IBARW: 50Books_POC, One Year and Fifty-Odd Books Later
Happy International Blog Against Racism Week (ibarw)! This year's theme is intersectionality, and I plan to have one or two posts on that topic before the week is out. But first, I wanted to do a wrap-up about a challenge I participated in as a result of last year's IBARW.
So, a little background: I stumbled across IBARW last year -- probably through matociquala, although I really cannot remember now. At the end of the week, I found myself agitated -- I had been reminded (again) that there was a gap between my goodwill and my actions with respect to race, and while my energy to do something about it was renewed, I was unsure what to do. coffeeandink posted a list of things one can do to unlearn racism, and I decided to do the one that looked like it was custom-made for me: the 50books_poc challenge. By IBARW 2008, we were to read fifty books by authors of color. Any books. Cookbooks, knitting books, picture books, history, heavy tomes of literature, whatever. The point was to just step outside the mostly-white point of view that is so ubiquitous, and spend a good chunk of time listening to voices we (probably) don't spend much time listening to.
In the post where I committed to doing the challenge, I listed some of my early observations, as well as some of the fears/concerns I had going in. One year and fifty-odd books by people of color later, it seems like a good time to revisit that early post.
1. Pre-emptively mourning all the books I wouldn't get to read because of my reading-time being taken up by the challenge; no longer having the space to let whim guide my reading choices; etc.
I didn't foresee getting drawn deeply into this project, and yet I did: one book on school integration led to reviews that this other book was better, which led to questions about how it might have looked to this other person who had also written a memoir but from a completely different point of view, which led to questions about... And always-always, it turned out there was a next, obvious book on the path I had already been reading along. I was totally following my whim, and my whim was always guiding me deeper into the project. I had initially thought that I would feel constrained from reading things I wanted to read; that was not at all the case.
2. My reading to date had been far heavier in books about POC, rather than books by POC.
...and there's a big difference between the two. I wrote back in May about the difference between Insider Voices, Outsider Voices, and how that affects portrayals of agency, but that's only one small piece of the POV differences.
At the beginning of the challenge, I'd occasionally have to stop and think hard about why an author would choose to put things this way, and eventually would suss out that if the world really did look like that to you, that this might be a reasonable way to express it.
Now, however, I've gotten to the point that when I pick up a white-authored book about POC and the point of view feels twisty-wrong. Phrases leap off the page at me as weirdly euphemistic, cagy, or just outright wtf. "Why on earth would anyone think to put it like--?" and I flip to the back inside jacket flap and look at the photo. "Oh. That's why." The default, "objective" POV no longer seems objective to me -- it seems white, with all the subjectivity implied by that. And that's had a ginormous effect on how I understand discussions about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
3. Anticipating emotional exhaustion, not getting to spend time cozying up in my own culture...
Emotional exhaustion was a very real issue for the first half of the project or so. I would dread taking a POC-authored book down from the shelf because I really didn't want to learn what was in there. Mind you, it wasn't that I didn't want to learn about objectively unpleasant things. I was reacting badly to continually being blindsided by my own ignorance.
In the last half of the challenge that was far less of an issue: sure, my ignorance was (and still is) vast, but I'm not feeling blindsided by it so often anymore. So that's something.
As far as not having time to cozy up in my own culture goes... Well. My own culture stopped feeling cozy. I've been seeing it from the outside this past year, and it's not pretty. That's been a difficult thing to take. As a side-effect, I've gotten somewhat flinchy about picking up books by white authors: I don't know what stupid white-privileged crap I'm going to get slapped upside the head with this time.
You know how you can be reluctant to read books that were faves when you were a child, because you're not sure your pleasant childhood memories would survive what your adult self would see in that book? It's like that. So I'm kinda having to go back through all the white authors that I used to like, and see which ones I still like. :-/
4. Fear that I won't be able to find much of anything to read within the genres that I prefer.
Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahaha!
