Diverse Voices
For most of the last century, American readers were presented with a version of literature in which an estimated 95 percent of published novels were written by white authors, even as the country itself grew increasingly diverse. When schools finally filled shelves with books that reflect a wider range of lives, students read longer, engaged more deeply, and their scores rose, especially among children who had previously struggled. At the same time, the titles now pulled from classrooms and libraries most often center characters of color and LGBTQ+ lives, so the very books that help underrepresented readers recognize themselves on the page are the first to be targeted and removed.
Roughly 3% of books published in the United States are translations, and translated literary fiction and poetry account for less than 1% of the list. In parts of Europe, including Italy, translations routinely account for half of the publishing output, which means English-language readers stand at the center of a global language while reading almost entirely within their own borders. The pattern starts early. A recent audit of children’s books in the United Kingdom found that fewer than six percent featured any marginalized main character and that Black and South Asian children appeared at rates far below their share of the classroom, even in schools where more than one in ten pupils are South Asian. The children most likely to encounter racism outside the school gates still open books and find that the world on the page behaves as if they do not exist.
In the United States, the record of who appears in children’s literature shows how deep that absence runs and how much work it takes to disturb it. When researchers first conducted a count in the mid-1980s, only 18 of roughly 2,500 children’s books were written or illustrated by African American creators. Decades later, American children were still more likely than any child of color to meet an animal or an invented creature as the hero of a story. Sustained advocacy, including the work of We Need Diverse Books and teachers who rebuilt their classroom libraries, finally altered that landscape. Between 2014 and 2023, the share of children’s books by authors of color rose from single digits to nearly half. In classrooms that added diverse and bilingual titles, students read for hours longer each week and saw reading scores rise with every additional bilingual book. The stories once considered too narrow or too risky are the same stories that keep children turning pages and provide them with evidence, in print, that they belong.
