Poster Child - Racism edition
I had joined Bookstagram at the very height of the conversation surrounding inclusion and diversity in books; the books that we read, talk about, the authors we support, publishers we support, how to diversify both and why it is important to diversify both. It was the very height of this conversation.
There were two things that I had noticed. One was that, people of colour were being over shadowed in this conversation. Second, people of colour from the global west were predominantly the only ones we were talking to and about, both in terms of BIPOC authors who get buried and BIPOC bookstagrammers who also get buried.
The global west issue is a much broader, a much heavier topic that I am not prepared to write about purely in the form of opinions made based on observations. I do, however, want to write about poster child books.
Before that I want to digress a little and talk about a conversation I had with a bookstagrammer.
This conversation was about a book series that everyone in the book community was calling out for lack of diversity. In that instance there were two issues. The author was white, expecting diversity from white authors is a travesty. It shows that you would rather read white authors in a more palatable format neatly aligning to your politics and what is currently politically right than reading BIPOC authors which is inherently diverse in a lot of aspects.
As a person of colour who had read those books and held them in high regard (still do actually) I found the rep to be very good for a white author. But there was a problem with the fan art. Character art was being white washed and no one was talking about that.
The conversation I had with a fellow bookstagrammer was with someone who had not read the book series, was going on the words of someone else who had not read the book series, was white and was dismissive of my experience, reflections and perspectives over the book as someone who is a person of colour, has an invisible disability and someone who read the books back and forth multiple times over the course of that year alone.
Very early on I had noticed that there are a set of diverse authors whom we prescribe to. It is like a tiny market that we put our hand into, add a book from that market, and just like that we become less of a racist, because we did the bare minimum.
During this period we were questioning organisation like Book of the month, what were they doing to make sure their picks of the month were diverse. We were questioning bookstagrammers and booktubers about the books they read, about our choices when it comes to who we follow. We were questioning white authors, expecting more diversity from them as well (my opinion on that hasn’t changed, stop expecting diversity from white authors, just go support a BIPOC author, there are many of them, more than advertised on Bookstagram). It was a time of shallow reckoning.
From that came poster child books, BIPOC poster child authors. You can do this exercise yourself, look at your shelf, actually look at it, and ask yourself how diverse it is. The diverse section, yes that section, how many different diverse authors are there in that section of yours? Is it just one author, is it two, is it three? How many books by the same author? What is the country that they live in? The language they speak, the religion they practice?
This is on a personal level though.
Now think about what you see on instagram or any social media or your choice, think about the BIPOC authors and their books that come up on your feed. In the past four months I have seen about 10 books that fall under the category of “diverse books”, the same books repeating themselves over and over again. Where are the rest, I am certain that those were not the only BIPOC authors that were published. I see books that are predominantly written by American BIPOC authors on top of that, very specifically American BIPOC authors, maybe one or two European ones as well, if I look very hard.
You might say, well this is something that happens even to white authors, why are you talking about it as if BIPOC authors are the only victims?
In the current stream of information influx, there is a lot that gets buried. It’s hard to keep track of everything. There is an inherent erasure that happens in the attempt we make to not erase, to amplify. A lot of books get buried, a lot of white authors get buried too, but a lot more BIPOC authors get buried. I wouldn’t bother with this topic if we did not have a global history of racism (no racism is not an American issue only, nor a European issue only, it is however the most advertised in the context of America and European countries), and internalised prejudice.
As someone who lives in the global east, (in India for the majority of my life, Singapore for college), I was astonished at the amount of books I had by authors -white and BIPOC- from the global west. This was stunning to me because racism and internalised prejudice is a global and local issue. We must read diversely even on a small scale, support diverse authors (indie authors and publishers as well) that are close to us. I was so much more attuned to racism politics of who gets published, marketed and over hyped when it came to the global west. It over shadowed everything that was right in front of me. That is another issue that social media does to us. It is geared for and to the global west. It churns out poster child diverse books and authors in the perspective of and for the west. Which is problematic and something that is to be unpacked on another post.
It is really necessary for us to ask ourselves who is our poster child author or book that make us feel like we are reading diversely when actually we are not reading all that diversely. It is also time to reexamine what diverse really means in the current context to make sure that it has appropriately evolved and will continue to do so.
We look at racism from a very isolated perspective, from inside a bubble, it is still a bubble to the people from the outside as well. A bubble we can talk about, gossip, watch explode from the outside, all the while believing that we definitely cannot have our own version of the very same explosion, a more devastating version of that explosion. We never consider the global scope of it. Since we don’t consider the global scope of it on more macro issues, it is harder to wrap our mind around issues like books and the global racial politics around that. However, it is time we start thinking about it. Looking at our own bookshelves is as good a place to start.
