Beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?

Friends:

It is time for us all to decide who we are.  No, not really.  (I seriously hope most of us know this already.  If not, probably a good time to hop to it.)  It is actually time for us (Yael & Cinders) to introduce you to a concept that is very close to our hearts. It is time to introduce you to the “Diversity Barricade.”

You might be side-eyeing the computer right now, wondering what dead, fictional revolutionaries and barricades have to do with the children’s book industry. We suppose this confusion is warranted, but let us explain.  

First, take a look at this wonderfully illustrated chart from Tina Kügler, illustrating the current level of diversity in children’s fiction:

Depressing, no?

We might not be Enjolras*, but recognizing the lack of diversity in children’s publishing gets our blood boiling with revolutionary fervour.  

We started talking about the Diversity Barricade about a year ago, when we were horrified to discover that a publishing house we liked and respected did not, as a rule, publish novels with LGBTQ characters.  “They don’t sell,” was the explanation we were given.  At the grand old age of 26, Lucinda went home and cried. Because here were people she had met and respected, saying that a story about people like her couldn’t be good enough to sell books.

This was only the tip of the iceberg.

After a huge amount of reading on the interwebs, we realized that the issue was much bigger than just this one publishing house or this one book. There is a widespread misconception in the publishing industry (and in media, generally, but we’re narrowing our focus here), that books about people who are not white, straight and non-disabled don’t sell.  They’re perceived as a risk, because they’re different, so it takes a lot to get publishers and booksellers to invest in making these books successful.  There’s this fear that people who aren’t African American will look at a book with a black person on the cover and then decide it isn’t for them.  Or find out that a character is lesbian, and then decide that it isn’t for them, because they aren’t lesbian.   Which is patently ridiculous.  People read books about people who aren’t like them all the time.  I mean, has any of us ever been a wizard? No? Well Harry Potter was flying off the shelves.  Most of us don’t have Aspergers (a disability, albeit often an invisible one) - check out the success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. And Cassie Clare’s genius creation, the bisexual half-Asian warlock, Magnus Bane, drives home that this point is just utter rubbish.  He was such a popular character in her best-selling Mortal Instruments series that he earned his own spin-off series!

The amazing Sarah Rees Brennan, who The Chronicles of Word have a bit of a writers crush on, talks about this a bit in her post on Gay in YA and the Circle of Suck:

“The Circle of Suck goes a bit like this. Society is set up so life is often homophobic, sexist and racist. Not to say life is a never-ending round of pain unless you're a white straight guy. Life is often just fine: but things can--not all the time, but very, very often--be that little bit more difficult, in lots of different situations. There are more roadblocks as one tries to go on one's merry way. (And they are REALLY different roadblocks, and combined roadblocks if you're, say, a gay lady of colour.) It's generally a bit harder to get published with a book that has gay characters or characters of colour. [...] It's a bit harder if you have both, or the characters of colour are gay. It's a bit harder to get published with gay characters who are ladies than if they were gentlemen. It's a bit harder to get published if you are gay or of colour. So, overcome roadblocks, get published by one of the big publishers, fantastic! Except now it's harder to sell the book.”

Sarah goes on to cite the fact that book fairs, libraries and major bookstores are less likely to carry the book, which means sales figures will be lower.  That marketing and art departments will get less money to invest in making the book a smash.  Furthermore prospective buyers - kids and parents - look at the book and think “oh my gosh, I just want entertainment, not issues' or 'But kids shouldn't read books with...' and they don't buy or read the book.”

So that makes it really challenging to diversify the landscape of children’s literature.  Which is, frankly, a tragedy. For many of us, as kids and teens, stories are how we learn about the world - about who we want to be, who we have the potential to be, and how to overcome life’s challenges.  It’s also how we develop empathy, how we learn about what the world is like for people not like us. So it’s unacceptable that so much of children’s fiction leaves out that vast majority of identities and experiences, both for people who want to see themselves in the stories they read and for people who do see themselves there, but could benefit from learning about others.  A lack of diversity hurts everyone.

(An excerpt from YA author Seanan McGuire’s fantastic twitter rant on diversity and representation, last week)

It’s tempting, with a post like this, to try and keep it objective. To fear that no one will take you seriously if you apply your own experiences to something, as though making it personal undermines its validity. But the lack of diversity in the children’s book industry is personal, and that’s part of what makes it political too. When you tell stories about the world to kids, and erase their own experiences from these stories, you are making a decision, conscious or unconscious, that affects people on a personal and political scale. Our understanding of politics and equality, like everything else, comes from our understanding of how we see the world. And surely that’s why people tell stories in the first place?

