We Need Diverse Books

Every year, the Cooperative Children's Book Center tracks how many books are by, or about, people of color. They just released the numbers for 2014.

It's not pretty.

For some context--they estimate 5000 books for kids and teens were pubbed. They looked at 3500 of them. I took the number of books about an ethnic group and divided it by 3500 to get the percentage. I then did the number of books by an ethnic group and did the same thing. (CCBC breaks it out into two numbers--how many are about that ethnic group, and how many do not contain significant cultural content of that group. I added those two numbers together to get a total.)

I then graphed those percentages against the percentage of the US population of the same ethnic group. (Source: 2013 Census Bureau info) (I added the numbers for Asian and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander to get a number to compare to CCBC's Asian Pacific/Asian Pacific American)

Ideally, all of these percentages should be equal.

They're not:

We can certainly do better than this.



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