I’ve read 43 books so far in 2016.
23 books by white women
4 by white men
9 by women of color
7 by men of color
That’s about 37% authors of color. And 63% white authors.
Better.
If I look at new books only, that’s 15 books by white women, 2 by white men, and still 9 by women of color and 7 by men of color. So I’m almost 50-50 in the the new-to-me books but when I’m re-reading (for comfort and/or writing books) most of those are by white authors.
My last few posts before my inadvertent blog hiatus were about K.T. Bradford’s article on xojane I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year. My version was to be more aware of what I was reading and to consciously chose to read more writers of color.
I did … not do great in 2015. It would be really easy to kind of slink my way out of saying so and just drop the topic (as with so many intentions when it comes to blogging that kind of disappear). But, I think it’s important to not do that. I consider myself one of those thoughtful, anti-racist white people, and I’m still not doing so great. It takes effort for me to not read just white women with a smattering of white men. I’m not saying it’s hard. This is not rocket science. But it does take change. It does take listening to voices I didn’t realize I wasn’t listening to, just to find the kinds of books that I want to read written by people of color. And sometimes it means reading books that I’m not sure I want to read but trying anyway.
And while I didn’t do great numbers-wise, I noticed that by the end of the year my tastes had changed (not all because of this challenge, but it was one strand in it.) A lot of books felt too much the same to others or too flat. And too improbably white. I also read a lot of fantastic books, the most I’ve ever posted on my my About me page, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many were authors of color.
To the numbers:
According to Goodreads, I read 117 books in 2015.
73 were by white women, and an additional 3 DNF
9 were by white men
25 were by women of color, and an additional 1 DNF
5 were by men of color, and an additional 1 DNF
That’s 85 books by white people or 73%
And 32 books by people of color or 27%
I thought I was doing well. It’s shocking how not well I’m doing at being thoughtful in my reading choices. It’s been a month and a half, more or less, since my last post. Here are my numbers:
48 books read (I’m on drugs after minor surgery. I’m aware my numbers don’t add up, but I can’t make them and I give up)
32 by white authors
14 by authors of color (that’s less than half! better than 20% in Februrary, but I still have a lot of catching up to do)
42 by women
5 by men
If you count the books I have started but not finished but mean to go back to, it’s even worse: 10 books (really?? Who is the midst of 10 books? 3 are poetry collections, if that helps)
All of them are by women.
One will probably be DNF.
4 are by women of color.
6 are by white women.
This is me trying and still reading mostly white women. This is my library not having any poetry collections (on the shelves in front of me the day I went) by any of the black women I looked for (Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Nelson or Maya Angelou). This is all of our book club books this year have been by white people. This is also me deciding to try to read all of Margo Lanagan’s books.
Amazing books by authors of color I’ve read so: Under the Painted Sky by Stacey Lee, Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brisset, Fire in the Streets by Kekla Magoon, and Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (which is going on my best reads of 2015 list)
I tried not to look at the other results when I was searching for K.T. Bradford’s article on xojane I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year, but unsurprisingly, it looks pretty bad. Mostly I wanted to do this for my own information, but now I don’t mind adding my noise against the ignorant, the racists and the sexists.
Last year, I recorded reading 76 books. I know I read more like 120 books, but I get lazy and I read fast and I forget what I read. Which is why I want to write down what I’ve been reading in the first place. Anyway. Since high school or college I’ve consistently read many more women than men, so that’s a given.
2014
Women authors (presumed to be white): 63 out of 76
Women authors of color: 5 out of 76 (yeesh)
Men authors of color: 6 (ditto)
Men (presumed to be white): 7
Look at that. Even given my bias against men, I still managed to read more white men than either women or men of color. That’s bad.
As for content:
6 books had a character with some kind of disability or disability was important to the narrative (the wording here because of a memoir)
22 books had characters of color
4 books had a LGBTQ character
66 books had a woman main character or focused on women
Those numbers are a little soft since I read a number of books about writing (by women) and a bunch of SFF that had non-humans as the main characters.
I was already doing better in 2015 before the challenge:
31 books read
7 written by people of color (6 women, 1 man)
28 written by women
That’s still 24 books by white women.
A few things came into my head tonight that I thought might be interesting to others.
