I’m a bibliophile. I read lots of different kinds of books, both fiction and nonfiction, on a variety of subjects. But this year I’ve been thinking more about the books that I read, and I find that my bookshelf doesn’t yet include very many authors of color.
Like Lisa Kenney, “It wasn’t that I was consciously reading only white American authors, but … I was missing out on a lot of great work I hadn’t heard of.”
There are many contributing factors in play, and one of them is marketing. Justine Larbalestier, a white Australian author who writes young adult novels in which most of the protagonists are people of color, has been told by editors, sales reps, and booksellers that “black covers don’t sell.” (You can read about the controversy over her most recent book at Racialicious.) Can all the blame be laid at the feet of consumers? Larbalestier does not think so.
The notion that “black books” don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them. Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers”.… Perhaps the whole “black books don’t sell” thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Malaika Adero, a senior editor at Atria Books, suggests the same:
Literary African-American writers have difficulty getting publicity. The retailers then don’t order great quantities of the books. Readers don’t know what books are available and therefore don’t ask for them. It’s a vicious cycle.
So part of the reason “I was missing out on a lot of great work I hadn’t heard of” is that publishers and booksellers are doing very little to tell me about these books they claim “don’t sell.”
Consider also the way bookstores and libraries shelve books. For example, if you go into a bookstore just to browse mysteries or Christian fiction, you may not find books by the African American authors writing those genres. Some bookstores put books by African American authors in an “African American fiction” section. This means I may need to visit the African American section to find a book by Claudia Mair Burney.
So another reason “I was missing out on a lot of great work I hadn’t heard of” is that I didn’t know where to look for a book I might want.
One of the editorials at the Inkwell Bookstore blog laments, “More often than not, White customers buy books by White authors. While this in no way makes them racist, their unwillingness to explore something outside their comfort zone does make them dull.”
Yes, another reason “I was missing out on a lot of great work I hadn’t heard of” is that I need to make the effort to throw off that dullness and broaden my reading horizons. The publishers and bookstores may not be helping me, but that’s no excuse. “It wasn’t that I was consciously reading only white American authors,” but neither was I taking off the blinders of whiteness. Larbalestier asks:
Consumers need to do what they can. When was the last time you bought a book with a person of colour on the front cover or asked your library to order one for you?
Good question. I need to examine my choices.
Novelist Tayari Jones shares an insight: “The ugly truth is that stories by writers of color are thought to be of interest only to readers of that community.” I think this is a factor in all the points mentioned above:
- publishers tend to think writers (and characters) of color will only interest readers of color,
- booksellers tend to think writers (and characters) of color will only interest readers of color,
- we white consumers tend to think writers (and characters) of color will only interest readers of color.
The good news is that if we discover that we’re not reading enough books by writers of color, we can change our reading habits!
Author Carleen Brice is inviting white (and other) readers to read black authors at White Readers Meet Black Authors. I love her video proposing that December should be celebrated as “National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month”:
But don’t stop there. Look for Latino authors, Asian American authors, and Native American authors, too. If your bookshelf, like mine, is wanting in diversity, please start making an extra effort to seek out authors of color.
Irene's Daughters 
The following points from Peggy McIntosh’s essay on white privilege, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” seem to me related to the lack of diversity on my bookshelf.
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
When I’m shopping for books, I don’t even have to consciously seek white authors or consciously avoid authors of color to end up with a whitewashed bookshelf. Unless I am intentionally seeking authors of color, which I am now doing more often, I am pretty much automatically steered to white authors by influences internal (e.g. unconscious prejudice) and external (e.g. the marketing choices of publishers).
This entry is great – thanks for posting it. I know we’ve talked about this before, during the snafu over the cover of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. The whole episode, apart from the obvious and appalling racial implications, left a sour taste in my mouth because it revealed such cold calculation and skepticism on the part of the publishers. That they believed it necessary to misrepresent the content of a young adult novel to make it marketable to young adults is so disappointing, especially to those of us who love the young adult genre and read it freely even as, er, old adults (guilty).
I’ve also been a lifelong bibliophile. I read voraciously as a kid, and back then it was even more of a religion to me than it is now, actually, because I was somewhat lonely and books were friends as well as transportation to adventure. But I did notice the fact that basically every book on my shelf featured white protagonists, except for a lone biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. and another on Sacajawea. I think that it affected me subconsciously and made me separate my love of good books (and my desire to write them myself!) from my identity as an Asian, because they just didn’t seem to go together.
Like the prevalence of white dolls and white characters on television, the whiteness of books is one more thing that can make it difficult, at times, for people of color to see themselves as heroes/protagonists in their own lives. This bothers me so much, because I just think of how common it is for lonely people of all ages to turn to literature for understanding, companionship, and inspiration. And if people of color don’t even have recourse to widely known, easily found books featuring people who look like them as well as people who don’t, it can function as one more layer of isolation.
While you are investigating books written by nonwhite authors, might I suggest taking a look southward? My favorite authors for the last few years seem to all be Hispanic women– there’s just something so lyrical about prose that is either written in English by someone who speaks native Spanish or has been translated from original Spanish. There is an increasing amount out there, dealing with both life in Latin America and life as a Hispanic person in the US. I particularly love Isabel Allende and Julia Alvarez, but there are so many, many more.
October is National Hispanic Heritage Month! Last time I was at the library, I picked up a number of YA novels by Latino authors. :)
I never read Sandra Cisneros till college, and that makes me very sad.
I’d love to add focus to an horribly ignored group in the US, Arab authors (ESPECIALLY Arab-American female authors, who remain almost entirely unpublished in the United States). I’m hoping a trend will happen soon, like the recent trends of publishing Indian-American and Iranian female authors here.
In the first category, however, I highly recommend authors Randa Jarrar, Laila Lalami, and Hanan Al-Shaykh (the last of whom is British, not American).
I just took stock of my bookshelf too – I’m doing better than I thought, thanks to a couple of authors I can’t get enough of, but am almost entirely lacking in Asian-American (East Asian, that is) authors. Recommendations?
I’ll be looking for these authors at the library! Thanks.
Great online radio interviews I found through Carleen Brice’s site:
Separate But Equal: African American Authors In Today’s Bookstores 1
Separate But Equal: African American Authors In Today’s Bookstores 2
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