4 minute read
The Importance of Diversity in Children’s Literature
by Abigail Kulemeka
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Only 10% of children's books include people of colour. This needs to change.
Before diving into this article, I would like to give the definition of what I mean by the term ‘diversity’:
‘Diversity’ is differences in racial and ethnic, socioeconomic, geographic, and academic/ professional backgrounds. People with different opinions, backgrounds (degrees and social experience), religious beliefs, political beliefs, sexual orientations, heritage, and life experience.
So why is diversity in literature so important?
Seeing characters or people in a similar situation or who look, act, or think the same the way as yourself provides comfort and relief knowing that there are other people out in the world who relate to you. Because of this people tend to be drawn to stories with which they can identify and may feel isolated by those who don’t.
It is especially important in children’s novels for the children to be able to see themselves within characters, so that they are not isolated and restricted by the ideology they are shown of how certain types of people should behave and act.
Kate Sullivan, in her article “Why Diversity in Literature Matters” states - “This is a particular problem in children’s and YA literature because kids need to see themselves represented in order to develop healthy selfimages and to feel comfortable with who they are... You may not see other folks like you out and about in town... and you’re not always seeing them in books, either, making you feel even more isolated.”
As a young girl I read popular novels such as the Harry Potter series, Charlie and Lola, The Twilight series, Roald Dahl and David Walliams, Dirty Bertie, and other books of the sort. When I think back to the storylines and characters within this collection of children’s books, I realised that the representation of people of colour was minimal, and any LGBTQI+ characters are practically non-existent. As a Black-British woman of colour I feel like I was never able to fully resonate with characters who shared these same traits with me. In this sense, it made it harder for me growing up to find books that drew me in.
Charles Dickens, Michael Morpurgo, William Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis, Dan Brown, J. R. R. Tolkien: these are all authors that were recommended by teachers and fellow avid readers as I began to mature. What do they all have in common? They are all British white men. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this – they are all fantastic writers in their own right – but these recommendations meant that most of the literature that I consumed was written from the male perspective, and on subjects which seemed to focus on any struggle other than the colour of one’s skin.
In the words of Walter Dean Meyers, an author and publishing expert: “As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.”
As a female person of colour, I didn’t need a novel to inform me of the struggles that minority groups face – simply because I experienced them in reality, but from the perspective of a cisgendered white male, for example, or someone who hasn’t had these experiences, is only natural that it would be harder to understand the challenges faced by these groups and they may not gain knowledge about them due to its absence from popular literature.
As Kate Sullivan mentions in her article “Why Diversity in Literature Matters”: In 1965, The Saturday Review published an article titled “The All-White World of Children’s Books” detailing how only 6.7% of children’s books published in the past three years had included black characters. For 2013, the numbers weren’t much better: only 10% of children’s books included people of colour, even though a full 37% of the United States—and most of the rest of the world—wasn’t white.
There haven’t been many similar studies done on representations of LGBTQ people in children’s and Young Adult books, but the numbers are probably very similar. For instance, author Malinda Lo compiles her own statistics on LGBTQ representation among traditional publishers and found that 47 Young Adult books with queer characters or themes appeared in 2014 - not many, considering all the Young Adult books published that year, but a 59% increase from the mere 29 books published by mainstream publishers in 2013.
The lack of diversity in novels makes it that much more difficult to try to shed light on challenges that minority groups face.
If people cannot understand or simply aren’t very aware of a problem, it becomes impossible to combat. Therefore, literature must be diverse so that we learn not only for ourselves but for others as well.