Actually, I didn't spend much time in my fave genres: there was TOO MUCH TO EXPLORE everywhere. Also, way, way, too much history that I didn't know: I suspect one of the reasons I didn't enjoy much fiction by POC in years past is because I didn't understand the referents.
There was another fear in here which I had at the time I started the challenge, but which I didn't mention in the post because I was too ashamed of it: that I'd be stuck reading inferior books for a year. That the reason that "nobody" read books by POC is because said books were mostly crap.
I needn't have worried. The quality of what I've read this past year has been higher than most years in recent memory. I can think of two explanations for this. The first is the old "you have to be twice as good to get half the credit" problem that many of the authors face. The other is that Sturgeon's Law (and its corollary that 10% of anything is not crap) applies, and that unlike with mainstream, mostly-white SFF (which I've been reading voraciously since junior high), where the set of all books by all authors of color is concerned, I haven't already read a big chunk of the good stuff. There are all these amazing books out there by people of color, and I mostly haven't looked at them (nor even realized that most of them existed) because of how cultural, institutional and structural racisms work. I've been missing a lot of really good books.
5, 6. Trouble finding books by authors of color.
It turns out that this is like any other research project: uncovering the first few productive threads is the hardest. Once you've begun to find interesting things, finding more interesting things is easy. That, and I was just keeping my eyes open, noticing and remembering when something is by an author of color, and then seriously considering reading it instead of just dismissing the book as something that probably wasn't relevant to me.
(That's one big shift of my POV in this past year: I no longer understand why, say, "African American History" is its own shelf and own categorization way over there, supposedly optional for most of the American public. Because it's pretty clearly American history, vitally relevant to both African-Americans and non-African-Americans. And so on.)
(And actually? That brings me to my major beef about white privilege. No one can possibly independently evaluate all the things that it may be worth knowing, so you have to use existing clues to figure out where the interesting stuff may be. All my life, I've been getting strong cues that Hyphenated-American History is a quasi-optional subject, that there's nothing that interesting there if you're not Hyphenated-American, blah blah blah. And guess what? Those cues were wrong. If it feels like I harp on this stuff all the time, that's why: I got bad information, and I'm trying to help "googlebomb" more accuracy into the what-is-interesting cues. For that matter, googlebombing LJ's social consciousness is basically the whole point of having IBARW -- it certainly is NOT meant to be the one week of the year that anyone blogs against racism. End of digression.)
7, 8. Multnomah library has a nice collection of books by authors of color. Most of its books by black authors are housed at North Portland; none of those are ever checked out.
Other than finally finding the Urban Fiction genre -- which is housed all over the MCL system and is extensively checked out -- this observation pretty much held.
Admittedly, a lot of what I was reading by Black authors is from MCL's African-American history/culture collection, which is housed at North. There did seem to be a "dustbin of history" issue about whether or not that collection gets checked out. See the previous item.
In general, though, books by POC are clearly not in high demand at my local library. This is the first year in ages when I pretty much always had space available on my hold-list (which has a system-set maximum of fifteen titles). Usually there wasn't anyone else waiting in line for any of the books I wanted to read, so a hold for a particular title would only be on my list for the amount of time that it took MCL to actually get the book off the shelf and send it to my branch. Institutitonal and structural racism is alive and well.
9. Initial troubles sorting out who is or isn't an author of color.
Well, as I noticed in the first twenty-four hours, if no one says anything about the author's race, the author is white. I don't think I found a single exception.
10. Surprise and ignorance.
I've written other posts about this, but if there was ever a project that made me feel like an idiot, this one did. At the beginning, I was writing long pseudo-objective reviews of books. Mid-way through the challenge I started realizing that my pseudo-objectivity was a put-on, and I started trying to write more personal, "this is they way I responded" reviews. More recently, I've been losing trust even in my ability to do that without embarrassing myself or annoying others. I'm trying to coax myself to go back out on the limb of saying what I think about the books that I'm reading, but I'm still hyper-aware of my own ignorance, and that I'm probably trotting biases that I have no awareness of.
