In 2016, we published the infographic “Diversity in Children’s Books 2015.” It went viral and was discussed on Twitter, in Facebook groups, published in books and journals, and presented at countless conferences.

Today we present to you an updated infographic, “Diversity in Children’s Books 2018.”

Link to JPG & PDF files: Diversity in Children’s Books 2018 – Dropbox Folder

Full citation: Huyck, David and Sarah Park Dahlen. (2019 June 19). Diversity in Children’s Books 2018. sarahpark.com blog. Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/books-by-about-poc-fnn/. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/.

Released for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0 license). You are free to use this infographic in any of your work, including presentations and published work, so long as you provide the full citation noted above.

As with the 2015 infographic, we relied on the multicultural publishing statistics compiled by the librarians at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) that were “about” particular populations: American Indian/First Nation, Latinx, African/African American, and Asian Pacific Islander/Asian Pacific American.

One important distinction between the 2015 and 2018 infographics is that we made a deliberate decision to crack a section of the children’s mirrors (Rudine Sims Bishop, “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors,” 1990) to indicate what Debbie Reese calls “funhouse mirrors” and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas calls “distorted funhouse mirrors of the self.” Children’s literature continues to misrepresent underrepresented communities, and we wanted this infographic to show not just the low quantity of existing literature, but also the inaccuracy and uneven quality of some of those books.

Similar to the 2015 infographic, David created this with a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license so that anyone working toward equity in children’s literature publishing may freely use it. We hope that this infographic, along with Lee & Low’s Diversity Gap blog posts, Emily Midkiff’s CCBC data graphs, Debbie Reese’s blog American Indians in Children’s Literature, Edith Campbell and Zetta Elliott’s blogs, Maya Christina Gonzalez’ “Children’s Books as a Radical Act” blog posts, Malinda Lo’s LGTBQ blog posts, We Need Diverse Books, Reading While White, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and other diversity initiatives, can help push forward important conversations and lead to real change in children’s literature publishing. We encourage you to study these and other sources to better understand the context in which these numbers exist.

Thank you.

Sarah Park Dahlen, Associate Professor, MLIS Program at St. Catherine University

http://sarahpark.com/

@readingspark

David Huyck, Illustrator

davidhuyck.com/

@huyckd

With special thanks to Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K.T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner.

Note: When I published this blog post in June, I failed to cite Rudine Sims Bishop’s seminal article “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors,” which is clearly the basis for the mirror metaphor in both the 2018 and the 2015 infographics. We’ve spoken about Sims Bishop in interviews, etc., and cited her on the infographic postcard, but realized we didn’t cite her here. In keeping with #CiteWomen and #CiteBlackWomen, I have added her name in the blog post above. I also added a link to Emily Midkiff’s very useful graphs in the last paragraph. With apologies for these omissions, Sarah (updated on 2019 Oct 23)