A hard look at my bookshelf
Expanding what we consume is good for everyone.
I spent this week reading Brit Bennett’s new book in the side yard of my apartment. The sentences are luscious but what makes the book a banger is the motor of it. Bennet has the ability to create a plot that drives you forward so quickly that it is physically upsetting to need to put the book down. I bought The Vanishing Half because I loved The Mothers when it came out in 2016. I wasn’t the only one. This week, Bennett debuted at number 1 on the New York Times Bestsellers list. She is the first black woman to hold the number one spot in fiction in more than a year.
Publishing, like the rest of the country, is broken. It is broken specifically in that it is owned by white people, run by white people, and publishes more books by white people. These are all facts. What it means for us as consumers is that we have to be intentional about making sure we read books that portray a world outside our own. I wrote last week about how white people should read diverse books because we love reading and not just as a kind of balm for white guilt, but this week I want to talk about diversifying your reading list intentionally. To change the way we read, and to expand our reading list, we need to do a little bit of self-evaluation first.
Art as a concept has always been meant to broaden us, to enrich our lives with beauty and force us to question the world around us. Be it paintings or sculptures or music or film, art is an expansive space. It can make even the smallest room feel bigger. But that is only true if we are consuming art that challenges us, that is made by people from different cultures and backgrounds and experiences than we have. “It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different,” Richard Wright wrote in Black Boy.
What I’m trying to say is that because whiteness is so pervasive in culture it is possible to never move outside your comfort zone in the content you consume. You can watch TV shows about people just like you, see movies about people just like you, read books about people just like you. A small thing that white people can do right now is decolonize the culture we consume. Does everything you watch and read and listen to have white creators? Why?
I’m using second person here, but it’s more important that I use first. That I see this in my own consumption too.
I’ve read all the articles about Decolonizing your Bookshelf, but I realized this week that while I have certainly done some work on that front, I haven’t done nearly enough. I realized this because I did the work. I did the stats.
So far this year I have read 28 books. Here’s what that looks like:
Written by men: 2
Written by women: 26
These numbers I feel good about. I’ve made it a priority to read more women’s writing and more women’s writing from the 60s and 70s. These next numbers, I feel way less good about.
Let’s look at the 26 books I’ve read by women this year:
written by Black women: 3
written by non-Black women of color: 3
written by white women: 20
20 books by white women!!! That means that 77% of the books I have read by women this year have been written by white women. These numbers stunned me. I thought I was reading more books by women of color. If you had asked me, I would have guessed this number was closer to 60% white women. I knew I was reading more books by white women, but I didn’t realize how many more. This makes sense, and I should have known better because I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THIS BEFORE. It is part of the structure of oppression that people in positions of privilege overestimate the number of people in a minority group in any situation.
But even though I knew these things, and I am aware of the disparity in publishing, I never reckoned with my own list. I’m doing that now, and I will be better. I want to be better because I want my list to reflect more accurately the world around me and because championing women’s writing isn’t enough if I am disproportionately championing white women. I also want to be better because I am depriving myself of good work with my own bias. I could be using this platform to promote women’s writing that is suppressed not just because it is old and written by women, but by the structures of white-supremacy. Why have I been so obsessed with women’s writing in the 60s and 70s without finding and reading Black women’s work from the same era? This is a failure on my part and one that I plan to correct immediately.
My goal is that by the end of the year these numbers will be more equitable. I want my list to be 50% non-white women by the end of the year. What that means practically is that I have to read more to fight against the disparity I already have and that I have to do the research and find books for this newsletter that are by Black women. To be clear, this will be fun. This is work that I want to do and that I should have already been doing more of.
I am sorry that I did not do this work sooner to recognize my own bias, and adjust what this newsletter promotes. Next week, I will be writing about a Black novelist from the 80s that I love deeply and should have written about sooner!
If you have recommendations, please do reach out, and I do recommend counting your list this weekend when you have time! Let me know how it goes!
REMINDER: If you are a black writer who reads this newsletter and would like to write anything about women’s literature (does not have to be about black writers; does not have to be about *this moment*), email me. I pay better rates than most magazines at this point and would love to promote your work