11. Struggling to figure out who is or isn't a POC.
Turns out, "people of color" is a really messy category, and who is or isn't a POC is dependent on who's asking and what the context is. I began this challenge with a pretty strong sense that race actually exists, and came out of it with a strong sense that race is a very mooshy categorization scheme, and one which exists only in terms of local cultural/sociological constructs.
One of the 50books_poc participants finally did ask for a formal clarification from a group mod, and the answer came back that we were allowed to interpret it quite broadly. For my own reading, my guideline was that the author have a reasonable claim to an identity that was frequently Othered on racialized grounds in my own society.
(FWIW, I'd like to use a self-identity rule for this, but there are cross-cultural issues that complicate that.)
And that's that list.
I could try to give you a list of what I actually did get out of the challenge. Unfortunately, it was more transformative than here-let-me-list-things-for-you. And you can probably pick up at least some of it from the above, anyhow.
So instead, here's a more interesting list: the utterly amazing must-reads from the past year:
*eyeballing that list* Most of those books are pretty intense. So I offer a second list, books that I really-really liked, but which were much higher on the "pleasantness" scale:
There's one more question that's relevant to this post: it's been a year and fifty books, so what now?
I confess, when I started this, I had a vague idea that I would be somehow done after fifty books -- that I would have learned what it was that I didn't know, gotten a good solid grasp on it, and would be ready to move on.
Ha. Haha. Hahahahaha!
I've barely made a scratch.
I'm signing up for another fifty books. I intend to initially focus on some areas that I missed this last year, particularly:
And that's... um, that. Well, except to say this: the 50books_poc challenge was freaking amazing, and unequivocally worth the time and energy I put into it.
ETA: Oo! oyceter's experience doing the challenge!
So, a little background: I stumbled across IBARW last year -- probably through matociquala, although I really cannot remember now. At the end of the week, I found myself agitated -- I had been reminded (again) that there was a gap between my goodwill and my actions with respect to race, and while my energy to do something about it was renewed, I was unsure what to do. coffeeandink posted a list of things one can do to unlearn racism, and I decided to do the one that looked like it was custom-made for me: the 50books_poc challenge. By IBARW 2008, we were to read fifty books by authors of color. Any books. Cookbooks, knitting books, picture books, history, heavy tomes of literature, whatever. The point was to just step outside the mostly-white point of view that is so ubiquitous, and spend a good chunk of time listening to voices we (probably) don't spend much time listening to.
In the post where I committed to doing the challenge, I listed some of my early observations, as well as some of the fears/concerns I had going in. One year and fifty-odd books by people of color later, it seems like a good time to revisit that early post.
1. Pre-emptively mourning all the books I wouldn't get to read because of my reading-time being taken up by the challenge; no longer having the space to let whim guide my reading choices; etc.
I didn't foresee getting drawn deeply into this project, and yet I did: one book on school integration led to reviews that this other book was better, which led to questions about how it might have looked to this other person who had also written a memoir but from a completely different point of view, which led to questions about... And always-always, it turned out there was a next, obvious book on the path I had already been reading along. I was totally following my whim, and my whim was always guiding me deeper into the project. I had initially thought that I would feel constrained from reading things I wanted to read; that was not at all the case.
2. My reading to date had been far heavier in books about POC, rather than books by POC.
...and there's a big difference between the two. I wrote back in May about the difference between Insider Voices, Outsider Voices, and how that affects portrayals of agency, but that's only one small piece of the POV differences.
At the beginning of the challenge, I'd occasionally have to stop and think hard about why an author would choose to put things this way, and eventually would suss out that if the world really did look like that to you, that this might be a reasonable way to express it.
