One in five children’s books features character of colour – but fiction lags behind
Almost 20% of children’s books now feature characters of colour, according to a new survey, but many still put forward “poorly represented characters” and contain “difficult and damaging portrayals”.
The Reflecting Realities survey, conducted by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), is now in its fifth year and monitors the diversity within children’s books in the UK.
Of the 5,383 children’s picture books, fiction and non-fiction from 2021 assessed for the latest report, 1,059 (or 20%) featured a character of colour, up by 5% from the year before and by 16% from the first survey in 2017.
Characters of colour featured as part of the main cast in 9% of books, which the report said was “slow but positive growth”, although “it remains a very low figure”.
The report also assesses the quality of representation. It said that although there had been “a raised consciousness” from publishers around good representation over the last five years, the “industry is not yet at the place in which this conscious practice is consistently translating into meaningful presence of characters from racially minoritised backgrounds”.
Instead, said the report, the presence of characters of colour was at times “problematic and poorly executed and at others it is too insignificant to have any real weight”.
Louise Johns-Shepherd, chief executive of CLPE, said that while there were “positive, well-rounded characters across a range of genres”, there were also “characters and books that are submitted with what we view as difficult or damaging portrayals”.
Representation in picture books and non-fiction was ahead of that in fiction, which was described as being “markedly slower” to grow than the other two types of books.
Of the picture books published in 2021, 61% featured characters from racially minoritised backgrounds, up from 6% in the first year of the survey, described by the report as a “tremendous improvement”.
But there was a huge variety in the quality of picture book portrayals of characters of colour, who “sit on a spectrum of vague at worst to great at best”.
Non-fiction titles with characters of colour was up 7% from the year before to 41% in 2021, with a number of titles making efforts “to unpick challenging themes and issues by framing or exploring them in interesting ways to broaden understanding and deepen thinking”.
Fiction is the category that has “seen the slowest and smallest incremental year-on-year change”, said the report, with 11% of books published in 2021 including characters from racially minoritised backgrounds.
Horror and science fiction books were especially underrepresented, and overall the team reviewing books for the report “encountered many instances in which the only references to ethnicity in fiction titles were the incorporation of surface or limited signifiers to the extent that a reader might easily miss the reference”.
But the report welcomed improved representation of characters from east and south Asian backgrounds. It said that in earlier years it had noted the “total absence in some instances and significant under-representation in others” of characters from these backgrounds.
Johns-Shepherd said overall CLPE was “delighted” with the improvement but determined that it will not “be a ‘trend’ that disappears or that dips”.
She added: “We will continue to do this work and to support ongoing dialogue within the publishing industry because we believe in the power of children’s literature to change lives and we believe meaningfully inclusive representative casts of characters in children’s literature make books better.”