Helping New Readers - Diversity Challenges?
OK in the last week two little things regard relatively new readers irked me and I need to have a chat about it.
I’ve regularly talked about why I believe it is important that we read books by people other than ourselves and here I mean the white CIS male population. Reading books by people from other backgrounds is important so that you can stretch your view of perspective. By publishing having long been a bastion of white male privilege many own voices have been left out of the acclaim that people like Asimov, Lovecraft, Campbell etc got for themselves. And sometimes we have found those big names were acting foully and their work with levels of sexism and racism that strangely got overlooked by white male reviewers (and on occasion still do). Redressing that imbalance is I think something everyone from publishers, bloggers and yes readers need to take ownership of.
The only I read great stories argument many present is great but if you look back at your recent reading history and as I recall from a little survey of a fantasy site men were genuinely only reading 20 percent-ish books by women then that is clear evidence of implicit bias. If we look at writers of colour, I think we would find still shocking statistics and only in 2019 did it get announced that in SF only 5 BAME authors got into published out of 4500 books published the previous year. Those figures are concerning. Let’s remember 50% of the population is female and in the UK 18% is non-white. And you can also look at levels of LGBT and non-binary authors too.
This leads to readers and bloggers taking responsibility and one way some people start is a diversity reading challenge – setting yourself a deliberate target of books by women or people of colour. A totally legitimate way for a blogger or reader to realise what they’re missing and the tricky process of changing your reading habits – to think a bit more about what are you deciding to read and be wary of your implicit biases shining through.
What starts this post was on twitter I retweeted a queer author complaining that so many still readers were small c conservative and too focused on the big names like Sanderson. A blogger I know got in touch trying to say this was unfair and this got us into a very well-mannered discussion about biases and the fantasy industry isn’t largely male and that trying books in non-medieval settings would be useful. The blogger went away looked at their reading habits and has announced they are going to do a diversity read and after twitter recommendations they announced what they would be doing for a few months.
And then two people got into my twitter feed complaining that N K Jemisin doesn’t really count. One of whom got abusive her work is still a good starting point for a new reader trying to broaden their horizons. The argument they were making which I’ve some sympathy with is a diversity read is a risk of you doing something getting praise for it and then when the dust settles you go back and return to your default biases. Very valid point but we don’t know what this blogger will do. I think it’s very important though that people realise a diversity read as I’ve said is a FIRST step. The goal isn’t acclaim is for the reader to start widening those reading choices and I hope realises what you’re missing out on. The hard work is doing this week in and week out. All you’re doing is saying you’re going to treat people fairly it’s a low bar to hit you are not getting an award afterwards but trust me you’ll realise you’ve been missing out on a lot of good stories
But regards writers of acclaim like Jemisin not being a place to start? Well for me Jemisin write the best trilogy of the decade and is an incredible writer. I personally cannot see how once you’ve read her books you can in all seriousness not realise that books by women and people of colour cannot match your favourite male author book (or even surpass). Arguments such as well she’s won the Hugos I don’t think really are relevant for a new reader because I think if the reader is new they won’t fully know what the Hugos are and also if they’ve not yet read such authors then perhaps they haven’t been paying attention and lets not forget a Worldcon is only circa 7k people in the world. I love the Hugos but its not yet a household name that most people know. I suspect the general population know RR Martin; Sanderson and co a lot better so work still needs to be done.
I think I’d much prefer someone to say ooh good choices, but I also think you’re like x, y and z. In other words - tempt them.
If the reader goes back to cis white default, then they are the fool but let’s not pick on someone starting to realise they need to take some responsibility. Let’s give them some more encouragement but also hold people to account if they soon fall back into bad habits
Would really appreciate your thoughts on this?