Now, however, I've gotten to the point that when I pick up a white-authored book about POC and the point of view feels twisty-wrong. Phrases leap off the page at me as weirdly euphemistic, cagy, or just outright wtf. "Why on earth would anyone think to put it like--?" and I flip to the back inside jacket flap and look at the photo. "Oh. That's why." The default, "objective" POV no longer seems objective to me -- it seems white, with all the subjectivity implied by that. And that's had a ginormous effect on how I understand discussions about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
3. Anticipating emotional exhaustion, not getting to spend time cozying up in my own culture...
Emotional exhaustion was a very real issue for the first half of the project or so. I would dread taking a POC-authored book down from the shelf because I really didn't want to learn what was in there. Mind you, it wasn't that I didn't want to learn about objectively unpleasant things. I was reacting badly to continually being blindsided by my own ignorance.
In the last half of the challenge that was far less of an issue: sure, my ignorance was (and still is) vast, but I'm not feeling blindsided by it so often anymore. So that's something.
As far as not having time to cozy up in my own culture goes... Well. My own culture stopped feeling cozy. I've been seeing it from the outside this past year, and it's not pretty. That's been a difficult thing to take. As a side-effect, I've gotten somewhat flinchy about picking up books by white authors: I don't know what stupid white-privileged crap I'm going to get slapped upside the head with this time.
You know how you can be reluctant to read books that were faves when you were a child, because you're not sure your pleasant childhood memories would survive what your adult self would see in that book? It's like that. So I'm kinda having to go back through all the white authors that I used to like, and see which ones I still like. :-/
4. Fear that I won't be able to find much of anything to read within the genres that I prefer.
Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahaha!
Actually, I didn't spend much time in my fave genres: there was TOO MUCH TO EXPLORE everywhere. Also, way, way, too much history that I didn't know: I suspect one of the reasons I didn't enjoy much fiction by POC in years past is because I didn't understand the referents.
There was another fear in here which I had at the time I started the challenge, but which I didn't mention in the post because I was too ashamed of it: that I'd be stuck reading inferior books for a year. That the reason that "nobody" read books by POC is because said books were mostly crap.
I needn't have worried. The quality of what I've read this past year has been higher than most years in recent memory. I can think of two explanations for this. The first is the old "you have to be twice as good to get half the credit" problem that many of the authors face. The other is that Sturgeon's Law (and its corollary that 10% of anything is not crap) applies, and that unlike with mainstream, mostly-white SFF (which I've been reading voraciously since junior high), where the set of all books by all authors of color is concerned, I haven't already read a big chunk of the good stuff. There are all these amazing books out there by people of color, and I mostly haven't looked at them (nor even realized that most of them existed) because of how cultural, institutional and structural racisms work. I've been missing a lot of really good books.
5, 6. Trouble finding books by authors of color.
It turns out that this is like any other research project: uncovering the first few productive threads is the hardest. Once you've begun to find interesting things, finding more interesting things is easy. That, and I was just keeping my eyes open, noticing and remembering when something is by an author of color, and then seriously considering reading it instead of just dismissing the book as something that probably wasn't relevant to me.
(That's one big shift of my POV in this past year: I no longer understand why, say, "African American History" is its own shelf and own categorization way over there, supposedly optional for most of the American public. Because it's pretty clearly American history, vitally relevant to both African-Americans and non-African-Americans. And so on.)
(And actually? That brings me to my major beef about white privilege. No one can possibly independently evaluate all the things that it may be worth knowing, so you have to use existing clues to figure out where the interesting stuff may be. All my life, I've been getting strong cues that Hyphenated-American History is a quasi-optional subject, that there's nothing that interesting there if you're not Hyphenated-American, blah blah blah. And guess what? Those cues were wrong. If it feels like I harp on this stuff all the time, that's why: I got bad information, and I'm trying to help "googlebomb" more accuracy into the what-is-interesting cues. For that matter, googlebombing LJ's social consciousness is basically the whole point of having IBARW -- it certainly is NOT meant to be the one week of the year that anyone blogs against racism. End of digression.)
7, 8. Multnomah library has a nice collection of books by authors of color. Most of its books by black authors are housed at North Portland; none of those are ever checked out.
Other than finally finding the Urban Fiction genre -- which is housed all over the MCL system and is extensively checked out -- this observation pretty much held.
