The #OwnVoices Gap in African-American Children's Books

Since 1985, the CCBC has been keeping statistics on the number of children's books by and about African Americans. For the first two years, the numbers were dismal (just 18 books out of 2,500 published in 1985 and again in 1986).  USA Today did a story about it that included one of their handy visuals to illustrate the problem.

For the next few years we began to see an increase that was enough to make us hopeful. But that didn't last. By the mid-1990s the numbers began to plateau and they have stagnated ever since.

But a couple of years ago we began to notice a dramatic increase in the number of books about African-Americans -- it nearly doubled from 2013 to 2014 (from 93 to 180), and then jumped to 265 in 2015. In 2016 we saw a small bump to 278.

We're not sure what caused this. Was it the Obama effect? (If an African American can be President, why not a book character?) Was it the call for more Black books in the New York Times editorials by Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers early in 2014? Was it the impact of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement? A combination of all three?

Regardless of the cause, many saw this as a reason for celebration. But the increase in the number of books about African Americans doesn't tell the whole story. It needs to be looked at next to the number of these same books that are actually by African Americans. This graph helps to illuminate what is happening:

Click to enlarge image

We can see that there are a whole lot of books being written about African Americans these days by people who are not African American. Does it matter? It certainly can. Especially when you care about authenticity.

And, more significantly, this means we are not seeing African-American authors and artists being given the same opportunities to tell their own stories. In fact, last year just 71 of the 278 (25.5%) books about African-Americans were actually written and/or illustrated by African Americans.  The graph above shows this gap quite dramatically.

There are a few hopeful signs this year already.  An African-American artist won the 2017 Caldecott Medal for a picture book that's actually about an African-American child. This marks the first time -- ever -- that the Caldecott Medal has been awarded for a picture book that is both by and about an African-American (as opposed to animal tales or an informational book about Africa). 

We're also seeing promising debut novels this spring from African-American authors such as Linda W. Jackson, Tiffany D. Jackson, Angie Thomas and Ibi Zoboi.   But we still have a long way to go to bridge the gap between the books about and the books by African Americans.  

We don't just need more African American authors and artists being signed and nurtured by publishers, we also need white authors and artists to take a step back to make room for people to tell their own stories. Let's hope that by 2020 this graph tells a different story. 

Asian-American Writers Take on Race

It's something we've been wondering about here at the CCBC for the past year or so, ever since we noted that our statistics reveal that fewer Asian-American book creators write and illustrate books about Asian characters than they do about white (or animal) characters.  With such a dearth of books with Asian main characters, why don't more Asian authors and illustrators create them?

In a year when we celebrated so much diversity in the ALA Award choices, it doesn't escape our attention that the three Asian-American authors and illustrators who were honored this year won for books that didn't feature any Asian characters. This year's Caldecott Medal winner by the prolific Thai-American artist, Dan Santat, is a case in point.  Beekle is about a raceless imaginary friend and, although the people he meets in the real world are diverse, the girl who eventually adopts him appears to be white. 

Jillian Tamaki won a Caldecott Honor for This One Summer, a realistic graphic novel that perfectly captures a summer friendship between two girls during the time when one is beginning to outgrow the other. Both the illustrator and the author are Japanese American, but the book, as far as I can tell, features an all-white cast. 

Interior from This One Summer

And author Anna Kang won the Geisel Award this year for You Are (Not) Small, a book with bear characters standing in for humans. In spite of the fact that the book has no human, let alone Asian, characters, the author talked about how the book was influenced by her own Korean-American heritage in her eloquent acceptance speech last month.  So who's to say if a book by an Asian-American author is Asian or not?

With all that in mind, we were pleased to see this eye-opening blog post by Zetta Elliott in which she asks several prominent Asian-American writers to discuss this issue. Their responses give us a lot of food for thought. 

