Reflecting Realities 2024

A response to the 2024 CLPE Reflecting Realities Survey from Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor.

In 2015, when Karen first came to the UK to work as a Leverhulme fellow with Seven Stories, it was possible to be aware of nearly all the books published by racially minoritised authors with mainstream publishers. In 2016, Darren’s essay ‘You Can’t Say That! Stories Have To Be About White People’ in The Good Immigrant took as its title a verbatim quote from a Year 2 child in Darren’s class in Hackney.  There were that few books by or about racially minoritised people—or at least, that was the sense that scholars (and many librarians and teachers) got by browsing in book shops, because there weren’t any clear statistics about where racially minoritised characters could be found in children’s books.

All of that has changed with the Reflecting Realities reports.  The first year of the report (2017) showed that the dearth of books featuring racially minoritised characters was not simply a perception, but a frustrating reality.  The first report showed that only 1% of children’s fiction published in the UK featured a main character from a racially minoritised group. That percentage rose slowly over the next 5 years, reaching 14% in 2022. Last year, however, the percentage dropped to just 7%.

The Reflecting Realities reports have galvanized activity around representation in children’s books. Reflecting Realities is part of a larger change in children’s books that, between 2010 and 2020, included initiatives such as the Diversity Review of the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals; the BookTrust reports into representation of writers of colour in the industry; and the creation of prizes such as the Jhalak, Diverse Book Awards, Jericho and Little Rebels awards, focused on those communities typically left out of children’s books.  Independent publishers such as Knights Of were created in the wake of the first report to increase the numbers of books written by and featuring racially minoritised communities, and mainstream publishers also responded with series (such as Scholastic Voices) to increase representation in British children’s books.

Penguin partnered with Runnymede Trust for the Lit in Colour project, working with teachers and, crucially, exams boards to make it easier for children to encounter books by writers of colour on the curriculum. The work has been ably led by Dr Zaahida Nabagareka cofounder of Afrikult, an organisation that worked with students and teachers to promote literature by African writers.  The announcement of Lit in Colour came just months after the Barnes and Noble and Penguin announcement that ‘classic books’ were being repackaged with covers showing main characters as people of colour. Lit in Colour has had a significant impact on secondary education in particular. Publishing is, however, business and news earlier this month that Penguin was pulling a children’s book it had published by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver following criticism from The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation (Natsiec) suggests that antiracist projects within publishing houses do not necessarily impact the wider organisation as much as we would hope.

Our column in Books for Keeps, ‘Beyond the Secret Garden’, began about six months before the first Reflecting Realities report appeared, and the reports have informed our work by indicating communities, genres, and types of literature that were still not getting enough attention from the industry. After seven Reflecting Realities reports, it is much more difficult to read all of the literature produced by racially minoritised authors in any given year.  But there is still work to be done, as the statistics and commentary in the latest report indicate. Our hope is that the downturn that this year’s report shows is a blip and not an indication that publishing view inclusivity as a trend that has had its moment.

Dr Darren Chetty is a teacher, lecturer and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip-hop culture. He is a contributor to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla, and the author, with Jeffrey Boakye, of What Is Masculinity? Why Does It Matter? And Other Big Questions. He tweets at @rapclassroom.

Karen Sands-O’Connor is a Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield. Her book British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour (Bloomsbury 2022) won the 2024 Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award.

Read the 2024 CLPE Reflecting Realities Survey in full: CLPE Reflecting Realities 2024