A friend laughed at me once, saying “You only listen to white people music!”
I didn’t realise how true it was until I thought about who sang my favourite songs, and then, it got quite embarrassing. I had just blindly listened to the radio and the songs that were fed me, and didn’t think about the people who wrote them and their life experiences.
The Black Lives Matter campaigns and the #publishingpaidme tweets of 2020 made me revisit again what books I was reading, and whose stories I was paying attention to.
So I made it my intention to read diversely. I want to know about people’s experiences that are different from mine, even if I think differently. It’s been great!
I stick with the genres that I like reading, YA romance, YA fantasy, I also like a bit of adventure or detective work if there is some kind of romance amongst it all, but I am committed to diversity.
I have even looked at a cover and wanted to put the book down because of my prejudice against it (because it was about someone who fit into a diverse group that I fit into but I wasn’t feeling the respect in the blurb).
But I did get it out of the library, and I’m glad I read it. Not because it was different from what I thought, but it was interesting to read about “my” category from the outside.
At the library anyway, it’s sometimes hard to find diverse categories in each genre. It’s great that library customers can request books that are not in their current stock, and so I do.
I think the book market for English books is the biggest in the UK and the US and it’s also sometimes hard to find authors who base their book setting outside that (for contemporary works), but I also love reading stories with blended cultures or immigrant families.
Right now I am reading a book that includes a romance between a Jewish young man and a Muslim young woman. The most interesting part of the book so far is not actually their romance, it’s the subtle gaslighting about the racism around them that leaves them speechless and bamboozled. The Sales pitch that people in power give them about why they want particular laws in their area and why it’s not racism, is truly scary. And it’s scary because it happens.
Also the Jewish boy’s family are legit scared of Nazi’s coming after them. It’s like a punch in the guts more than any newspaper article. This is reality. In 2021 people are still afraid because of their religion, sex, sexual preferences, skin colour, ethnic group, culture, because they are different.
Sometimes stories are more effective at conveying gravity and truth than simply a factual retelling. And that is why we write, we want to pierce hearts and make it a better place.