Still Pottered After All These Years

Last Friday, the first business day of 2015, Publishers Weekly released the list of the top-selling books of 2014.  There are the usual number of movie tie-ins and celebrity books in the Top 10 Print Bestsellers, but what is remarkable about the list is that 8 of the 10 are books for young readers. 

Top-Selling Books of 2014

And you have to get down to position number 5 on the list before you even find an adult book -- Killing Patton by professional gadfly Bill O'Reilly, which is the only adult book on the list that sold more than one million copies. Young adult author John Green sold more than twice as many books as O'Reilly with a book that was published back in January 2012.
 
The print sales statistics Publishers Weekly uses are are kept by Nielsen BookScan, a more reliable and realistic record than the New York Times Best Seller list. Unlike the New York Times, Nielsen BookScan doesn't subcategorize print titles by fiction or nonfiction, hardcover or paperback, adult or children's, series or stand-alone.  (For example, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars appears in the Nielsen Top 10 three times -- in trade paper, movie tie-in, and hardcover.) What you see is a simple, unadulterated list of the ten best-selling books of the year, in sales order.

The New York Times didn't separate out children's fiction from adult fiction until 2000, when they made the controversial decision to do this owing to the popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter.  The first three books in the series had occupied spots 1, 2, and 3, and didn't show any signs of being knocked off or even down the list, except inevitably by the forthcoming volume in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Best-selling adult authors being kept of the list by the young wizard were said to have been "pottered." The New York Times decided to fix that by taking children's books off the best-sellers list all together, no matter how many copies they sold.

Today it's clear that adult authors are still being pottered, but now it's by the likes of John Green, Jeff Kinney, and Veronica Roth. The children's authors on the list have changed in the past decade but what stays the same is that children's books are far outselling adult books, at least in print editions.

Potter on!

Considering the Young Adult Memoir

To-date in 2014 at the CCBC, we've read five memoirs by young adults (usually in collaboration with other writers): 

• I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World by Malala Yousafzai with Patricia McCormick (Young Reader's Edition: Little, Brown)
• Laughing At My Nightmare by Shane Burcaw (Roaring Brook)
• Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition by Katie Rain Hill with Ariel Schrag (Simon & Schuster)
• Some Assembly Required: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen by Arin Andrews with Joshua Lyon (Simon & Schuster)
• Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina by Michaela de Prince with Elaine De Prince (Random House)

I found each of these young adults' stories compelling in one or more ways and think many teen readers will, too. The young reader's edition of Malala Yousafzai's life to-date is, as she has said, her story, whereas the adult book has greater emphasis on her father. The Katie Rain Hill and Arin Andrews titles are an intriguing pair of books, because the two transgender teens are friends (and were girlfriend/boyfriend) and so have a number of intersecting characters and events seen from their two different points of view. Shane Burcaw's perspective on his life--he has spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative muscular disease that has made him wheelchair bound--is frank and often funny. Dancer Michaela De Prince's tells how she lost her family in Sierra Leone during brutal war and was eventually adopted by a family in the United States, which is where she began to pursue her interest in dance: a life of striking contrasts.

But I also found myself asking questions as I read them.

I would imagine one of the challenges, when taking on a project like this, from an editorial perspective, is trying to balance the teen's voice with the adult collaborator's (when there is a collaborator).  My guess is that the ones that are less well written from a literary perspective are the most authentic in terms of letting the young adults' voice come through unfiltered. Is that a good thing or a bad thing in terms of evaluating the books?  I don't know. 

Occasionally, what I think of as the less-filtered voice gave me pause.  There were moments in some of the books when I thought--Oh, how are you going to feel about having said/written this in five or ten years?

They are so young, really, to be reflecting on their lives. They all have stories worthy of sharing, but at moments like that I wondered if it wouldn't have been better for their stories to be something other than first-person.

Then again, I think the first-person is also part of where the power of their narratives resides. And those occasional moments that made me wince in some of the books are also, perhaps, the very things that teen readers might find most genuine.

So, no answers, just questions, none of which detract from my overall appreciation for the existence of these works.