All white world of children's books question continues with the 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey

Recently Lee and Low published their 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey results on diversity in the publishing industry. The Diversity Baseline Survey (DBS 2.0) was created by Lee & Low Books with co-authors Laura M. Jiménez, PhD, Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development and Betsy Beckert, graduate student in the Language and Literacy Department of Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

They first created a baseline study in 2015.This study was authored by Sarah Park Dahlen, PhD, St.  Catherine University and Nicole Catlin, graduate student, St. Catherine University.

Unfortunately,even with a bigger response rate, the survey results' numbers reveal an industry, sales force, and book review staff that is overwhelmingly White, Cisgender, Straight and Non-Disabled.  The issue of the All White World of Children's Books remains.

See also 
https://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2014/05/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2014/04/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2014/03/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2013/06/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html

All white world of children's books question continues with the BookCon controversy-UPDATE

Update

Results

 A conversation about the whitewashed lineup of BookCon guests sparked 22 writers, publishers and bloggers to begin the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign on May 1st. Since then, they’ve reached out to a community of readers, teachers, librarians, authors, booksellers and publishers who want to see more diversity within the publishing industry. Their message has been received: As of May 6th, 2014, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag on Twitter has garnered 87,520 posts from 23,275 unique users, with over 162 million timeline deliveries.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign took the Internet by storm with more than 160 million impressions in a week’s time, but soon its reach will spread even further—into the conference halls of BookCon on May 31, 2014 in New York City.

New Panels
 The Blockbuster Kids Panel has been enlarged.

A new Blockbuster Kids  Panel includes Rachel Renee Russell author of the Dork Diaries

Here is a picture of the old panel

Publishers Weekly has announced that the campaign members, in conjunction with Lee & Low Books, have secured a diverse panel of acclaimed children’s authors, including Grace Lin, Matt de la Peña and Jacqueline Woodson for

The World Agrees: #WeNeedDiverseBooks panel featuringAisha Saeed, Ellen Oh, Grace Lin, I.W. Gregorio, Jacqueline Woodson, Lamar Giles, Marieke Nijkamp, Matt de la Peña, Mike Jung.

After taking the Internet by storm, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign is moving forward with brand new initiatives to continue the call for diversity in children's literature. Join the WNDB team as they share highlights of their campaign, discuss the success of grassroots activism, highlight diverse books and how everyone can diversify their shelves and talk next steps for the campaign. Ellen Oh (PROPHECY Series), Aisha Saeed (Written in the Stars, 2015), Marieke Nijkamp, founder of DiversifYA, Lamar Giles (Fake ID) and Mike Jung (Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities). Special Guests include acclaimed Authors Grace Lin (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon), Matt de la Peña (The Living) and Jacqueline Woodson (Beneath a Meth Moon). Moderated by I.W. Gregorio (None of the Above, 2015).

 More to Come
The #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign will reveal further news and action plans at 10:00 a.m. during the BookCon diversity panel in room 1E02 at the Javits Center, 655 West 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

View the Campaign Archive
To see the submissions for the we need diverse books campaign, Check out the archive
http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/archive

and some of the submissions below
#WeNeedDiverseBooks because everyone should be able to find a book and say look that’s me!
http://tmblr.co/ZWNYhn1Eg5SmX

#WeNeedDiverseBooks because we have to tell our stories and hear the stories of others!
http://tmblr.co/ZWNYhn1Eg55oc

#WeNeedDiverseBooks because  we need to share our collective truth!
http://tmblr.co/ZWNYhn1Eg4sU-

We are all in this together! We > Me
http://tmblr.co/ZWNYhn1EiaYrp

#Weneeddiversebooks because people from all parts of the world need a story or character to relate to!
http://tmblr.co/ZWNYhn1FUOFoy

#WeNeedDiverseBooks because we are not one color!!!

http://tmblr.co/ZWNYhn1F8ZyZh

#WeNeedDiverseBooks because they speak to us!!

http://tmblr.co/ZWNYhn1EhDpO8

See also these posts on this blog
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2014/04/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2014/03/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2013/06/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html

All white world of children's books question continues with the BookCon controversy

The continuing concern over the "all white world of children's books"  continues with the recent announcement of an all white, all male panel of top children's authors authors at BookCon.

