📖 We need diverse books

Thinking a lot about diverse books recently, especially after a kind of shitty thing happened to me near the beginning of the year. There’s quite a lot of setup to get through first though, so let’s get to it.

# The Fable fuck-up

At the start of this year, there was a lot of chatter around the reading app Fable. They had jumped on the AI/LLM bandwagon and used the tech to make playful year-end summary graphics for their users: it was Spotify Wrapped, but for books. This was supposed to be a fun way of dressing up what is otherwise dry stats, but things took a turn when it started roasting its users for not reading enough white authors.

Fable, a popular social media app that describes itself as a haven for “bookworms and bingewatchers,” created an AI-powered end-of-year summary feature recapping what books users read in 2024. It was meant to be playful and fun, but some of the recaps took on an oddly combative tone. Writer Danny Groves’ summary for example, asked if he’s “ever in the mood for a straight, cis white man’s perspective” after labeling him a “diversity devotee.”

Books influencer Tiana Trammell’s summary, meanwhile, ended with the following advice: “Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, okay?”

Trammell was flabbergasted, and she soon realized she wasn’t alone after sharing her experience with Fable’s summaries on Threads. “I received multiple messages,” she says, from people whose summaries had inappropriately commented on “disability and sexual orientation.”

Oof. Yikes. This led to a lot of users deleting their accounts and taking to social media to ask for better book-tracking alternatives.

# Enter StoryGraph

One popular answer I saw get brought up a lot and rather enthusiastically in my corner of #Bookstodon/#BookSky was The StoryGraph. It’s ad-free and not owned by Amazon, so this made it a frontrunner. This is despite its homepage prominently boasting its own AI features:

Get smart personalised recommendations

Our machine learning AI is like your trusted go-to friend for book recommendations.

It’ll understand your reading preferences and find the best books for you.

“It’s uncanny how spot on the recommendations are!”

• Yuko C. Shimomoto, Freelance Translator & Writer

The StoryGraph had also recently undergone a visual overhaul for how book pages looked on its site. It now includes an AI-powered “preview,” followed by a description provided by the publisher (the “back of the book” blurb). I personally hate this, both because it’s incredibly redundant (who cares so much about spoilers that they think the publisher description has spoilers??) and because the AI-powered “preview” is usually a bunch of fluffy nothing. According to Rob Frelow (AKA Mr. StoryGraph), this is all by design. For an example of this, here’s the preview for Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ:

This book is ideal for readers who appreciate emotionally rich historical narratives intertwined with explorations of cultural identity and forbidden love in colonial settings.

Following the two book blurbs, we then get to the community star ratings, a cloud of “mood” tags, and then a bunch of graphs about diversity, the cast’s lovability, so on and so forth. Crucially, all of these stats are coming to you divorced from the actual user reviews, which you need to click through to actually see. Here is what the StoryGraph’s Taiwan Travelogue book page looks like in its entirety:

This looks designed from the ground up to be fed into an algorithm or AI, not the social-media-plus-book-tracking that made apps like Goodreads so popular. Which, you know, if you’re into no-context wordless book recs then here you go, this is the site for you. But it was a big turn-off for me since I mostly use these kinds of sites to meet other nerds and talk about books.

On StoryGraph, I felt weirdly sealed off from seeing what my friends were reading, and in general I got book recs from the site itself and not from whatever my friends were into. Which, again… is fine if that’s what you want… but in my case, I might as well just log my books on a spreadsheet and then talk about them on Mastodon. The StoryGraph, like all other book-tracking sites including Goodreads and BookWyrm, tends to be a hot mess when it comes to non-English books. I was constantly having to create new Japanese book entries or clean up existing ones, so at that point, why not just log them in a notebook?

