Waddell.
Students read books featuring a diverse range of characters, including Wonder by R.J. Palacio, Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney, and Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos. Students enjoyed being able to identify with some of the characters they were reading about. For instance, one African American student who was a boxer found special relevance in Bird in a Box, which features legendary boxer Joe Louis. "The student commented about how cool it was to be reading a book [that] was part of his history," says Waddell.
Another student whose family is from Nigeria was elated to read Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor, a fantasy novel set in Nigeria. The family enjoyed seeing names of villages they recognized.
Waddell thinks this project is perfectly suited to middle school students because they can read these multicultural texts independently and are savvy with the technology. "Instead of seeing summer slide, these kids were maintaining or moving ahead over the summer," Waddell says. "We saw it in their test scores."
Making Diversity a Non-Issue
At the BookCon panel, We Need Diverse Books president Ellen Oh talked about the need to transform diversity from a "trend" to a "call to arms." She described a variety of initiatives, including plans for a Children's Literature Diversity Festival in 2016.
"My biggest vision is that we don't have to have this panel anymore," concluded author Jacqueline Woodson—that diversity will be a given in our daily lives and our literature.
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Finding Multicultural Books
Are the books you're teaching representative of your student population? Visit www.ascd.org/eu1114list for multicultural booklists, awards, and other resources to diversify your classroom library with texts carefully selected by reading experts. Many, including those recommended by the Southern Poverty Law Center, are aligned to the Common Core State Standards.