The faces and characters of Quebec children’s literature have long been white, only white. Today, the trend is changing. In 2023, 28% of the 120 books observed by Rachel DeRoy-Ringuette, from the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, present characters of various origins. “You can clearly feel the movement,” says the professor.
About 16% of the general population was part of “visible minorities” in 2021, according to Statistics Canada. Literary novelties would therefore display more ethnic diversity than what is current in the country – even if it is necessary to remember that the regions and the cities have a very different fabric from each other. On the other hand, certain particular groups remain neglected by the literary imagination, as revealed by the study Description of diversity in recent Quebec children’s books by Mme DeRoy-Ringuette.
In 2016, a first study by the professor on the subject revealed that, out of 200 titles for 0-11 year olds, 18% contained characters from cultural diversity. Of these, only 8% actually had an “active” role.
Today, 46% of the characters in the books that the researcher has analyzed are white and 5% are black, which is the exact percentage of the population. Asians remain under-represented in children’s books, with 1.6% of characters, despite making up 5% of the population. No Latin American character was found on paper, while they account for 2% of the population.
Six books in the sample included Aboriginal characters, or 5% of the sample, while the population accounts for 2.5%. They were all written by native authors. Two of these books were about nature and four about native traditions. The indigenous presence is much stronger today: six books of realistic fiction for 0-12 year olds appeared in 2023, while the 2017 study counted eight over the previous 10 years of publication.
Rachel DeRoy-Ringuette emphasized, during the presentation of her study at the Acfas Congress last week in Montreal, the limits of her analysis. While in 2015 all the books observed had been read in full, in 2023, for the update, the specialist lingered to study the front and back covers of the books and their reviews in three issues of the journal Lurelu. A few books were consulted in full in a secondary analysis.
Skins under the magnifying glass
“How to analyze the origins and pack down the biases and prejudices that one can have as a researcher when one looks at illustrations? It’s really difficult, ”she said during her presentation. “We are on skin colors. What to do with completely different colors that some illustrators have chosen, such as turquoise or bright red? What do they mean? »
To demonstrate the difficulty, Mme DeRoy-Ringuette gave as an example black and white illustrations, cartoon style, with characters whose complexions have different shades – necessarily between the white of the paper and the gray. The first name of the character, of his siblings, can be a clue to the origin… or a decoy.
In her new study, the professor also added gender diversity to her analysis. Some 40% of the characters are female, 36% are male. In terms of “functional diversity”, 11% of the books in the sample feature characters who do. According to the Office of People with Disabilities of Quebec, 16% of 0-17 year olds had various types of disabilities in 2020.
In these “functional diversities”, anxiety and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are overrepresented in books, of which they are often the subject – 1.6% for anxiety in books against 0.4 % of diagnoses among 0-5 year olds in Quebec according to the Observatoire des tout-petits; and 1.6% for ASD in the books against 0.4% of real cases among 0-17 year olds.
Conclusion ? Quebec children’s book publishers seem to have caught up most of the delay they still had in 2021 in terms of the representation of diversity. This means that in 2023, there is an “increased possibility of finding mirror texts, windows and doors for everyone”, summarized the specialist in didactics of reading.
The mirror text, let us remember, is “the one where the person who reads sees his reality represented and recognizes himself”, recalled Mr.me DeRoy-Ringuette. In a window text, the reader “sees a different reality represented and learns to know and understand it”. The text, on the other hand, makes it possible to engage in an awareness that can lead to action.
The winning books
For their part, Elaine Turgeon and Sarah Jane McKinley, from UQAM, drew a brief portrait of diversity in Quebec albums that have won awards. They studied the 20 winners of the TD, Governor General’s, Harry Black and bookseller awards (0-5 years and 6-11 years), from 2018 to 2020.
Inspired by Rachel Skrlac Lo’s 2019 research on winning English-language children’s books, the two specialists wanted to see if the phenomenon of the “king fish” was found in Quebec literature – that is, more white main characters, male and from traditional family patterns.
The result ? “Even if his white skin places him among the world’s minorities, the pale child learns from these books that he is a king fish [a kingfish] “, as Nancy Larrick thought as early as 1965, and these “gentle doses of racism instilled by books” do not help, according to the thinker, to change perspectives.
In Quebec, therefore, 85% of the main characters in these winning books are Caucasian. Some 66% of the secondary characters also and 80% of the extras – “which suggests that we could have an effect of tokenism”, this inclusion of minorities made to be able to boast of diversity, mentioned the researchers during their presentation at Acfas.
The three winning books where the main characters were from diversity are My brother and I (Yves Nadon and Jean Claverie, From Them), bury the moon (Andrée Poulin and Sonali Zohra, The short scale) and Albertine Petit Brindamour hate brussels sprouts (Anne Renaud and Élodie Duhameau, The short scale).
Mmy Turgeon and Mc Kinley intend to tackle soon a six-month study of the production of Quebec children’s literature, where they also wish to observe the diversity of gender, sexual orientation (among parents), functional and bodily characters.