Children's Publishing and Black Britain, 1965–2015 by Karen Sands-O'Connor (review)

In 2018, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) published Reflecting Realities, the UK's first survey of diversity in British children's literature. The report's conclusions made for dispiriting reading: although 32.1% of school-aged children in the UK in 2017 were of Black, Asian, or Minority Ethnic (BAME) heritage, only 1% of the books published for them featured a BAME main character (CLPE 2018). Only 4% featured a BAME character at all. The second report, published in 2019, showed a slight improvement: 7% of the books published in 2018 included a BAME character, and more than half of these (4% of all books surveyed) featured a BAME main character (CLPE 2019). These numbers still, however, fell far short of reflecting the reality of racial diversity in the UK's streets and classrooms.

CLPE's report was modeled on the annual survey produced by the US's Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC); those well versed with the CCBC's report will also find the overall picture painted by CLPE's findings somewhat familiar. The details, however, differ considerably. Yet until now, neither scholars of book history nor those concerned with questions of race and diversity in children's literature have scrutinized the unique story of publishing by and for BAME communities in the UK. Karen Sands-O'Connor's Children's Publishing and Black Britain, 1965–2015 addresses this gap. Drawing heavily on archival sources, she shows that recent efforts by the CLPE and other organizations in UK children's literature to investigate and improve the representation of minority ethnic groups are part of a much longer tradition of activism in UK children's publishing. In so doing, she greatly enriches both fields.

The title of Sands-O'Connor's book in itself indicates some of the complexities involved in teasing out this history. In this review so far, I have used the term BAME, the term currently accepted—if not necessarily embraced—in the UK as encompassing a range of "ethnic minority" groups. As Sands-O'Connor notes, however, "during the period between 1965 and 1980 … 'Black British' was most likely to encompass any people racialized as not white, regardless of origin, because the concerns and problems of racism experienced by people from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Pakistan, and other former colonial nations of the British Empire tended to be similar" (3). Sands-O'Connor's use of the term "Black Britain" in her title partially reflects its relationship to what Kehinde Andrews terms "political blackness" and its use as a uniting term against oppression: she traces a close connection between publishing and activist movements. It also reflects a focus on the group more narrowly defined as "Black British," people of Afro-Caribbean descent: Sands-O'Connor identifies many of the early organized publishing efforts as emerging from within this community. The reference to "Black Britain" rather than "Black British" in the title, however, allows Sands-O'Connor to consider efforts that did not emerge from within these communities but were instead led by white editors and publishers. The intersecting efforts of different groups, and the aspects of activism that were—and were not—incorporated into mainstream publishing, are important to an understanding of how the contemporary scene evolved.

In her introduction, Sands-O'Connor briefly outlines the history of Black representation in British children's literature prior to the twentieth century (a subject she treated at length in her previous book, Soon Come Home to This Island [2007]). This context serves as an important reminder of the inextricable links between the history of the UK and the history of Empire, and the way in which these legacies of colonization and enslavement have shaped both the representation and the lived experience of Black Britons. That this history forms an important basis for understanding the developments that took place within the period covered by the rest of the monograph is underscored by Sands-O'Connor's account of...