White Women, Goodreads, and the Curation of Literature

This has been living in my spirit for years but I have to write about it now. Bear with me, this is probably going to be a rant.

It's not a secret that POC are left behind in the publishing industry. In 2018 11% of books in 2018 were written by people of color.^[1] 85% of the people who acquire and edit books are white as of 2019.^[2] I don't foresee those numbers to have gone up much in the past half-decade, other than the bump that always happens whenever the news cycle provides a spotlight on the frequent acts of brutality against Black people.

“I’ve heard things like, ‘We already have our Black girl book for the year,’” said Ms. McKinney. She also remembered comments suggesting books wouldn’t sell well if they had a Black person on the cover.

This isn't surprising. None of it is, and it's well talked about. An industry of capitalism and racism go together like peanut butter and jelly. What really interests me is how book consumption also reads as racist to me, because book reading is run by white women.

What I first thought was a gut feeling ended up being proven right after the most paltry of research. The demand for books in the US is driven almost entirely by women.^[3] "Diversity win!" you might be thinking. "Finally a place where women are thriving. Women are writing books, and women are reading them!" This is the part where I write "intersectionality" on a wad of paper, roll it up, and smack you over the head with it.

I was possessed to write my thoughts on this after a bit of a rabbit-hole dive led me to the Goodreads page for "The Country of Ice Cream Star," written by Sandra Newman in 2014. Newman is white (this will be readily apparent in about 15 seconds). The characters in her novel speak in an invented patois 'inspired by AAVE':^[4]

So from there, the language ended up being informed by African-American English. I’ve given a lot of reasons for this, but the bottom line is just that it’s my favorite English, and probably objectively the best English going. It also gave me not only a model for innovation in the vocabulary, but a starting point for innovation in the grammar. And finally, most people are familiar with it to some degree, so readers have a starting point for understanding it.

Once I had the flavor of African-American speech in the language (and don’t get me wrong – it’s not African-American Vernacular English as spoken now, but it’s obviously strongly influenced by it) it felt like the characters should be black. Or, put another way, why shouldn’t they be black? I mean, it became a choice to make them anything but black.

And then, as soon as I thought of them as black, the book came to life in the most incredible and inexplicable way. It began to write itself.

I'm going to have a heart-attack, but before I do that please have a look at patois in the book as quoted by @futurejake on Cohost, who sent me down this rabbit-hole:

My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star. My brother be Driver Eighteen Star, and my ghost brother Mo-Jacques Five Star, dead when I myself was only six years old. Still my heart is rain for him, my brother dead of posies little.

My mother and my grands and my great-grands been Sengle pure. Our people be a tarry night sort, and we skinny and long. My brother Driver climb a tree with only hands, because our bones so light, our muscles fortey strong. We flee like a dragonfly over water, we fight like ten guns, and we be bell to see. Other children go deranged and unpredictable for our love.

We Sengles be a wandering sort. We never grown nothing from anything, never had no tato patch nor cornfield. Be thieves, and brave to hunt. A Sengle hungry even when he eat, even when he rich, he still want to grab and rob, he hungry for something he ain't never seen nor thought of. We was so proud, we was ridiculous as wild animals, but we was bell and strong.

Alright, I'm dead now. Goodbye.

When I read this I felt a rock sink in my stomach. "Surely this got absolutely destroyed on Goodreads?" I thought, like a fucking idiot. "This was in 2014, people knew better, right?"

Reader, they didn't.

"The Country of Ice Cream Star" has a 3.60 rating on Goodreads, with 2,757 ratings and 678 reviews as of this writing. The weight is even more depressing when you look at the averages across stars.

This broke my brain and leads to the frentic thoughts you're looking at right now. Scroll through any Goodreads page for any book and you'll pretty much only see reviews written by white women named Meg, or Justine, or Lisa, or Jennifer, or Paula, or Simone, or Caroline, or Johanna, or fucking Susan. White women are the curators of taste, the ones who decide what blows up on Booktok, on what gets strong reviews or absolute harassment on Goodreads. Even the fucking books about white women being racist are reviewed almost entirely by white women on Goodreads! (On that note, thanks for the thoughts Hannah).

White people being the gatekeepers of a type of media isn't news to most people either. But it particularly stings here because I have a bone to pick with white women. White feminism is a plague on POC. White tears are a plague on POC. White women went ham on voting for Donald Trump. Twice. It irks me to no end that this fucking bloc is the reason I have to work twice as hard to find POC voices to help me figure out what to read next.

There are plenty of reasons why white women dominate the consumption and dictation of literature. White women are more often in a higher income-bracket, meaning they have more free time and resources to read. Books are expensive as fuck to read with any regularity.^[5] White women who read a lot become publishers and editors, who then get to publish books by other white women. The list goes on.

I wish I had some pithy, powerful conclusion to end here, some solution to the problem, but I honestly don't. I guess what I can do is share this link of Black readers,^[6] take a couple of ibuprofen and nap on the couch, 'cause this shit is exhausting.