First, I recently read the Book Smugglers’ review of Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein because Code Name Verity was so good and because I have no intention of reading her new book, but at the same time I also wanted to know more about it and readers’ reactions to it. (I don’t read Holocaust fiction. If I read about the Holocaust, my preference is non-fiction because the actual events are so horrific I cannot immerse myself in fiction without thinking about the real people who survived or did not survive what other people did to them. Actually, I generally can’t read fiction about war, US slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, famines or rape for the same reasons. I read non-fiction on these topics judiciously and sparingly and only when I have enough spoons.) This is what Thea of the Book Smugglers had to say at the end of her review (bold mine):
Rose Under Fire is one hell of a book. It’s a powerful, emotionally resonant historical novel about remembering and about surviving, and I truly appreciate and value that. That said, it’s also a story about a war that ended nearly 70 years ago. It’s also a story narrated by a beautiful, young, privileged, white girl who literally flies into a terrible situation. Please understand that I am not disparaging or arguing against the value of the rich canon of literature about the Holocaust, or the set of circumstances facing heroine Rose. I am simply saying this: there are so many wars, atrocities, even genocides that have happened in the last 70 years, and that are still happening now. Those truths and those stories are hardly represented today – much less in YA literature. And perhaps this doesn’t belong here in this review, but it’s something I am acutely conscious of, and I vow to do as much as I can to change this. Because I am inspired by Rose’s story and by this book, because I think it’s important to talk, to remember, and to experience that truth through storytelling, I vow to read and review books from other, more contemporary wars, from characters and authors other than that of the white, the privileged, the American and Western European. (I think I’ll start with Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick, or A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah…)
So, there’s that, which I totally agree with.
I’m also reading Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annalee Newitz. I’m up to the section on famines. The author brings up the Irish Potato Famine, the famine of the Great Leap Forward in China, and the famine in Greece during Nazi occupation in WWII. And I’m conflicted. Why those three famines? One very well known to Western readers, one less well known (to me, China) and one slightly obscure (again to me, Greece), and all also 70 years behind us. What about the North Korean famine and the ongoing food aid the country receives to this day? Or Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia? (Like Thea, I feel I have to make the disclaimer. Just apply hers here, too.) The author does not tell us the reason she picked those three famines to discuss.
She goes on to say that mobility, food aid and sustainable use of agricultural land are essential to preventing famines and that “Famines and their accompanying pandemics are problems that we’ve been trying desperately to solve for hundreds of years.” (p 113). And that last part is where I disagree, where I think she dodged her own thesis. Famines are created. They are created by political will, either as the intended objective (as I understand it: North Korea, Stalin’s Great Famine, the Greek famine mentioned in the book) or as the unintended but acceptable (as collateral damage) effect of a different objective (The Great Leap Forward, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Irish Potato Famine). Some people may have been trying desperately to solve the problem of famine; others have deliberately pursued famine as a means to an end.
These two reading experiences came together for me and reminded me, once again, that it is SO hard for us to confront the atrocities that are happening right now, in our lifetimes, and it is especially easy when the people suffering Don’t Look Like Us, for a value of “us” that is the dominant one.
How many movies and books have been made in the US about the Holocaust? Compare that to how many books and movies, with the same popular appeal and reach, have been made about US slavery? We in the US live with the after-effects of slavery every day. It is inherent in our gun laws, in who can easily vote, in whose bodies are a battleground, who has access to education and health care, in every aspect of our laws and social institutions. The Holocaust was a terrible thing. Many people continue to live with its after-effects. But it is easier to say it’s over, the Nazis lost, besides, they were German anyway and that’s far away and long ago. If we looked, really looked at the legacy of slavery in this country, we would have to admit it’s not over and it’s not long ago.
I don’t have answers. I have questions. I struggle almost every day with the knowledge that my electronics, clothing and food were produced by slave labor–much of it the labor of children. I struggle with sexism and racism and so many more issues.
Like Thea I want there to be more books about all these things. Even if I personally am not going to read them, because at least they’d be part of our world view, part of the discourse, part of what’s in the public eye.
