(no subject)

[serene]

Thanks to the link from badgerbag, I've gone crazy and signed up for 50books_poc, which means I'm going to try to read fifty books by people of color this year. I probably read five or ten books TOTAL last year, so this'll be a real challenge for me, and might mean fewer silly survey posts from me -- which, of course, means your life is about to get a smidge less boring. :-)

Comments

[nitoda]

I fail at working out how to use delicious ... if you have a link to a booklist, that would be much appreciated.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Sure! http://denim-queen.livejournal.com/272185.html is one I've seen referred to on the community.

[nitoda]

Many thanks - now I can check the holdings of my local library! I love recommending stock to them ... it's such an easy form of social engineering!

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

May I ask a really stupid question here, and beg forgiveness for having to ask?

My question arises after quick perusal of the community and the books which people are listing:

Who belongs to the class 'people of colour'?

It seems that members of this LJ community are using the definition, "Any person who is from a culture different to my own."

ETA: Could it be, "any person who self-identifies as a person of colour" (although that is hard to know of an author when you pick up their book)?

Many thanks for your indulgence.

[firecat]

I don't know the answer to your question. It's a complicated question and probably doesn't have a definitive answer. But I wanted to comment on this:

It seems that members of this LJ community are using the definition, "Any person who is from a culture different to my own."

I didn't notice that. Do you have an example?

A number of folks posting there identify as people of color (I know this from reading their comments elsewhere on LJ) and they were posting about books by people from (presumably, I don't know details of their self-identifications) their own culture.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

From a UK perspective, I'd previously formed the impression that the term 'person of colour' encompasses people who identify as Black and some others.

Rapidly scanning the 50books_poc community, the books mentioned seemed to be from a very diverse range of cultures and countries indeed. I didn't realise that some people of e.g. Japanese descent self-identify as 'a person of colour'. I know that some people in England consider southern Europeans - and possibly, even French people - to be non-white.

So it was a bad guess at the meaning, on my part.

[For reference, I am used to seeing privilege attached to people who are clearly (male) (intellectual-sounding) white northern Europeans (who can be non-heterosexual).]

[firecat]

IMO, the Carl Brandon Society is a good place to go for an understanding of where some people in the US stand on the issue of who counts as a person of color. (Some of the people who run it identify as people of color, which makes its perspective more authoritative than this random white person's opinion, although not "official".)

Their resources page has the following lists of books:
* Black History Month Reading List
* Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Reading List
* Hispanic Heritage Month Reading List
* American Indian Heritage Month Reading List

Japanese people count in the "Asian and Pacific Islander" group, I think. I think of Japanese people as "people of color" and I know a number of people of Japanese heritage who identify that way. And it's often an option on forms that ask for ethnicity. I didn't know any of that was different in the UK. That's interesting.

My way of thinking about privilege is that there are a lot of different ways a person can have or not have privilege, and "race" markers/ancestry/cultural background is one way.

In the US also, an educated-sounding male white person of northern European ancestry would tend to have the most privilege, but a woman with the same background would have a lot, too. (And once you get to people who have some privilege markers and not others, it doesn't make sense to try to rank them...not that you did, just saying.)

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Many thanks indeed for that list.

I think that I would like to spend some time reading autobiographies from those lists, if there are any?

(I'm too busy at work to read much non-fiction for pleasure at the moment, and I have never developed much skill at reading literary fiction. I am slowly learning to read literary fiction, but now's not the best time for me to be working on that skill either ;-)

I have read "I know why the caged bird sings" and some of Maya Angelou's other autobiographical books - I might even start by re-reading those.

[firecat]

I think the Carl Brandon Society lists are all speculative fiction.

Here is the list of posts on 50books_poc that are tagged "(auto)biography":

http://community.livejournal.com/50books_poc/tag/(auto)biography

Enjoy!

[firecat]

Thanks for linking to this. I am not signing up for any challenges, but I am watching the community, which is a great source for recommendations.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Definitely a community for me to keep an eye on--I want to make sure that works by people of color have better representation in my section of the magazine than they have in the past. And I've been kind of flailing about for resources so I can figure out who those writers are (preliminary flailing, I hadn't gotten down to serious Googling yet).