As a queer reader and writer, I, (Lucinda), came out through fiction. I understood my life entirely through the stories I was exposed to, and so spent most of my teenage years convincing myself completely that I was in love with (admittedly, fairly feminine) boys and feeling personally betrayed whenever own of my closest friends got a (*gasp*) boyfriend... It was only when I actually discovered fanfiction online that I discovered stories that existed outside a heteronormative framework and could apply them to my own experiences**. Stories that weren’t just “issue books”, which I avoided as a matter of principle. Stories about characters I already knew were awesome, who just happened to be queer as well. And slowly, slowly, the world changed shape around me, and I had a new way of telling my story. A more diverse narrative taught me how to understand myself, in a way that the established canon of children’s fiction I devoured growing up never could.

I (Yael) didn’t realise how much of an effect stories had on me and my world until much later, partially because I didn’t go through the same period of self-discovery as Lucinda, though I empathise.  However, when I looked back on the stories that I read as a child about people like me (Jews), I realised that they were all Holocaust stories or other stories about periods of oppression, i.e. The Crusades or The Spanish Inquisition.  Basically, tales about how we’re victims, an idea that I very much internalized.  All the adventure books with people in them that I actually wanted to be like were about people who were not like me.  It wasn’t until I read Cassie Clare’s Mortal Instruments, and met Simon, and I got so excited to see somebody like me in a fantasy novel, that I realised what I’d missed out on as a kid.  It’s so surprising to me how rare that is, because there’s definitely a yearning in this community for us to have more heroic narratives.  Did you know that most of the creators of the first comic book superheroes were Jewish? And yet they felt like they had to make their heroes just like everybody else, closeted, white-washed.  We don’t live in that world anymore. So why are we still perpetuating a such a whitebread norm?

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Comparatively the children’s book industry isn’t bad, and it’s still improving. Observant readers will have noticed that the illustration towards the top reflects the figures from 2012, and things do seem to be getting a little better each year. The incredible Malinda Lo, who somehow manages to write brilliant books while running the diversity in YA tumblr (with fellow writer of colour Cindy Pon)***, is also queen of the statistical analysis, and her graphs and charts reflect the (slow) changing trends in LGBTQ YA since 2001:

We’re definitely moving in the right direction.  And as more and more people speak out in favour of diversity in children’s books...  as more and more authors write these books… as more and more agents, publishers and booksellers champion these books... and as more and more readers buy these books, the world will change.  We all need to be brave enough to invest in making these books successful, and we believe that if we do, they will be.

Which brings us back to the Diversity Barricade. You see, it is time for us all to decide who we are, after all. And time to decide what to do about it.

What we are proposing is no less than a revolution in the children’s publishing industry. And when we talk about the Diversity Barricade, we’re creating a metaphor for this revolution.  Picture in your mind, if you will, a barricade of built of books instead of furniture.  And picture on it all those who champion diverse books, write diverse books and read them.  In our minds we, have invited all of our heroes: the aforementioned Malinda Lo and Sarah Rees Brennan.  We have invited David Levithan, author of Every Day and Two Boys Kissing.  We have invited Holly Black, Patrick Ness, Justine Larbalestier, Cassie Clare, Ellen Oh, Seanan McGuire and Cindy Pon. We want to invite every author and blogger linked to below. 

And today we are inviting you.

***

Needless to say -  we have good intentions, but we are still two white, cis, able-bodied Western girls trying to make sense of things. There are a million and one people who know far more than we do, and who like to direct you to some of them below:

• Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon are both excellent, and run the Diversity in YA tumblr
• DiversifYA is a fantastic site with interviews from myriad, diverse writers (and happens to be also run by writers we’re huge fans of)
• YA Flash has a great collection of links here
• Ellen Oh wrote a great piece on the harmful effects of of pretty white girls on book covers
• There’s also a fantastic two part guest post from Mary Ann Mohanraj about dealing with institutionalised racism in publishing, hosted on John Scalzi’s blog.
• Last but not least, Deepa D’s essay ‘I Didn’t Dream of Dragons’ is a particularly effective reminder of why this all matters.

***


*  And that might even be a good thing. We love Enjolras, but one look at the barricade of 1832 tells us that it was almost all upper/middle class white boys leading the revolution. If our barricade is to work, it needs to be manned by everyone. And while we're happy to pick up metaphorical bayonets and join in the battle, we are in no way the leaders.   ** This is an interesting socio-political conversation in itself, but also another topic for another post. *** I strong suspect they have superpowers...