rachelmanija | 50 Books POC

I am participating in

50books_poc, a challenge to read and review 50 books by people of color in a year. Read a book, write a post, post it to the community and, if you like, to your LJ too.

Any books count, including comics. However, I am choosing not to include manga, manhwa, or manhua in my totals. This is not because they are not written by POC, or because I think comics don't count as real books. It's because in my mind, the point of the challenge is to read and review books that you might not otherwise read and review. I already read and review a lot of manga, and already eagerly look for manhwa and manhua to read and review. Since I'm already doing that, it's not a challenge.

For me, this challenge is as much about reviewing as it is reading. I would guess that I do read 50 books by people of color per year. But my posting skews toward works that I think will get discussed, which skews it toward sf and fantasy, which are notoriously white genres.

This is the vicious circle: Most writers in the genre are white. Authors of color look at this and decide, with perfect justification, to write in a genre that has more people like them already in it. The genre continues to be white. Fans of color are unwelcome and excluded. They go elsewhere.

The even-more-predominantly-white fans and publishers unconsciously or consciously select within their cultural comfort zones, choosing books about white people and portraying characters of color as white on the book covers. More fans of color go away. Publishers decide, unconsciously or consciously, that clearly, what sells is whitey whitey whiteness. They print more of that.

All fans remaining are now reading many of the same books by white authors. If they want lots of discussion, they have to discuss those books. The discussions skews toward those books, giving them more publicity and the books by authors of color less. The latter books sell poorly, proving to the publishers what they already believe. And so the cycle continues.

This happens in other genres as well. It's just especially obvious and disgraceful in sf.

I am doing this challenge because, to crib from my reply to a commenter on

meganbmoore's LJ:

"In America, publishers publish more white writers and bookshops carry more white writers, and so it is harder to find and read books by authors of color without making a special effort. So making that distinction in order to read more authors of color both broadens readers' horizons, and provides royalties and publicity to authors of color.

There's also the phenomenon in which white writers writing about POC frequently get more sales, publicity, etc than authors of color writing about POC. Good explanation of that here: http://jonquil.livejournal.com/799057.html

Basically, especially if you're white, if you don't make the distinction, you will end up primarily or entirely reading books by white authors. In that case, the distinction you don't make gets made for you by the way that society works. And I'm sure you don't agree that reading only books by white authors is the ideal state of the world."

Plus, I think it will be fun!

I invite you all to join this challenge with me. Please comment to let me know if you decide to do so.

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Date: 2009-01-27 08:31 pm (UTC)

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I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance

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