I mostly read (hard) sci-fi written by straight white dudes, so the tweet on the screenshot made me feel a bit defensive. In the replies and qrts people are patting themselves on the back for reading marginalized fantasy writers exclusively and this "consumption as activism" seems rad-libby to me, but maybe I'm wrong.
RTer is basically spot on. If you just read things that you happen to find, whether through being generally popular or recommended to you by friends, most of the time you will not get very diverse authors because the systems that make books popular are already biased towards cis white dudes.
The systems that enable you to be an author are biased towards cis white dudes.
I agree. People in that thread talk about how important diversity in entertainment you consume is and I wonder if it's actually important or if the the whole "I'm trying to read more fantasy written by women" thing is a bit performative.
No it's definitely important imo. It broadens your perspectives. I'm not saying that white dudes aren't going to have anything of value to say, or that people who aren't should always be taken seriously, but a diversity of viewpoints is I think a good idea. Someone who directly experiences racism, misogyny, or transphobia is fundamentally going to have a different understanding of things to someone who doesn't, and if you don't make an effort to listen to those people you cannot hope to get a complete perspective. Of course, this doesn't preclude you from being a liberal.
super performative, imo. fixing the systems that stand in the way of marginalized people becoming authors is important. reading more books by certain authors (let alone talking about how you're doing it) accomplishes very little. also, hand-wringing about media consumption is generally cringe/bad imo, with some exceptions for more extreme cases.
Blaming individual consumption choices isn't a more effective tactic here than it is for the environment or anything else.
People complaining about how white and male certain genres and going out of their way to read things written by people other than white men does impact what gets published. If sci-fi novels by Black women routinely do well financially, publishers are less likely to see sci-fi books by Black women as "a gamble" and will publish more of them.
Like it's obviously not as effective at addressing structural inequality as overthrowing capitalism, but making a point of reading books by authors from underrepresented groups is still better than not doing that.
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I don't necessarily completely agree, but in the spirit of "the right to disengage", I'd ask whether you are interested in discussing this further vs you wanted to add something, but don't have the energy for a whole conversation about it?
I mean that was pretty much my point, I know it kinda sorta has some effect to some degree since I spent quite awhile working adjacent to the publishing industry and know a lot of people who are pretty plugged in to how publishers make decisions about what gets published.
I'm not terribly invested in this discussion and might not reply, but def feel free to add your thoughts if you've got em!
I guess the only thing I'd add--or maybe ask, since you have experience here--is to question the extent to which it has an effect beyond representation. And representation is important!! But typically, as I'm sure you know, one of the problems with idpol alone is that, for example, the publishing houses will publish more books by a small group of Harvard-educated black authors, and it will help with representation, but do little to address the systemic issues that underlie the disparity.
Oh yeah, I mean that's definitely still an issue, and there's a further issue of the people making the decisions about what gets published being libs and capitalists.
You're totally right that a blanket "publish more books by authors of color" policy doesn't do anything to make sure that representation within that group is actually diverse, but the current publishing stats are pretty bleak as-is — I think something as little as 1-3% of books published in some recent year (maybe 2019?) were written by Black authors. (I could be off on this stat but I remember it being extremely bleak.) iirc there was some kind of backlash/push against that in 2020/2021 following the George Floyd uprising, but I don't known if I've heard any updated stats or anything about how all that's going since.
But when you're talking about numbers that small, any improvement helps IMO. Like obviously the systemic barriers are still in place — if you're poor, grew up in a heavily underfunded school district, have to work multiple jobs, etc, it's going to be much harder to write a book and get it published than if you're affluent and connected. And there's still that same component of structural racism too, people reading more books by Black authors doesn't fix that.
My point is more that the material impact of a big swath of people making a point to diversify and decolonize their bookshelves is still nonzero, so there's no reason to actively disparage it as long as no one is pretending that they're fixing racism by reading one NK Jemison book.