In the end, I moved over to BookWyrm, which is far from perfect (again, I’m still constantly having to make new Japanese book entries), but it at least lets me see my friends’ comments and reviews on books more easily. Now every time I mark a book as finished, I am no longer prompted to answer yes/no questions about if the cast is “diverse” or “lovable,” fluffy nothing terms that don’t mean much when removed from any context. Which leads me to…

# We need diverse books but also: be serious

What does a “diverse” book look like to someone who is not able-bodied, cisallohet, and white? Are books that are filled with people who look like me necessarily “diverse” because I am not a WASP? If I wrote a book about my own life, how would I feel about people tagging it as “diverse” because I am not The Default? Who gets to define what is The Default, and why should I respect their authority on the matter? How is this anything but exotification under a different name?

I am reminded of the incredible essay Why I’m Done Talking About Diversity by Marlon Jones:

And whose diversity is it anyway? Are we truly being diverse, or are we just widening that hierarchal lens for one sector of the population to broaden their view of the world? For some people, an Asian sidekick in a movie is diversity. Or a white woman putting on a Kimono. But who is this diversity benefiting? And what about diversity’s side effects, like cultural appropriation, which some people still look upon as a positive thing? Are we truly broadening our landscapes, or are we just cutting off a manageable chunk of exotica or worse, putting a white voice on top and selling a million copies, exploiting the cultural richness of diverse peoples without accepting the people themselves or even worse—simultaneously driving them out?

Because the other problem with diversity, is that it works with segregation extremely well. In fact it gives liberals in particular the opportunity to pay lip service to a thing that they may be unable or unwilling to actually practice. Well that’s not totally true. They could travel to these neighborhoods of color if they wanted to (maybe for some authentic Indian food), but for security concerns. “Sketchy,” becomes the code word for black, or brown or just poor. Again, these are liberal cities that pride themselves on diversity, and yet New York City has the most segregated schools in America. Chicago’s blacks and whites live such radically different lives that they are essentially in two cities. A multiplicity of neighborhoods merely means that multiplicity exists. It doesn’t mean that anybody lives, works or even plays together.

It is hilarious to me that Taiwan Travelogue has a diversity rating of 76% on The StoryGraph. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know how this stat is darkly funny.

I think the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtags and similar movements are doing great work in promoting authors and work that traditionally don’t get as much attention as works by straight white men. I, perhaps paradoxically, believe literary circles need to be doing more to promote diversity in books… even as the words “diverse books” chafe hard against me. I do not want to return to a world of all-white, all-cishet books. But rating books on a yes/no, five-point rubric on the diversity of a book’s cast, to quite literally tick boxes for diversity, cannot be the way forward.

Needless to say, I was not a fan of the StoryGraph redesign that placed a much higher emphasis on the “stats” of the book reviews and less on the written reviews themselves. These stats were clearly being used to power the site’s algorithmic book recs, which is not something I am necessarily against, I’m just not as invested as someone who prefers getting book recs from reading written reviews.

What does it even mean to me that Taiwan Travelogue got a 76% diversity rating, genuinely? Stats about books in a vacuum tell me nothing about the book, the author, the reader who graded them. There is no nuance, no context, no communication, just raw numbers. Seeing these numbers tells me nothing about the book but tells me everything about the general audience feeding data into these algorithms: that they are coming from a place where Western, white, cisallohet, able-bodied are The Default, and anything else is therefore “diverse.”

This is even more obvious and frustrating when these triumphant marketing labels get applied to non-white writers. Naomi Day wrote about this phenomenon in Diversity Syndrome: On Publishing’s Relentless Pigeonholing of Black Writers:

Diversity syndrome is a cultural condition where the “otherness” of an author is elevated over the impact of their work, to the detriment of the author, their work, and their audiences. Much like structural racism, it’s more systemic than individual, though individual actions certainly uphold or subvert its existence.

But let’s look more closely at the interactions of race and genre. Black authors are frequently and repeatedly asked to speak on their experiences as Black writers. Panels want to focus on the impact of race on these authors’ careers and whether they believe having an all-Black cast will negatively impact their work.

