Posted on November 11, 2020 at 4:26 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek

When Britain’s Centre for Literacy in Primary Education analyzed minority representation in children’s books in the past, publishers had a theory about the lack thereof.

In kid lit, they suggested, a number of characters are non-human animals, which could be making the diversity statistics appear lower than they truly were.

The Guardian shares this news along with the latest report from the CLPE: that “children are almost eight times as likely to encounter an animal main character than a human main character who isn’t white.”

The proportion of ethnic minority main characters has at least risen, to 5 percent in 2019 from 4 percent in 2018 and 1 percent in 2017 (books studied were all published in the United Kingdom in those particular years).

The proportion of any minority character also rose, to 10 percent in 2019, up from 7 percent in 2018 and 4 percent in 2017.

You can read more about this study and one that looked at diversity in the publishing industry in the Guardian.

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Categories: Today in Books