Race in the Newbery books

[osprey_archer]

Now that I’ve done the Gender and the Newbery’s posts, it’s time for a Race and the Newbery’s post. This one is focused entirely on the contents of the book; in the interest of completeness I should probably do a post about the race of the authors, too. But I have a strong suspicion that the numbers for that are dismal.

Race of protagonist
White: 59
Black: 6
Asian: 5
Hispanic/Latin American: 1 (And Now Miguel)
Native American: 2 or 3 (Waterless Mountain, Julie of the Wolves, and perhaps Secret of the Andes, because Cusi is descended from, like, an Incan conspiracy? I’m not saying it’s a good representation.)
Pacific Islander: 2 (Call It Courage, Island of the Blue Dolphins)
Multiple protagonists of different races: 2 (The Westing Game, The View from Saturday)
Mixed race protagonist: 1 (Walk Two Moons)
N/A (the book is nonfiction or poetry, or the hero is an animal or a doll): 13

Now, time to compare the numbers with census data! The first number is percentage of US population by race, 2010 census data; the second is percentage of Newbery books with a protagonist of that race (not counting the books that have no protagonist or have an animal protagonist).

White: 63.4%
Medal Winners: 75%

Black: 13%
Medal Winners: 7%

Asian: 5%
Medal Winners: 6%

Hispanic: 16%
Medal Winners: 1% (!)

Native American: 1.2%
Medal Winners: 4%

Pacific Islander: 0.4%
Medal Winners: 3%

Mixed Race: 3%
Medal Winners: 1%

I didn’t expect the award numbers to track the census data as closely as for American Girl, given that the Newbery Award has been around since 1922. Not only US attitudes toward race but population percentages by race have changed quite a lot since then*. Given that the award only picks one book a year it can only change its percentages rather slowly, even assuming that they dropped all other criteria to make racial balance their top priority, which I tend to think would be a bad idea.

(American Girl, in contrast, could solve most of their representation problems simply by introducing an Asian American Girl.)

But nonetheless - the number of books with Hispanic protagonists still seems awfully low.


*US census data by race, 1920
White: 89.7%
Black: 9.9%
Native American: 0.2%
Asian or Pacific Islander: 0.2%

Comments

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely. And I think that's why there are Newbery winners with Pacific Islander, Native American, and Asian protagonists so much earlier than African-American. There's a concern with diversity from the beginning of the award, but in the early years it's more for the sake of picturesque exoticness than for social justice or representativeness.