Similarly, despite being some of the highest grossing and most commercially popular genres, authors in speculative genres are frequently pigeonholed at conferences and in interviews, their expertise presumably limited to worldbuilding and fantastical premises. Black authors of speculative work sit at the apex of the two issues, frequently relegated to a strange place of hyperinvisibility as if Blackness and speculative fiction are both some extreme “other.” They are pushed to the margins and told to stay in their boxes, valued for their perspective on their race and their genre but not much else.

When readers pick up work by Black authors of speculative fiction expecting it to be centered on the authors’ identities, or approach these authors with questions confined to specific racial or genre-based expectations, they are pigeonholing the authors and limiting their own ability to experience the richness of these narratives. These authors are frequently specialists at crafting stories that are intensely meaningful to our current reality without trying to “make a point” as Black authors, something the social impacts of diversity syndrome might indicate they should aim to do; we should really be trying harder to understand that Black speculative literature is much bigger than just Black.

Diving into the topic of “diverse books” surfaces a lot of readers expecting diversity as a kind of teachable moment, with Black folks (and Latine folks and Indigenous folks and Asian folks and and and) patiently teaching The White Learner about the differences between their exotic and Different cultures and The Default. Culture as commodity, culture as consumption, a neat little 101 class you took and then got in your car and went back home. Meanwhile Black authors (and Latine authors and Indigenous authors and Asian authors and and and) are still having to live with being so marginalized and othered that simply writing characters who look like themselves means they get a special Diverse Books sticker on the cover… if they’re even lucky enough to make it through the gauntlet of Western white publishing.

And, I’m sorry, but I find that horrifying. I hate all of that. We need diverse books but we also need diverse audiences who can appreciate those diverse books for what they are on their own terms. We need to reckon with the idea that “diverse books” are being used to reinforce and uphold a necessarily exclusive Default.

# Things get even hairier when you start feeding those stats into AI

I mean. Anyone could have told you that. Here’s StoryGraph recommending against a book because it has “disability” as a tag:

“Disability: This theme hasn’t appeared much in your reading history, so it’s uncertain how you’ll respond to it.”

Here’s one listing “BIPOC” alongside themes like “magic” and suggests users might not be in the mood for it:

1. Aspects you might be in the mood for:

• Magic (33 matches): This theme is prevalent in many books you’ve enjoyed, such as “A Conjuring of Light,” “The Fifth Season,” and “The Way of Kings.”

2. Aspects you might not be in the mood for, or haven’t read about recently:

• BIPOC (0 matches): This theme does not appear in your recent reading history.

Analysis: “Daughter of the Merciful Deep” aligns well with your recent reading history featuring several themes you’ve shown a strong preference for, such as magic and historical fantasy. The book’s focus on black historical fantasy is also present in some books you’ve enjoyed, though it’s not as frequent as other themes. However, the BIPOC theme is not prominent in your recent reading history, which might indicate you haven’t sought out books with this focus. Given the high number of matches in core themes, it’s likely you will enjoy this book.

Oof. Yikes. This is the service everyone was switching to after Fable shit the bed. The #BookSky and #Bookstodon hashtags were full of people chattering about leaving one AI platform and onto another that they erroneously thought was free of that shit. Was this not exactly why people had been dunking on Fable earlier?

So I did what I always do: logged on and posted about it.

# My incredibly boring and lukewarm take on The StoryGraph

I posted the following thread on Mastodon:

StoryGraph is going all-in on AI stuff btw, so if you were turned off of that from the Fable debacle, be warned that StoryGraph is not a whole lot different

• (link to Rob Frelow AKA Mr. StoryGraph’s video thread on Bluesky about how TSG uses AI)

Even aside from AI for book blurbs, the review rubric being the way it is has always felt extremely “optimized for the algorithm” in a way that made the whole site super alienating. Having to grade on a scale of 1-5 if the protagonist experienced emotional growth or whatever, like, who talks about books and stories this way? Unless you are shoveling all that data into an LLM to churn out book recs, which I guess is what they are indeed doing now

Yes you can turn off the AI shit, you don’t HAVE to answer the review questions and just write your own

But saying that is like you can use an annual planner like a general-purpose notebook. I mean you CAN, but then why not just get a much cheaper notebook that isn’t constantly boxing you in to using it a specific way

Then I went off to do something else because I didn’t really think anything I had said was especially noteworthy or controversial. The one thing I got wrong (and then later corrected) is that StoryGraph is using machine-learning (ML) instead of a large language model (LLM) and I mixed up the acronyms.

