For years, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (a resource that Wisconsin is proud to claim) has been keeping track of the numbers of books published by or about people of color and American Indian/First Nations people. In the past few years, when increasing attention has been paid to the lack of diversity in publishing, the CCBC information is often cited. The data for 2016 has been released. There’s been a significant increase in books by and about Asian Pacifics/Asian Pacific Americans and Latinos, but the numbers are still small.
You can read their
blog post about it and you can find the charts that show numbers from across the years, along with an explanation of what they document,
here.
What can we do to improve these numbers as librarians? Purchase and promote the best of these books in our libraries! If you are looking for some suggestions for how to incorporate books the reflect the diversity around us into storytime, check out the blog
Everyday Diversity from across the river in Minnesota.
