It seems every 3-5 years, someone in the press discovers the statistics the CCBC keeps on multicultural literature, and publishes an article about it. This first happened back in 1989 when
USA Today did a story on how difficult it was for African-American parents to find books for their children with characters who looked like them. It was accompanied by a nifty little graph that showed the first four years of our statistics, numbers we started documenting in 1985.
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| USA Today, 1989 |
This year on March 15 there were two terrific op ed pieces in the
New York Times,
one by Walter Dean Myers and
one by his son, Christopher Myers, about the sad state of African-American children's literature, and the CCBC stats were again quoted. This has led to a whole new cycle of reporting. Even
Entertainment Weekly did a two-page spread called
Kid's Lit Primary Color: White. Their accompanying graphic even looks a bit like the original 1989 illustration from
USA Today. Not surprising since the story is essentially the same one.
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| Entertainment Weekly, 2014 |
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These stories always generate a lot of passionate discussion for a month or so. Then things die down and nothing changes. New books flow into the CCBC every day, and we continue to count and document the books by and about people of color. The numbers have stagnated for the past couple of decades -- we update the
statistics on our web site every year. Many people know to look for them there. Others will stumble across them for the very first time and, in a few years, there will be another story. Maybe next time, it will be a different one.
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