# Someone will always find some reason to be mad at you online

I came back to my computer to see a notification from Caroline Delbert, someone I had once considered a friend. She had read my milquetoast critique of a book-tracking website and had to let me know that it was “maddening” how much I “rail” on StoryGraph, was spreading misinformation, and am generally Wrong To Feel That Way. Her posts have since been deleted, so they live only in screenshots now:

berserk du soleil (Caroline): it’s a bit maddening to me how much you rail on storygraph, including a lot of misinformation based on how all this optional stuff personally made you feel. a lot of people care about diversity, emotional growth, and character flaws when they choose books. i get that you really hate them a lot, but it’s a robustly featured thing, not a fancy planner i’m using as a plain notebook.

Me: Just to clarify, what misinformation have I been spreading about StoryGraph?

If you like and use StoryGraph that is your prerogative, why shouldn’t I say how the review rubrics were a turn-off to me. The review scores for books are front and center on every book’s page, if this is a turn-off for anyone the way it was for me then there are alternate tracking sites/methods that don’t have this

berserk du soleil: ok

Following this exchange, Caroline unfollowed me on Mastodon and quit the Nice Gear Games Discord server. I took this to mean she no longer wanted to hear from me or continue seeing my “maddening” opinions go past her timeline, which, you know what? Fair enough. People should unfollow, mute, and block people they don’t want to hear from anymore. With that in mind, I too blocked her everywhere.

After blocking her, I posted on Mastodon that the horrible Cohost So White debacle from last year and its continuing fallout, catching norovirus over the holidays, and now dealing with a rather abrupt friendship implosion was really getting to me:

Deeply upset that someone I like a lot and trusted not to do this came at me to accuse me of spreading misinfo and putting words in my mouth about how I hate eg diversity in books

Just like crying and shaking after having already a bad week due to illness lol. idk I used to like signing online and shooting the shit with folks but these days it’s like everyone really fuckin hates me and can’t wait to put me in my place lol

I did also add another post to my previous thread about StoryGraph to (rather exasperatedly) explain that I don’t hate diversity in books:

I guess to clarify I don’t hate eg protagonists experiencing emotional growth in a story, obviously(??), nor would I hate if eg a friend recommended me a book because it has that

But it is off-putting to me personally to be asked to grade books I read on this kind of rubric, for the specific purpose of it being easier for a site algorithm to recommend books to people absent any other context I would have given with a personal rec

I was upset and mostly just wanted to be done with it. Despite all the words in this post, I don’t actually spend a lot of time thinking about StoryGraph or AI (or BookWyrm or Goodreads), and I especially don’t like thinking about people who ruined my day for the sake of scoring some online points against me. I blocked the person who had been bothering me, and so this should have been it, the end.

# Stay too online my friends

The worst thing you can do when a white woman decides to write you off is to continue existing. At first, she tried to sound like someone had entangled her (passive voice) in some drama that was “too online” and that she only cared about this unwell person who had gone “off the rails”:

berserk du soleil (Caroline): Stepdad Greg is very offline compared to me and sometimes thinking about how to explain drama to him is funny and sad.

I’ve had some drama. If it’s you and you see this, I care about you and worry about you. You don’t have to do anything, but that’s all I would have wanted to talk about.

Stay too online my friends.

I’ve been that person who’s off the rails. I’ve been that person who thinks it seems like everyone is against them and no one is a good enough friend or whatever. That’s not true and it’s not a healthy thing to believe.

