The Power of Cross Group Books — Internationally!

Illustration by Scott M. Fischer from Lottie Paris and the Best Place by Angela Johnson

Last month I received an unexpected and delightful invitation: to meet via Zoom with the “Black Moms of Austria,” the “Black Dads of Germany,” and a number of their allies, to share the Diverse BookFinder’s research on Cross Group books.

The contact had been made through Naa Anorkor (top right in the photo), an Austrian of Ghanaian descent who has been working to make schools more welcoming for African and biracial Austrian children, who regularly report being called racial slurs. (A 2019 survey, “Being Black in the EU”, reported that “… across the EU, people of African descent face widespread and entrenched prejudice and exclusion. Racial discrimination and harassment are commonplace… Overall, 39 % of respondents of African descent felt racially discriminated against in the five years before the survey. …The highest perceived rates of discrimination in the 12-month period are found in Luxembourg (50 %), Finland (45 %), Austria (42 %) and Denmark (41 %).”)

Naa Anorkor, who has been following the work of the Diverse BookFinder for years, wanted to engage in a conversation with her community about using Cross Group books as a possible tool to reduce prejudice in young Austrians.

What are Cross Group books and how do they work?

Cross Group Books portray relationships between main or secondary characters across racial or cultural difference, including but not limited to those depicting peer group and cross-generational friendships. The interactions depicted may be positive, negative, or resolving. 

Diverse BookFinder website, “Our Categories”

One of the unique features of the Diverse BookFinder is our identification and application of nine unique book categories that capture the dominant messages conveyed by current children’s picture books featuring Black and Indigenous People and People of Color (BIPOC). This categorization system — and the ideas that lead to the formation of DBF — began with a study of Cross Group books conducted by Dr. Krista Aronson, as detailed in her research paper, “Telling tales in school: Extended contact interventions in the classroom”.

Many research studies have documented the pervasiveness of prejudice and the existence of “in-group favoritism” among children. Studies in England (at the University of Sussex), Italy, and the US (Krista's research), examined whether picture books depicting positive interactions between children of different groups could be a successful intervention to reduce prejudicial attitudes.

As I shared in our Zoom session, all three book studies were applying Allport’s (1954) Contact Hypothesis, which proposed that

…sustained equal status, goal interdependent, cooperative contact between members of different groups with the support of institutional authorities would bring about favorable attitude and behavior change in both groups. … Direct contact is thought to diminish prejudice by enhancing knowledge about the outgroup, increasing empathy and perspective taking and reducing anxiety about intergroup contact.

Aronson et al, “Telling tales in school”

Intergroup anxiety is the term used to describe the nervousness people feel when encountering someone they perceive to be very different from them: Will we be able to communicate? Do we have anything in common? Will I be safe with them? If unresolved, this anxiety can become the foundation for prejudice to develop. But if people have contact and their anxiety lessens, attitudes can shift and the potential for a positive relationship increases.

As Krista explained in her study, according to the extended (or indirect) contact hypothesis,

it may be enough to experience contact indirectly by knowing (of) ingroup members who have positive relationships with outgroup members.

In other words, reading books in which characters from different groups are having fun together can shift children’s attitudes.

In a 2014 article, “How Cross-racial Scenes in Picture books Build Acceptance”, published in School Library Journal, Krista and I described how contact theory is effective:

Why do books depicting positive cross-race interaction work? Because when we see someone like us doing something with someone different from us, we become more open to doing it ourselves. Psychologists call this vicarious contact. It can ease children’s anxiety about interacting across difference because they have seen that it’s really fun. It also expands their thinking about the group they belong to. After reading, children think, ‘People like me play with people who are different from me.’

And, as we observed in our article seven years ago, there (still) aren’t nearly enough picture books depicting cross-racial relationships!

As noted in our category definition, our collection’s Cross Group titles cover all types of relationships across racial differences, including indirect, negative, and resolving, and cross-generational. To meet the criteria of titles that can be effective in reducing inter-group anxiety, relationships shown should be:

• between characters of equal status - in age (two children, not an adult and a child); in power and resource (for this reason, we do not include titles about kindness to just-arrived immigrants, victims of bullying, or other titles in which one character is the helper and another the recipient)
• central — between protagonists, not background characters
• positive - having fun together, not engaged in conflict
• direct - characters engaging with each other in person, not writing letters or other indirect contact

For the Austrian and German group, I gathered a list of picture book titles from our collection that met these criteria. In addition, to address the social situation encountered in their schools, I included only those books with at least one Black protagonist in relationship with white friends.

Cross Group Books in Black & White: central, direct, positive relationships between Black and white child protagonists

Although the Cross Group category is dominated by relationships between Black and white characters, there are a handful of titles featuring characters of other races:

Cross Group Books: central, direct, positive relationships featuring other children of color

UPDATE: Naa Anorkor and the Black Moms of Austria were so excited with what they learned about the potential impact of Cross Group books that they have decided to join forces with the Black Dads of Germany to publish their own original titles, basing the content on what research has shown to be effective, with situations common to European communities. We’re excited to hear that our findings informed their thinking.

Thanks to Margy Burns Knight for her part in making this connection possible.