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.
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.