Well, okay. She says that I “don’t have to do anything” which is quite generous of her (🙄) so I don’t. It is, *ahem* maddening to be talked about as if I’m the one stirring up some incredibly online drama instead of just, like, posting some nothingburgers off the top of my dome and dealing with this Protagonist Of Reality who thinks it’s some kind of personal attack on her, but okay.

Later, a friend messages to say that she’d been asking for me in Discord servers. I had blocked her on Discord and left all of the servers I shared with her. This is genuinely astounding to me. If you knew I had blocked you, why are you asking around for me to message you? Why is it so hard for people online to respect basic boundaries?

Caroline (Discord): hi folks, renkon blocked me everywhere yesterday, and i thought we were quite good friends before, so i’m taking an unusual step and inviting them to talk with me here about it if they want. that’s it, no further discussion about it otherwise, thank you

I once again ignore this because I was not in the mood. Again: dealing with a months-long racist harassment campaign on cohost, recovering from illness, etcetera etcetera. The last thing I wanted was to be used as the sounding board for an insufferable white who won’t respect boundaries. I asked the person who sent me this Discord screenshot to not keep me in the loop with regards to whatever Caroline had to say to or about me.

So that should be it, right?

# Wrong

berserk du soleil (Caroline): it’s wild here AND mastodon that some people seem to wait to see certain keywords and then comment like whack a mole. they’re never conversational either it’s just like an asocial bookend no one asked for. they don’t like people, they don’t like what they’re remarking on, they don’t want to talk

a friend recently blocked me everywhere after making a weird subtweet about how they liked to “shoot the shit” online before but now no one is nice. sorry, i’m . . . a whole human being, not a shit to shoot. we all have object permanence even when you stop venting spleen into your phones guys

Caroline logged on to Bluesky to complain about people who show up in your replies not to have a conversation with you, but who instead “wait and see certain keywords and then comment like whack a mole.” They “don’t like people, they don’t like what they’re remarking on, they don’t want to talk.” Yes, Caroline, I agree that those people sure are fuckin annoying! Could this be a moment of self-reflection on her part, the moment she realizes that, actually, she is The Drive-By Reply Guy in this exchange??

LOL, no. It was of course another opportunity to make herself the victim of a situation she created. She zoomed in on how I said I liked to “shoot the shit online” and decided this was about how I apparently thought she was a shit and that I liked to shoot at her. Yes, we’re at that level of bad faith, folks. Just completely rewriting reality to make it sound like I am the “asocial bookend” who showed up hostile and aggro in her mentions to yell at her out of nowhere. Sure, Jan.

You will also remember that this line about liking to “shoot the shit” came from a post when I was talking about being massively harassed online for months, so this isn’t about how I thought “now no one is nice.” Just incredibly manipulative language to make me out to be another freak in a long line of Online Weirdos who keep losing their shit at her, and not about how I, myself “a whole human being,” was hurt that someone I thought was a friend would treat me this way.

The worst part is that this wasn’t even her full thread. Her full thread goes into a plea to “ask everyone to take a few seconds before replying,” y’know, as if all this didn’t start because she was big mad at me for saying that the StoryGraph uses AI (source: The StoryGraph).

berserk du soleil (Caroline): i’ve been an asshole plenty of times and answered for it, which is one reason i work really hard now to be kind and keep my weird moody shit to myself

i know social pain is alienating. and it’s very alienating to suffer something you don’t know how to fix or even soothe. but i think some people aren’t even to that point, they don’t know that what they’re experiencing is suffering. it seems righteous to them in some way still.

Quick aside: I absolutely knew from what I was suffering, and it was a bad case of self-righteous whitesplaining.

i’m not talking to people who are neurodivergent – not encouraging masking instead of understanding, etc. – but most people can learn social skills and that’s . . . how you have them. you learn them. if you didn’t ever learn, it’s not too late to start now, be candid, ask for help, etc.

