From: Charles Bayless <charles.bayless_at_ttmd.com>
Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 10:34:08 -0400

Rob,

I think it is important to distinguish your argument. Your question is to what degree are multicultural artists represented among Caldecott books but your discussion focuses on race rather than culture.

I happen to be completing a small project at the moment which provides the data to answer your three questions. The purpose of the study is to determine whether established awards such as Pulitzer, Caldecott, Newbery and Coretta Scott King (CSK) do a better job of predicting the lasting impact of a book as opposed, for example, to simple popularity. I am comparing the performance of titles for each of the awards against one another as well as against the performance of PW Bestsellers for each year. As there are no objective criteria for what makes a book "good", I am using the concept of a book's consequence. A book is considered consequential if it is read often and frequently discussed, by many people, over many years. Ideally we would determine that through sales numbers and library circulation numbers but that data is not available. As a proxy, I am using commercial demand (in or out of print, and number of editions normalized by years in print), reading impact (number of times cited in other books), and
 universality (number of foreign editions and number of languages into which the title is translated). The supposition is that a book that is in continuous demand, that is frequently discussed, and that is appealing to diverse markets is more consequential than a book that is not in demand, not discussed and is limited in appeal.

I will be posting the results of that study (along with the methodology) in a couple of weeks. The quick answer to the study question is that Pulitzer, Caldecott, and Newbery do a good job of predicting consequentiality, that popularity at time of printing is a much weaker predictor of consequence and that winning the CSK is not a good predictor of consequence. Details to follow.

You ask three separate questions for which the data I have collected provide either a complete or partial answer:

Question 1: To what degree are multicultural artists represented among Caldecott books?

Question 2: Why aren't there more occasions when winners of CSK also win Caldecott?

Question 3: Does subject matter affect choice of winners ("Jerry Pinkney finally won the big one (five honors?), but notice it wasn't for one of his books representing African-American culture.")

Question 1: To what degree are multicultural artists represented among Caldecott books?

To answer your question, I looked at the winners of the Caldecott Medal since 1965 (landmark civil rights year). It is critical to keep in mind that this is only 48 Medals, i.e. only 48 data points; sufficient to make observations but too small a data population to draw material conclusions. Top performers in whatever field of endeavor (sport, literature, science, business, art, chess, mathematics, academia, etc.) are virtually never distributed proportionally (in terms of race, religion, culture, class, gender, etc.) to that of the population at large, in part because of different exogenous contexts and cultural orientations and in part because you are dealing with such small samples.

In order to identify culture and race, I referenced publisher bios, author websites, and/or Wikipedia. From those sources, there are 6 racial minority winners among the 48 Medals awarded since 1965 - 3 African Americans (6% of winners), 2 Asian Americans (4% of winners) and 1 Hispanic American (2% of winners). 88% are non-Hispanic white. In order to measure disparate impact, it is best to compare an outcome closely similar to the nature of the issue. In other words, comparing winners to general population distributions is weakly comparative. The stronger comparison is to number of authors (published or aspirant) or some proxy measure for bibliocentricism such as proclivity to read books, time spent reading, money spent on books, book related careers, etc.

For book reading, the ethnic distribution based on BLS time-use data for average time spent reading per year by ethnic group and Kaiser Foundation data for reading form preference (books vs. newspapers and magazines) by ethnic group is 82% white, 4% African American, 6% Asian American, 8% Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American. The distribution of librarians (from the ALA) is 88% white, 5% African American, 3% Asian American, 3% Hispanic, and 0.2% Native American. The distribution in terms of money spent on reading (BLS Consumer Expenditures 2011) is 85% white, 6% African American, 4% Asian, and 5% Hispanic (Native American numbers not broken out in the BLS data). Net is that the Caldecott measures are distributed in roughly the same proportion by race (+/- 3-5%) as that of the population in terms of book readers, book buyers, and book careers (librarians).

So the conclusion as to whether Caldecott is sufficiently representative by race depends on whether you take simple population demographics as your base of comparison (averaged over the time period given that Asian and Hispanic percentages have increased dramatically in the time frame) or instead compare it against the book reading population. If you take simple demographics as the base, the Caldecott has been awarded to all the major races but not proportionate to the US demographics. If you take the book reading population as the base of comparison, then the Caldecott has been awarded in rough proportion to each group.

But your actual question is with regards to culture rather than race ("how are multicultural artists represented among Caldecott books?"). This a more nuanced question as there are fewer accepted norms regarding exactly what constitutes cultural boundaries. As James Baldwin observed, a Texas cowboy and African American in Paris have more in common with one another because of their culture than the cowboy shares with Parisians because of their European ancestry. From a multicultural perspective, I have included all emigrants (i.e. born in a different culture and emigrating to the US and becoming naturalized citizens), all ethnic minorities and all members of groups who have historically been persecuted either in the US or abroad.

. 3 African Americans

. 3 British Americans

. 2 Jewish Polish Americans

. 2 Jewish Americans

. 1 Armenian American

. 1 Austrian American

. 1 Dutch American

. 1 Canadian American

. 1 Chinese American

. 1 Japanese American

. 1 Hispanic American

As a note, this might be an undercount as religion and ethnicity have only been included where it is self-identified by the author. Also, the danger of drawing conclusions from such a small data set is illustrated by the statistical improbability of two Jewish Polish Americans (Uri Shulevitz and William Steig), not a material percentage of the overall population, winning the Caldecott in back-to-back years.

On the above basis, there are seventeen multicultural artists among the 48 Caldecott Medal winners, or 35% of the total. For a prize that is awarded to Americans, that seems to be significantly multicultural. In addition, it raises the question: what exactly is the desirable or "right" level of multicultural? 10%? 50%? 100%? I don't know that there is a number that is a priori and objectively desirable; or at least not a specific number people might reach agreement on. Regardless of what a desirable multicultural goal might be, 35% is clearly a material and credible level. At 35% cultural diversity, I think it becomes challenging to sustain an argument that the Caldecott is not inclusive.

I think the answer to your first question then is that the Caldecott is reasonably multiracial and materially multicultural.

Charles
Received on Fri 17 May 2013 10:34:08 AM CDT