Perhaps the most surprising (to me, at least) source to participate was Entertainment Weekly through the article "Kid Lit's Primary Color: White--Report" by Nina Terrero. Terrero begins her article by reiterating the CCBC report numbers on inequalities in publishing diversity for people of color similar to Myers and Myers. After discussing this lack of books she reports two possible culprits: sales and publishers. Citing quotes from book execs. and publishers, she points to the belief that books with protagonists of color won't sell. She quotes one unnamed exec. saying, "If we thought there was a demand for more nonwhite characters, we would try to fill it." She then moves on to the structure of publishing houses as they are predominantly white males and the role they take in perpetuating the divide by failing to seek out talented authors of color as well as their general apathy towards the issue. Terrero isn't the first person to describe publishers as the problem (for more on this, see my page on publishers). Christopher Myers addresses this often gestured towards "villain" of diversity in children's lit in his article saying, "The Market, I am told, just doesn't demand this kind of book, doesn't want book covers to look this or that way, and so the representative from (insert major bookselling company here) has asked that we have only text on the book cover because white kids won't buy a book with a black kid on the cover--or so The Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way." 

But despite the many voices who have asked that publishing step up and do its part to help, the problem hasn't gotten any better. Perhaps, as Jensen has addressed, it's because we've needed "bigger megaphones" to get the message across to a larger public, to make the publishing companies realize that the general public does care (or, at the very least, to show them that the general public will talk with their money by buying diverse books or refusing to buy the same books over and over again). In this instance, Terrero's piece does augment the message. This megaphone might even be getting some of the voices heard as it makes small changes, such as ReedPOP's attempt to rectify its all white/male panel for their Bookcon's panel of the best children's lit authors (read Claire Kirch's piece in Publishers Weekly about this here). But just in case that's not enough, C. Myers addresses a wider audience to take responsibility at the end of his article: "The rest of the work lies in the imagination of everyone else [other than the authors who write the books] along the way, the publishers, librarians, teachers, parents, and all of us, to put that book in [the young reader's] hands." Instead of solely blaming the publishers--who, no doubt, are at fault--the public needs to change their minds and show them this matters. We need to be proactive and support the growth of these books in the market.