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[owlectomy]

Via Cynthia Leitich Smith: KT Horning has been interviewed by School Library Journal, a must-read for anyone interested in multicultural children's books.

When we looked at the Subject Guide to Children’s Books in Print for that year under “Blacks”—that was the subject—there was maybe a half-page of entries for nonfiction and fiction. But if you turned back a few pages and looked for “Bears” fiction, the entries went on for three pages. There were more children’s books with personified bears as main characters than there were with African Americans as main characters.

So we started keeping track of that statistic on a regular basis and printed it every year in CCBC Choices. After a few years, we reached a point where we would have people quote that number back to us, which was always kind of funny. Publishers would say, “Did you know, there were only 30 [multicultural] books [published] last year?” Yep. I agree with [Coretta Scott King Honor winner] Alexis De Veaux: buying a book is a political act. You have to buy books by authors of color so that there will be more books published.

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

No, it's all people of color -- if anything I would say that things improved for African-Americans more than they've improved for other races. I've seen maybe one or two picture books, total, with a middle-eastern protagonist -- maybe more if you count retellings of Aladdin and other stories from the Thousand and One Nights -- less than a dozen with East Asian protagonists (do we count Rosemary Wells's Yoko, an anthropomorphic cat who immigrated from Japan with her parents?), one or two with South Asian protagonists. Hispanic people are a little better represented but there's still very few of them. There's a bunch of retellings of Native American folklore but lots of it is "fakelore," as they say.

It is a publishing industry that has been, in the past, astonishingly resistant to the idea that black people buy books too.

In the mid-90s, Teri Woods and half a dozen other authors who were writing books about drugs, sex, and gangs could not manage to get themselves published because the major publishing houses didn't think there was a demand. So they started self-publishing. Well -- 80% of the time, when I'm taking the subway to work, I see somebody reading an urban fiction novel by one of these authors, or one of their imitators. There are massive waiting lists for their books at the library. It's not that the demand wasn't there, it was that the publishing industry couldn't conceive that the demand was there.

(But: if we're talking about hardcover picture books, we're talking about paying a LOT of money. So I would not be shocked if picture book editors were making decisions based on their assumptions about class...)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And one of the reason the awards are important is that awards are HUGE for influencing whether libraries buy the book. Because picture books are so expensive, it's often hard for individual parents to justify the price if they're not rich -- your kids write in them or rip them up, they outgrow them. So, if you're a working-class parent, maybe you've got a dozen picture books at home, and maybe you're checking out a dozen from the library every couple of weeks. But before the awards -- your demographic would be virtually invisible to the publishers, because you're buying only a small number of books directly, and even if you're talking to your librarian asking for more books about kids of your ethnic background, they can't do anything to influence what the publishers put out.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts. Thanks for the link.