BookCon is a production of ReedPop which is behind the very successful ComicCon.

Reaction has included varied blog posts summarized here

http://bookriot.com/2014/04/23/readers-bookcon-diversity-book-expo-america/

The reaction to this has cumulated in a group called We Need DiverseBooks,  online participation/events on May 1 to 3 to show that we need diverse books and that this is something that readers do indeed want! 

WHAT YOU CAN DO!-

On May 1^st at 1pm (EST), there will be a public call for action that will spread over 3 days. We’re starting with a visual social media campaign using the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks. We want people to tweet, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, blog, and post anywhere they can to help make the hashtag go viral.

VISUAL CAMPAIGN - TAKE A PICTURE

• Take a photo holding a sign that says “We need diverse books because ___________________________.” Fill in the blank with an important, poignant, funny, and/or personal reason why this campaign is important to you. 
• The photo can be of you or a friend or anyone who wants to support diversity in kids’ lit. It can be a photo of the sign without you if you would prefer not to be in a picture. Be as creative as you want! Pose the sign with your favorite stuffed animal or at your favorite library. Get a bunch of friends to hold a bunch of signs. 

SHARE IT

• However you want to do it, we want to share it! There will be a Tumblr at http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/ that will host all of the photos and messages for the campaign. Please submit your visual component by May 1^st to weneeddiversebooks@yahoo.com with the subject line “photo” or submit it right on our Tumblr page here and it will be posted throughout the first day. 
• Starting at 1:00PM (EST) the Tumblr will start posting and it will be your job to reblog, tweet, Facebook, or share wherever you think will help get the word out. 
• The intent is that from 1pm EST to 3pm EST, there will be a nonstop hashtag party to spread the word. We hope that we’ll get enough people to participate to make the hashtag trend and grab the notice of more media outlets.
• The Tumblr will continue to be active throughout the length of the campaign, and for however long we need to keep this discussion going, so we welcome everyone to keep emailing or sending in submissions even after May 1^st.

TWEET IT!

On May 2^nd, the second part of our campaign will roll out with a Twitter chat scheduled for 2pm (EST) using the same hashtag. Please use #WeNeedDiverseBooks at 2pm on May 2nd and share your thoughts on the issues with diversity in literature and why diversity matters to you.

BUY DIVERSE BOOKS! 

TAKE PHOTOS!

On May 3^rd, 2pm (EST), the third portion of our campaign will begin. There will be a Diversify Your Shelves initiative to encourage people to put their money where their mouth is and buy diverse books and take photos of them. Diversify Your Shelves is all about actively seeking out diverse literature in bookstores and libraries, and there will be some fantastic giveaways for people who participate in the campaign! More details to come!

For some lists of diverse books see:

http://www.njcu.edu/guarini/department/EdServiceBib/GlobalJuvenileLiterature.pdf

 http://www.njcu.edu/guarini/department/EdServiceBib/GLOBALSECONDARYBOOKS.pdf

http://www.njcu.edu/guarini/department/EdServiceBib/GLOBALSECONDARYBOOKS.pdf

http://www.njcu.edu/guarini/department/EdServiceBib/MULTICULTURALSECONDARYBOOKS.pdf

http://www.njcu.edu/guarini/department/EdServiceBib/LGBTQBooks.pdf

THE RESULTS-

We hope that you will take part in this in any way you can. We need to spread the word far and wide so that it will trend on Twitter. So that media outlets will pick it up as a news item. So that the organizers of BEA and every big conference and festival out there gets the message that diversity is important to everyone. We hope you will help us by being a part of this movement.

All white world of children's books question continues with Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers

Jersey City. NJ  resident and award winning children's author, Walter Dean Myers and his son,also an award winning artist and author tackled the question of representations of children of color in youth literature in the Sunday New York Times  dated March 16. 2014.

