Feministe does a nice recap of the recent Bloomsbury cover wars here, but one part of the argument struck me in particular:
“But let’s pull back to YA, because these book covers point to a specific problem with the genre. I’ve looked around many a bookshop YA section to see… whiteness. In the authorship, on the covers, in the stories. A good portion of young adult fiction is about addressing the issues involved in growing up in accessible and on teenage terms. I’ve read a lot of YA, but I rarely read anything in which non-white characters constitute anything more than one-dimensional and secondary presence. It’s not really about centring young adult experience. It’s about centring white adults’ perceptions of white young adult experience. It’s not only alienating, it’s denying non-white youth the same means of working life out as our white counterparts.
Books are precious, they’ve been heavensent for me. Books can change your life, change your worldview, change something of your very self. These constant little jabs of alienation tell non-white youth that the sort of thought provocation and lazy silly Sundays and transcendental change books can provide are not for us. These things are for the white kids, the kids important enough to get in the books. Not for us the dreams books foster.”
I’ll admit that sometimes I get my hackles up whenever anyone accuses YA of being something other than awesome (even though I am well aware that to say YA is a genre is unfair, because we don’t call adult books a genre on their own and I certainly would not make a blanket statement that all adult books are fabulous), but she does have a point. I went back and looked at the books I have reviewed this year and so far I can only find two that feature POC as the protagonist, and only a few other books that have POCs as secondary characters. Now part of this is skewed, because I am typically assigned fantasies and fantasies, whether we like to admit it or not, remain largely whitewashed. Looking at the books we’ve reviewed as a publication, I found a few more examples in realistic fiction and plenty more in nonfiction. However, the nonfiction tended to be about black history, and feeds into this poster’s argument that for some reason, the world of fiction, or at least the fiction that is being considered by review journals in the field, leaves large portions of the population out.
As a librarian, I’m not sure how to fix this, because I’m not even sure where the problem starts. Is it truly publishers who choose not to produce and promote books about/with a POC? Do they choose not to do so because there truly is no market for it, or are there other nefarious forces at work? Are people just not writing quality books about POCs? Are review journals just not reviewing such books? These are big questions but at the end of the day, as librarians we are left with the task of shaping our collection to best serve our patron needs and representing a diverse set of experiences. To do this, I think sometimes you have to look past the mainstream methods of collection development and choose nontraditional sources, such as blogs (the Brown Bookshelf is a good one for keeping up on books and authors) and yes, what some people might call “special interest groups” that take a stake in the literature produced about their interest (see the Oyate website). The problem doesn’t end with race either as there are few books about people with disabilities, and while there is far more GLBTQ fiction out there than there has been in the past, it is still an area that needs more promotion.






And thanks to