Image via Wikipedia
Malinda Lo on her blog:
But when I began writing a book set in the contemporary USA (Adaptation), I promptly fell into the passive trap. I had never written a novel set in the “real world,” and suddenly I was dealing with all sorts of expectations and traditions about the way girls behave, how they dress, what they do. It was … truly weird. Yes, I found it much weirder to write about contemporary teen girls than magically gifted sages or tomboyish heroines who like to go hunting.
Inspired by this post by Kate Elliott:
I try very hard to write stories in which there are as many female characters as male characters, with as much agency and importance in the plot. Yet I often have consciously to go back through later drafts to make sure that my female leads aren’t being more passive than I actually want them to be, aren’t letting others make decisions for them or devise all the cunning plans (unless there is a specific reason because of experience, competencies, or social roles), are showing leadership, and are present as confident individuals with a strong sense of themselves (as long as that is within character).
Oh, yes! I do that too. (And get really mad at myself in real life when I think I’ve acted too passively, before I shake it off and resolve to do better next time.)
And unrelated except in topic choice, Martha Wells on Laura Anne Gilman’s blog:
One of the elements about Raksuran society that was different, and also fun to write, was the gender role reversal. The queens are the leaders of the Raksuran courts, and also the most physically powerful. Female warriors are also bigger and stronger than male warriors. It was very interesting for me to write, because I had to check all my assumptions about physical power and sexual politics at the door, to stay in the viewpoint of my non-human characters.
And one the things that makes the series so fun to read.
Image via Wikipedia
It’s crazy times at work, so I haven’t had much energy to write or blog, but here’s a roundup of the many things I’ve read in the last two weeks or so:
The Yes Gay YA discussion still raging across the internet:
The original post: Say Yes To Gay YA
The baffling response: On Being Used, the Lack of LGBTQ Characters in YA, and Why It’s Important to Work Together
The roundup: What’s going on with #yesGayYA
Some responses worth reading:
Marie Brennan: Swan Tower – Followup on “Say Yes to Gay YA”
Steve Dos Santos: Ixnay on the Gay: The Gay YA Controversy: A View from the Trenches!
Scott Tracey: YesGayYA
Malinda Lo: I have numbers! Stats on LGBT Young Adult Books Published in the U.S.
In the movies and TV:
‘Thelma & Louise’: The Last Great Film About Women on The Atlantic. It’s true. There’s lots to choose from for male buddy movies, but movies that look at women’s friendships? Not so much.
John Scalzi explains why Ellen Ripley Is Clearly the Best Female Character in Scifi Film, and That’s a Problem on Film Critic
How To Discover Classic Doctor Who In 3 Easy Steps on io9 (The real doctor is always the one you watched first)
Race:
Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did by Hamden Rice on Daily Kos. I’ve mentioned a lot of links in this post, but if you read just one, read this one. Mind rattling if you’re from a privileged group in any way… He makes the connection between racism and living in a terrorist State.
Writing:
Writing Muscles by Shannon Donnelly on BVC blog. Exercises to train yourself to write more. I particularly like the directive Plan Your Training. This is something I don’t do. This is something I should do.
Malinda Lo on Authenticity. What does “authentic” mean, anyway?
Kate Elliott continues the discussion with her post Authenticity and Authority
She also tackles beginnings: Empty Space: Some thoughts on openings in novels
New York Times The Children’s Authors Who Broke the Rules
YALSA 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults Nominations
I haven’t had a chance to watch this video yet, Comforting Words on the Creative Process from Ira Glass
Science:
The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills
Pictures of dinosaur feathers!
My new favorite blog TalkToYoUniverse by Juliette Wade (Where I talk to you about linguistics and anthropology, science fiction and fantasy, point of view, grammar geekiness, and all of the fascinating permutations thereof…) prompted by this post Why Nouns Matter, part 1: Proper Names
And here’s the comment I couldn’t get to post
Yes! And it’s so fun to break down character names within a story to subtly show cultural, ethical, religious, racial differences by using different “families” of names. A not subtle example is George Chester Wallace III and Agamemnon – already you’re clued in to two wildly divergent histories. When you’re writing speculative fiction you can make up the names whole cloth to get a similar effect.
I finally figured out what I want to say in response to Zoe Marriott’s post Wake Up and Smell the Real World #2 in response to me, in response to her… you get the picture.