Walter Dean Myers article, " Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?"  stressed the need and importance of having protagonists of color in books for youth and recounted his discovery and love of literature as a child and his dissatisfaction as an adolescent when he could not find literature that reflected his life experiences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrens-books.html?_r=0

Christopher Myers article, "The Apartheid of Children’s Literature", examined the background reasons for the dearth of youth  literature by and about people of color.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

Many will remember that these issues have been visited before in the classic article, "The All-White world of children's books" by Nancy Larrick published in the Saturday Review (1965, September 11) that raised many of these issues.

Other books such as the The all-white world of children's books and African American children's literature,  edited by Osayimwense Osa (1995)  [PS153 .N5 A399 1995] and Free within ourselves : the development of African American children's literature by Rudine Sims Bishop (2007) ,[ PS153 .N5 B526 2007b] also examined these issues.

See also
http://educationservicesnews.blogspot.com/2013/06/all-white-world-of-childrens-books.html

All white world of children's books continues

From NPR:
"When it comes to diversity, children's books are sorely lacking; instead of presenting a representative range of  faces, they're overwhelmingly white. How bad is the disconnect? A report by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that only 3 percent of children's books are by or about Latinos — even though nearly a quarter of all public school children today are Latino."

(image from http://www.amazon.com/Am-Latino-The-Beauty-Me/dp/0316160091

The article also mentions that a young Latina reader likes multicultural books because they feature characters "  ... with their long, dark hair and olive skin, they look a lot like her."  The article glosses over the point that this is not a true  description of all Latinas, a population which has a great deal of diversity. Works by author/illustrators  such as  Eric Velasquez,  Amelia Lau Carling, Yuyi and  Magaly Morales show that this standard description is plainly not the case.

To read the rest of the article, which has similar findings for books about other ethnic groups, see
http://www.wnyc.org/npr_articles/2013/jun/25/as-demographics-shift-kids-books-stay-stubbornly-white/

However, , the situation described in this article  has been with us for decades.

( image from http://www.amazon.com/White-Childrens-African-American-Literature/dp/0865434778)

In 1995, Frances Smith Foster in her article " Since the Sixties" in th The all-white world of children's books and African American children's literature , bemoaned the fact that  "...since the eighties, the stream of books for children by African -Americans has slowed to a trickle.   Many books are out of print and new titles are few and far between. Only about 1% of children's books published in the first half of the 1980s focus upon African-Americans and many of these are not by African Americans ( p.42) ."

The book in which this essay appears, The all-white world of children's books and African American children's literature edited by Osayimwense Osa. (Africa World Press, c1995) also reprints the original Larrick  article from the Saturday Review of Books. The other  essays examine several aspects of the  representations of diversity in children's literature.( Guarini Library PS153 .N5 A399 1995)

( image from http://www.amazon.com/Free-Within-Ourselves-Development-Literature/dp/0325071357/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372174815&sr=1-3&keywords=free+within+ourselves)

 In 2007, in her book, Free within ourselves : the development of African American children's literature,(Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann, c2007), Rudine Sims Bishop voiced a similar opinion.

 "In spite of major increases in the number of children's books about Black people since 1965,  African American children's literature continues to exist as a very small subset of the estimated 5000 new children's books published each year in the United States (p.xii)...The highest proportion of books about people of African descent produced by Black writers and artists was 65 percent, achieved only once in 2000 with 96 of 147 books. in recent years it has ranged between 40 percent and 60 percent  (p.xiii)."

(Guarini Library- PS153 .N5 B526 2007b 2007 )

[ Please note there has been controversy about how these and other books are marketed in bookstores   See http://nkjemisin.com/2010/05/dont-put-my-book-in-the-african-american-section/; http://gawker.com/5628781/ohio-wal+marts-have-carefully-segregated-book-departments]

Librarians have tried to promote multicultural literature with the

Coretta Scott King Awards

Pura Belpre Awards

But the situation and articles like these show that there is very little change.
When will the publishers get on the bandwagon and realize that they are missing an increasing population of Americans, and that most Americans (of any ethnicity) will view multicultural literature as reflecting their reality?
.