More Children's books in the U.K. are now featuring racially minoritized characters. This was revealed in the survey conducted by the Center for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE).
This is a good thing since more and more children can now see other characters aside from White people; giving them a chance to learn more about other ethnicities.
The survey analyzed children's books with racially minoritized characters from 2017 until 2022.
UK: Children's Books With Racially Minoritized Characters are Increasing!
According to The Guardian's latest report, more and more children's books with racially minoritized characters are being published in the United Kingdom.
When CPLE first conducted its survey in 2017, there was only a 4% increase.
However, in its 6th survey, this number reached 30% (2022). This shows that there's a rising trend in children's books featuring other ethnicities that are not White; 7% in 2018, 10% in 2019, 15% in 2020, and 20% in 2021.
CLPE Research & Development Executive Director Farrah Serroukh shared her excitement about the rising children's books with racially minoritized characters.
"We welcome the increase in overall output and were pleased to encounter more variation in the breadth of realities reflected in the literature we reviewed," she said.
However, the children's books they analyzed, such as "JoJo & Gran Gran Go," "Hairdresser" by Laura Henry-Allain, "Through the Forest" by Yijing Li, and "My Mum is a Lioness," have some parts that don't properly depict racially minoritized characters.
Because of this, CPLE said that this makes it "challenging to decipher presence and in other instances, the role allocation felt tokenistic or formulaic."
Farrah is currently encouraging publishers to improve the quality and volume of their children's books in order to properly reflect the realities that other ethnicities face.
"We encourage publishers and creatives to build on the traction of recent years and continue to strive towards improving the volume and quality of titles that meaningfully reflect realities available to young readers," she explained.
Read Also : AI-Generated Books Could Put Amateur Mushroom Pickers in Danger; Here's What Experts Say
Most Featured Racially Minoritized People
CLPE said that the children's books they analyzed mostly featured Black characters (6.8%). The second most featured racially minoritized characters are those with mixed heritage backgrounds.
They made up 4.6% of the children's titles. Meanwhile, over 1% of these books featured characters from South Asian backgrounds. These non-White ethnicities are mostly included in fiction titles.
From 2017 to 2022, racially minoritized characters are increasing in these fiction children's books. However, this is not the case for non-fiction and picture books since both of these genres saw drops in 2022.
