On reading diversely
Sep. 21st, 2025 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dismallyorientedDebuting a discourse tag for this one, readers. Short version is, there's some caucasity going down on Tumblr
In brief, several months ago (around March, turns out), a blogger made a post asking non-Black users if they could name one (1) Black woman author "who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin." Solid thought exercise, good way to look at one's backlog and see if there was any sort of Obvious Gap induced by hegemony.
Unfortunately. As anyone who has Existed of Color for long enough will know, white defensiveness is a hell of a drug. In came the public admissions of "I can't name a single one," or people naming authors who were Black men, or white, or even fictional Black women. A couple answered by misgendering nonbinary Black authors (people who do good work, and work I've personally loved reading! But they're notably Not Women). The true standouts were those simply claiming to never pay attention to or notice who wrote the books they read at all. I'll grant that not everyone has fantastic memory for authors, but. That particular elision got repeated over and over and over again. Watching this whole discussion roll out was like watching Patrick Star swerve repeatedly around the jar lid, except if Patrick were also insisting that he wasn't avoiding it at all, or that this avoidance was a logical reaction.
I don't want to spend my time belaboring internet racism - that's a topic for me to hash out in private whenever I wish to ascend to a new plane of irritation. But recently, the topic cropped up again with someone trying to refute the "but how could you tell without looking it up" response (you can read it here if you like). The post points out that authors who write from a culturally specific place will have differences in perspective that will be noticeable in the text, and the only way to avoid experiencing or noticing these differences in the course of your reading would be to never read outside your cultural perspective at all - for white readers to ensconce themselves in the bubble of whiteness. It's a pretty important observation to make.
One commenter still suggested that certain genres would be exempt from having noticeable differences in authored text - specifically, SFF and nonfiction. The argument for SFF was essentially that as speculative settings, they would not have any reference back to an author's culture. Which. Bit of a bingo space/checkbox moment of someone embodying the exact flavor of caucasity being critiqued on a post showing up to demonstrate it. The commenter is correct that nonfiction would not necessarily have indicators - if you took an excerpt of Ed Yong's scicomm books and shared it without his name attached, there would be nothing in the text itself that specifically designated its author as Chinese. But any genre that exists can have a culturally-specific spin put on it. It isn't some "we can always tell" nonsense, it's a matter of Black women (for example) coming from a particular subset of backgrounds and set of experiences due to their position in society. It's about culture and history producing a set of concerns, interests, and touchstones that color people's perspectives and get drawn on by those authors when they write from lived experience. If you read from authors of color, if you pay attention to the work they've produced, you will notice it. It will feel different from your baseline assumptions and perspective (or, if you're from the same culture, it will feel refreshingly familiar). N.K. Jemisin's name might not be Noticeably Ethnic to a given reader, but someone making their way through The Broken Earth trilogy will see the themes she is wrestling with, the descriptions she gives for her characters, and be able to draw connections. One of my favorite SFF books, Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, imagines a futuristic galactic empire, but the aliens who feature tell a refugee story and deliberately echo the stories of Vietnamese refugees or people fleeing dictatorships. You can look at the alien family in its pages and see the connective tissue to Asian Americans and other irl immigrants. An author can still write compelling cross-cultural protagonists, but there is a specificity here, and a valence to the specificity, that would take active effort to ignore if you read these works. And frankly, never reading works like this will lead you to miss out on entire swathes of the world. Aside from any moral axis, it's just *fun* and *cool* and it makes my brain happy to chew over, and you lose out on all of that by never reading widely outside of whiteness.
Anyway. If anyone wants to better equip themselves to answer that initial Saw Trap challenge, as the OP put it, here's a semi-exhaustive list of authors by genre.
In brief, several months ago (around March, turns out), a blogger made a post asking non-Black users if they could name one (1) Black woman author "who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin." Solid thought exercise, good way to look at one's backlog and see if there was any sort of Obvious Gap induced by hegemony.
Unfortunately. As anyone who has Existed of Color for long enough will know, white defensiveness is a hell of a drug. In came the public admissions of "I can't name a single one," or people naming authors who were Black men, or white, or even fictional Black women. A couple answered by misgendering nonbinary Black authors (people who do good work, and work I've personally loved reading! But they're notably Not Women). The true standouts were those simply claiming to never pay attention to or notice who wrote the books they read at all. I'll grant that not everyone has fantastic memory for authors, but. That particular elision got repeated over and over and over again. Watching this whole discussion roll out was like watching Patrick Star swerve repeatedly around the jar lid, except if Patrick were also insisting that he wasn't avoiding it at all, or that this avoidance was a logical reaction.
I don't want to spend my time belaboring internet racism - that's a topic for me to hash out in private whenever I wish to ascend to a new plane of irritation. But recently, the topic cropped up again with someone trying to refute the "but how could you tell without looking it up" response (you can read it here if you like). The post points out that authors who write from a culturally specific place will have differences in perspective that will be noticeable in the text, and the only way to avoid experiencing or noticing these differences in the course of your reading would be to never read outside your cultural perspective at all - for white readers to ensconce themselves in the bubble of whiteness. It's a pretty important observation to make.
One commenter still suggested that certain genres would be exempt from having noticeable differences in authored text - specifically, SFF and nonfiction. The argument for SFF was essentially that as speculative settings, they would not have any reference back to an author's culture. Which. Bit of a bingo space/checkbox moment of someone embodying the exact flavor of caucasity being critiqued on a post showing up to demonstrate it. The commenter is correct that nonfiction would not necessarily have indicators - if you took an excerpt of Ed Yong's scicomm books and shared it without his name attached, there would be nothing in the text itself that specifically designated its author as Chinese. But any genre that exists can have a culturally-specific spin put on it. It isn't some "we can always tell" nonsense, it's a matter of Black women (for example) coming from a particular subset of backgrounds and set of experiences due to their position in society. It's about culture and history producing a set of concerns, interests, and touchstones that color people's perspectives and get drawn on by those authors when they write from lived experience. If you read from authors of color, if you pay attention to the work they've produced, you will notice it. It will feel different from your baseline assumptions and perspective (or, if you're from the same culture, it will feel refreshingly familiar). N.K. Jemisin's name might not be Noticeably Ethnic to a given reader, but someone making their way through The Broken Earth trilogy will see the themes she is wrestling with, the descriptions she gives for her characters, and be able to draw connections. One of my favorite SFF books, Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, imagines a futuristic galactic empire, but the aliens who feature tell a refugee story and deliberately echo the stories of Vietnamese refugees or people fleeing dictatorships. You can look at the alien family in its pages and see the connective tissue to Asian Americans and other irl immigrants. An author can still write compelling cross-cultural protagonists, but there is a specificity here, and a valence to the specificity, that would take active effort to ignore if you read these works. And frankly, never reading works like this will lead you to miss out on entire swathes of the world. Aside from any moral axis, it's just *fun* and *cool* and it makes my brain happy to chew over, and you lose out on all of that by never reading widely outside of whiteness.
Anyway. If anyone wants to better equip themselves to answer that initial Saw Trap challenge, as the OP put it, here's a semi-exhaustive list of authors by genre.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 12:40 am (UTC)I also learned from this that apparently not everyone does what we do. That being seek out works by BIPOC authors or learn about the author of the work and what their background and lived experiences are. Like… wait… people don’t do that?
- Brick