I’m glad to see that Zoe’s post didn’t result in a slew of defensive comments by white people claiming they’ve never done anything racist in their lives so can’t be called racist, as often happens when someone points out a need to be actively anti-racist in our everyday lives. The corollary, in my mind, is that if you are not actively anti-racist, that means you are probably passively racist, at least.
As quoted in The Stranger (out of Seattle, I think):
“Racist is the new n— [redacted by me(1)],” says Riz Rollins, the writer, DJ, and KEXP personality. “For white people, the only word that begins to approximate the emotional violence a person of color experiences being called a n— [redacted] from a white person is ‘racist.’ It’s a trigger for white people that immediately conjures pain, anger, defensiveness—even for white people who are clearly racist….”
The article is Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Race and is definitely worth a read, as are the comments. Some are supportive, some are trolls protected by internet anonymity and many have the knee jerk defensive reaction mentioned above.
Or as Zoe said:
They know they’re a good person, not a hateful, chuckling Neo-Nazi. Therefore they cannot be a racist/sexist/ableist/homophobic.
I think, besides the pain inherent in white people admitting that their lack of action maintains the status quo of a racialicized and racist society, it’s also a question of definitions. Specifically, how we define racism and what we mean when we talk about it.
For most people who haven’t thought critically about racism and how it affects all of us racism means the KKK burning crosses in yards sometime in the distant past. Most people don’t do that today on a daily basis.
Many activists use the definitions Racism= prejudice+ power (meaning only the people with power can be racist. For example, in the US, that’s white people). Or they use Racism: a system of institutional policies and cultural messages that is advantageous to white people and disadvantageous to people of color. Or they use some variation on the two. The key ingredient is power/structural in both of these definitions.
But breaking it down further, you can split it into Active Racism and Passive Racism.
Active Racism: Actions which have as their stated or explicit goal the maintenance of the system of racism and the oppression of those in the targeted racial groups. People who participate in active racism advocate the continued subjugation of members of the targeted groups and protection of “the rights” of members of an agent group. These goals are often supported by a belief in the inferiority of People of Color and the superiority of white people, culture, and values. (Definition lifted from University of Colorado). So that’s cross-burning and lynching, hate crimes, etc.
Passive racism: Beliefs, attitudes, and actions that contribute to the maintenance of racism, without openly advocating violence or oppression. The conscious and unconscious maintenance of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that supports the system of racism, racial prejudice, and racial dominance.
And now we get to scenarios that most of us know quite well. This is the kind of racism I–and most of us–are involved in a daily basis. Passive racism or benefiting from the privilege of being white is what is going on when my neighbor makes a comment about the dirty ___s that are taking over our building and I don’t say anything because I am trying to get her to stop complaining about us the management company. I am benefiting from being white. I am maintaining a system of racism by not protesting her racism, allowing myself to be complicit in the racism, because I haven’t spoken up.
Passive racism is also living in a neighborhood that used to be primarily Latino and South Asian. Now it’s not, because the people who used to live there can’t afford to anymore. I didn’t set it up like that, but I’m still benefiting from it. When you act in an anti-racist way, you may still benefit from it, but you’re exposing it, and by exposing it, making it possible to combat it.
I’ve gone far afield from the original topics of writing diverse characters (and the mistakes we will inevitably make) but until we agree on what we are talking about we can’t even have that conversation. We also started out talking about diversity in its multiple forms: race, age, class, ability, sexual orientation, and while I focuses on racism, the arguments are applicable to other areas where we discriminate.
And until we have this conversation, with others, with ourselves, then the diverse characters we write will just be white people in blackface or straight people with a rainbow over their heads, or women who are really men, without the cultural, societal, experiential luggage that comes with their identity.
So, that’s what I wanted to say. Plus, I agree with what Zoe said.
(1) It’s my blog so I get to redact any words I want.
So Zoe Marriott had another awesome post on Friday about writing characters that reflect the real world — in other words, not always having an all white, straight, able-bodied cast. I’m really liking her blog and I have got to move her books to the top of my TBR list.