Admittedly, a lot of what I was reading by Black authors is from MCL's African-American history/culture collection, which is housed at North. There did seem to be a "dustbin of history" issue about whether or not that collection gets checked out. See the previous item.
In general, though, books by POC are clearly not in high demand at my local library. This is the first year in ages when I pretty much always had space available on my hold-list (which has a system-set maximum of fifteen titles). Usually there wasn't anyone else waiting in line for any of the books I wanted to read, so a hold for a particular title would only be on my list for the amount of time that it took MCL to actually get the book off the shelf and send it to my branch. Institutitonal and structural racism is alive and well.
9. Initial troubles sorting out who is or isn't an author of color.
Well, as I noticed in the first twenty-four hours, if no one says anything about the author's race, the author is white. I don't think I found a single exception.
10. Surprise and ignorance.
I've written other posts about this, but if there was ever a project that made me feel like an idiot, this one did. At the beginning, I was writing long pseudo-objective reviews of books. Mid-way through the challenge I started realizing that my pseudo-objectivity was a put-on, and I started trying to write more personal, "this is they way I responded" reviews. More recently, I've been losing trust even in my ability to do that without embarrassing myself or annoying others. I'm trying to coax myself to go back out on the limb of saying what I think about the books that I'm reading, but I'm still hyper-aware of my own ignorance, and that I'm probably trotting biases that I have no awareness of.
11. Struggling to figure out who is or isn't a POC.
Turns out, "people of color" is a really messy category, and who is or isn't a POC is dependent on who's asking and what the context is. I began this challenge with a pretty strong sense that race actually exists, and came out of it with a strong sense that race is a very mooshy categorization scheme, and one which exists only in terms of local cultural/sociological constructs.
One of the 50books_poc participants finally did ask for a formal clarification from a group mod, and the answer came back that we were allowed to interpret it quite broadly. For my own reading, my guideline was that the author have a reasonable claim to an identity that was frequently Othered on racialized grounds in my own society.
(FWIW, I'd like to use a self-identity rule for this, but there are cross-cultural issues that complicate that.)
And that's that list.
I could try to give you a list of what I actually did get out of the challenge. Unfortunately, it was more transformative than here-let-me-list-things-for-you. And you can probably pick up at least some of it from the above, anyhow.
So instead, here's a more interesting list: the utterly amazing must-reads from the past year:
- Mildred D. Taylor's entire Logan Family series.
- Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back.
- Thomas King and William Kent Monkman, A Coyote Columbus Story.
- Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, A Broken Flute.
- Riverbend, Baghdad Burning.
- Mary Frances Berry, The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice.
- Melba Patilla Beals, Warriors Don't Cry.
*eyeballing that list* Most of those books are pretty intense. So I offer a second list, books that I really-really liked, but which were much higher on the "pleasantness" scale:
- Anything/everything by Atul Gawande.
- Ai Yazawa, Nana.
- Paline W. Chen Final Exam
- Sherman Alexie, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
- Thomas King and William Kent Monkman, A Coyote Columbus Story.
There's one more question that's relevant to this post: it's been a year and fifty books, so what now?
I confess, when I started this, I had a vague idea that I would be somehow done after fifty books -- that I would have learned what it was that I didn't know, gotten a good solid grasp on it, and would be ready to move on.
Ha. Haha. Hahahahaha!
I've barely made a scratch.
I'm signing up for another fifty books. I intend to initially focus on some areas that I missed this last year, particularly:
- Latin@s (initially with a focus on Latin@s in the U.S., but we'll see how/where that thread goes)
- Asian-Americans (with an initial emphasis on understanding and deconstructing the Model Minority stereotype, as well as who becomes invisible because of it)
- Immigrants of color in the U.S.
- Queers of color
And that's... um, that. Well, except to say this: the 50books_poc challenge was freaking amazing, and unequivocally worth the time and energy I put into it.
ETA: Oo! oyceter's experience doing the challenge!