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Re: Multicultural Statistics for 2013
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From: Roxanne Feldman <roxannefeldman_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 10:47:25 -0500
Thank you for resending the links -- sorry that I didn't go back to read all the first posts. Will the stats be compiled for the entire year? And I really liked the genre breakdown you presented in the second blog post. I have a question here:
You said, that
"I counted 191 picture books with human characters, which is a little over half (53.8 %) of the total number of this year's picture books in our collection. Of these 191 titles, 28 (or 14.6%) feature a child of color as the protagonist. In the overall total number of picture books, adding together human and nonhuman characters, children of color make up just 7.8% of the total number of picture book protagonists."
My question is: why would we use the 7.8% as our final number of comparison and not 14.6%? Given the numbers here, we can determine that 85.4% protagonists are white in the books with humans and 42.7% of all picture books feature white protagonists.
Currently, there are about 72% U.S. population being white -- and 85.4% is definitely a much higher number than reflecting perfectly the population percentage, especially when we consider that 28% of the population is non-white and only 14% (half) of the picture books feature non-white characters!
More questions -- I really should get back to work... so, after this, I'll be away for a while:
Also, if the books are not about animals or animal characters, are we presuming that they are about humans? Can they be about non-humans? Such as Eruption? -- Do we consider this book as containing non-white
"characters" since it covers many different groups of people around the globe? Or do we only care about the scientists' ethnicities? Do we count this book as having non-white "characters"?
Do we consider a book on basketball or basketball teams as about "sports" or also about "people"? If they profile a bunch of players or mention a bunch of players, do we count them as featuring non-white "characters"?
I know I'm asking very detailed questions but my curious mind likes to probe.
Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 10:47:25 -0500
Thank you for resending the links -- sorry that I didn't go back to read all the first posts. Will the stats be compiled for the entire year? And I really liked the genre breakdown you presented in the second blog post. I have a question here:
You said, that
"I counted 191 picture books with human characters, which is a little over half (53.8 %) of the total number of this year's picture books in our collection. Of these 191 titles, 28 (or 14.6%) feature a child of color as the protagonist. In the overall total number of picture books, adding together human and nonhuman characters, children of color make up just 7.8% of the total number of picture book protagonists."
My question is: why would we use the 7.8% as our final number of comparison and not 14.6%? Given the numbers here, we can determine that 85.4% protagonists are white in the books with humans and 42.7% of all picture books feature white protagonists.
Currently, there are about 72% U.S. population being white -- and 85.4% is definitely a much higher number than reflecting perfectly the population percentage, especially when we consider that 28% of the population is non-white and only 14% (half) of the picture books feature non-white characters!
More questions -- I really should get back to work... so, after this, I'll be away for a while:
Also, if the books are not about animals or animal characters, are we presuming that they are about humans? Can they be about non-humans? Such as Eruption? -- Do we consider this book as containing non-white
"characters" since it covers many different groups of people around the globe? Or do we only care about the scientists' ethnicities? Do we count this book as having non-white "characters"?
Do we consider a book on basketball or basketball teams as about "sports" or also about "people"? If they profile a bunch of players or mention a bunch of players, do we count them as featuring non-white "characters"?
I know I'm asking very detailed questions but my curious mind likes to probe.
---
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Received on Tue 04 Feb 2014 09:53:44 AM CST