In my comment to her post (yup, I actually commented, I liked it, and her blog, so much), I mentioned that if you belong to a majority group, and are writing characters that are different from you, it’s important to ask your beta readers to pay attention to the issue. Flat out ask them to look for places that you unwittingly fell into the trap of a stereotype (For example, one issue I recently dealt with: My villain was the only biracial person among a multiracial cast of characters. So to I tried to make sure it’s clear that it’s not a racial characteristic by including a biracial character among the good guys.) or have been oblivious (For example, there’s one male author who writes female characters who always cross their arms over their “breasts”. Now this might just be me, but I generally cross my arms over my “chest” because I am not so super-aware of my breasts that I think about them all the time. Throws me out of the story every time — not that I’m reading this author for his great characterization. I still haven’t figured out why exactly I read the entire series; it wasn’t for the infodump either.)
And if you’re lucky enough to have beta readers who belong to one of those groups you might be trying to write about, they are not exhausted by constantly educating the privileged about why what someone just said or did was racist, classist, ableist or sexist, and they think about these things in a critical way, you can ask them to tell you where you just tripped over your big, fat privilege and ignorance. (In other words, walking up to a random woman, a black person or a person in a wheelchair (for example) and asking them to read your work and tell you about being a woman, a black person or a differently abled person, or asking any of those people to act as a representative for the entire group is NOT OK. But I know you know that already.)
And the other thing I said in my comment was that how you react if you mess up in a public, published kind of way is really important. In my view, a lot of RaceFail had to do with people obliviously saying “I did not do something that was offensive to you!” instead of being respectful, acknowledging that we all make mistakes and taking it as a learning experience to do better in the future. (Of course a lot of that was the result of unexamined privilege manifesting itself as defensiveness and attack, and some to the fatigue that people of color feel dealing with this issue also manifesting as attack, and it just spiraled downwards from there.)
But as an example of a response that is appropriate, I was thinking of N.K. Jemisin admitting she had messed up by linking her character’s blindness to her magic in The Broken Kingdom in her post Why is Oree Shoth Blind? (Edited to add: You have to scroll down past the parenthetical asides to get to this part). Or the apology issued by Strange Horizons and one of the authors whose work was posted, in response to comments stating that the story was racist because of its stereotyped depictions of native americans (I can’t find the links).
Ok, and I stole the title of this post from Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward and their book/workshop Writing the Other because I hate coming up with titles and because it’s so good! The title, I mean. I haven’t read the book–yet.
So, what have I read today?
NPR’s list of Top 100 SciFi/Fantasy titles, which is shamefully lacking women and people of color. To balance it out I traced back through the Russ Pledge posts that started this summer, like Taking the Russ pledge and A shocking UK sf ‘favourites’ score: men 500, women 18 on Ask Nicola, MIND MELD: What’s The Importance of ‘The Russ Pledge’ For Science Fiction Today? on SF Signal and Taking the Russ Pledge on Wis[s]e Words. The Angry Black Woman asked for scifi by people of color in the comments to her post Mindblowing Science Fiction by POC and I know I’ve seen lists elsewhere, but a quick google search didn’t help me that much.
So then I moved on to Sniffing Dirty Laundry: A True Story from “the Help’s” Daughter by Bernestine Singley. She recounts her reaction to the white woman who called her to gush about how much she loved her black maid, the author’s mother. Fabulous post about how in this so-called “post-racial” society stories like The Help are used to perpetrate racism and revisionist myths about the South and white people — with continuing impact on black people and all of us today. And, rare thing in the blogoverse, the comments are as insightful as the original post and create dialogue. (via @JustineLavaworm on twitter). And for good measure I read “Growing Up Oblivious,” by Barbara Beckwith on the same blog, about a white woman whose family employed a black maid when she was little, and revisiting those memories as an adult who finally becomes aware of the white privilege of her life. All of which will give me way too much to fight about during my sojourn in white suburbia this weekend with my family.
But first of all a fascinating look at current thought on the past of homo sapiens, Homo Sapiens, Meet Your New Astounding Family on Discover Magazine:
A single, unforgettable image comes to mind when we ponder human origins: a crouching ape slowly standing and morphing into a tall, erect human male poised to conquer every bit of habitable land on this planet….But that ascent-of-man picture is looking as dated as the flat earth. A series of scientific and technological breakthroughs have altered much of our fundamental understanding of human evolution.
Reading, Writing and the 'Rhythmatic of Life 