Diversity Audit Update: Dystopian
The last time I had time to work on our library’s Diversity Audit I was in quarantine in October. After my two weeks in exile, I haven’t had the time, but since returning from the holiday break I made it a priority so that we can finish it by the end of the year. So far Adventure was the only genre section I had been able to finish on my own. Entrusting the help of my library aides definitely helped speed the process along this week as we were able to finish our Dystopian section and are currently a third of the way through Paranormal. Of the 272 Dystopian titles we currently have my results were, unfortunately, very similar to Adventure in that we had a strong white presence in these books and not enough minorities and representation of BIPOC both in the author categories and the main characters. This is definitely something I am going to work on when purchasing new books. It’s also something the publishing industry needs to be aware of and do better at publishing diverse, inclusive and empathetic literature for our middle grade and young adult students. A difference that I did notice, and was a bit surprised by—even though I shouldn’t have been—is the higher number of females as main characters and authors in Dystopian. This differed with Adventure greatly, as many of those authors and characters were male. If I think of the popular Dystopian novels, I shouldn’t have been thrown when seeing the data. Series such as The Hunger Games, Legend, The Testing, Divergent, The Selection, Red Queen, The Darkest Minds, etc. all have female authors and main characters. Yay for GIRL POWER! I hope to have Paranormal completed by the end of next week then it’s on to Humor. Honestly I’m hoping for more representation as we move through the genres because I know that all genre sections should have better diversity. So far it’s been a bit disheartening seeing how much work needs to be done to make these genre sections more representative of not just our school community, but the world as a whole. Feel free to take a look at the data presented below for the Dystopian section in my middle school library and thanks for following along with my Diversity Audit journey!
Dystopian Author Diversity Criteria
Dystopian Main Character Gender Identity
Dystopian Main Character Race/Ethnicity
Dystopian Main Character Characteristics
