Confessions of a Formerly Color Blind Reader

First, read this post by David Anthony Durham about the oft used argument of being a ‘color blind’ reader.

I’m a pretty standard example of an American upper-middle class upbringing and could serve as a great example of the term W.A.S.P. (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). As such, I’m almost certain that I’ve at some point claimed to be ‘color blind’ regarding reading and some issue or another – and when I made the claims I considered this to be a positive example of a lack of racism.

Over the last several years I’ve noticed that I can’t really make that argument anymore. I actively seek out diversity of one kind or another in my reading. I want to read a book from a different perspective. I bought ___ because the author is from Columbia, and ___ because it’s originally a Russian work, and ____ because it’s from Japan, and ___ because her perspective sounds intriguing, and ____ because he’s African, and ____ because he’s homosexual, etc. Were these the only reasons – maybe? I don’t know, but they were reasons. And I certainly don’t do this for every book I get – I get a lot of books because they sound good (and I may not know anything about that author), and I of course get books specifically because I know of the author even if I don’t know of that particular book. But, I can say that I know longer buy books blindly, and my reading experience has been greatly enhanced as a result.

And in spite of the entire previous paragraph, a study of my bookshelf would reveal that a large majority of the books were written by white males. It sure makes me think.

Race in SFF

I’m always interested when a major newspaper or other media outlet talks about SFF because it just doesn’t seem to happen all that often. Today the Boston Globe ran this article by Vanessa E. Jones about race in SFF – mainly concentrating on the scarcity of black authors in the genre. It seems likely this was inspired by the monochrome appearance of the attendees at the recent Readercon.

The article itself is a pretty good one, if being rather predictable. SFF does have too few non-white authors and there are subtle race, gender, sexual orientation, and other stereotypes are too often intentionally and unintentionally perpetuated in SFF works of both the past and present. I’m not really knowledgeable enough to write in any kind of detail about this – and I’m not going to be the one to point to all the good stuff that SFF is producing in this area. Other (likely much more informed and intelligent) responses are popping up around the blogosphere (and here's an interesting entry that's a bit older but well worth reading). But, what really got to me is the focus of this article. You see apparently the race issues are limited to the black minority. There doesn’t seem to be any other racial minority worth talking about, at least the article doesn’t mention any. Anyone else a bit bothered by this bit of tunnel vision?

Interesting Discussion on Differences

Over at the OF Blog of the Fallen, Freebird/Dylanfanatic/Larry has posted an interesting blog about differences (such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) of authors and readers. I comment at length there and don’t really have the energy to rehash and update it.

So, do you have gender preferences in your reading? How about other cultural preferences? It is my belief that this is the case to some degree or another for all of us – which is not (necessarily) a bad thing. I also believe in the value of challenging one’s self from time to time. For those of us that are part of the English as our only language, Western culture, when is the last time you read a book that was translated from some other language?

Anyway, comments and discussion is certainly encouraged.