A Lot of People (waggling eyebrows) are interested in devaluing that these skills require work and learning. and their devaluing in turn feeds into ableism, because the wide narrative is like “people just know” whatever. some stuff might be more inborn, but plenty more is conditioned

Another aside: Hmmm, bold move to lecture folks on ableism and neurodivergency after yelling about the unhealthy “asocial bookend,” AKA the bipolar clinically depressed cPTSD-having socially anxious shut-in, for having the temerity to ask you to clarify your belligerent accusations.

anyway 2025 is the year i relentlessly ask everyone to take a few seconds before replying. do you know what you’re talking about. is the person from a totally different context than you. pragmatically, will you seem like a total asshole because you didn’t take a few seconds. take a few seconds

and to be crystal clear. i do this and often decide not to post. if you can believe that i know haha. there’s plenty i don’t know, there’s plenty of context i will never understand. & there’s a reason most of my strong advice is just open ended like this haha. like slow down. do less.

I read this and just started. LAUGHING. HYSTERICALLY. White women will literally rewrite a situation that THEY CREATED and which was all public and in writing and perfectly archivable that anyone can go and look at, and tell you that actually, they were the victim, it was that mean ol’ ragin’ Asian who was yelling at them.

When I TELL you that white women are SO FUCKING VIOLENT, that the way these ~progressive~ fuckers don’t even bat an eye before immediately weaponizing their white tears to punish people trying to live their lives away from their white nonsense.

# Big mad

So, I did the one thing you’re not really supposed to do, and started posting through it. Because I was MAD. I was mad that this person decided to fling shit at me out of nowhere, mad that they burned all bridges to me because I wouldn’t take their shit, mad that they couldn’t stop talking shit, mad that they were now busily the rewriting reality of what anyone could see on these public posts. I am mad that at every step of the way, I had to take the high road lest I do end up looking like the villain to this royal white princess. Meanwhile Caroline was allowed to gaslight and bully folks into dropping all ties with me, taking the low road the whole way and being righteously angry at me, for…? For fuckin what? For not liking a book-tracking website?? For saying that the StoryGraph uses AI, a thing that the StoryGraph brags about right on its homepage??

I was mad, and still am mad, on behalf of all the people who are not allowed to be mad at all these fuckin Karens. I am mad at the way reading their own words back to them makes us look like assholes, I am mad that non-white users are constantly having to tiptoe around the delicate feelings of these noble and charitable whites who ““care about diversity in books”” but treat non-white, non-cisallohet, disabled people like idiots too stupid to understand their place. I am mad that by admitting that I am mad, I have already lost the argument for my right to dignity, to respect, to being left the fuck alone by this fuckin Karen.

I am mad that white women never think of me as their equal: never consider me a whole human being.

# i never harassed them

After I finally got Big Mad Online, Caroline read my posts (despite acknowledging that I had blocked her) and continued Posting Through It:

berserk du soleil (Caroline): i had a feeling and looked, it was because someone posted a really intense rage thread about me. you’re all free to support whoever and block whoever, but if you think it’s normal to respond this way to one social media post suggesting you’ve shared a misinformed opinion, please examine that.

anything i posted was because i either genuinely thought i could talk with this person and reason through it together (we were friends who talked regularly for months prior) or because the situation was making me reflect. i never harassed them, they did post the subtweet before they blocked me.

i took steps after SEEING that post. that is why i did that. the subtweet directly about myself that i saw in my own timeline. i don’t blame this person, i care about their wellness, but it seems they did not like me much all this time. that’s their prerogative. the rest is fine for them to say.

to be clear no one needs me to say anything is fine or not, sorry for implying that with my language. i just mean they said one thing that is fully untrue that they might just genuinely be mistaken about, but i swear to you i’m telling the truth. i have no issue with the rest & no matter if i did

There is a pattern here, of casting what I said and did (asking for clarification, blocking her after she flounced, posting receipts after she started rewriting reality) as “intense rage,” as needing to “examine” my (over)reaction to her “one social media post suggesting [I’ve] shared a misinformed opinion.” But her own actions were “reflecting” on the situation or “genuinely thinking she could talk with me and reason through it together.” She was the poor soul who had been languishing all this time under the “mistaken” impression that I liked her when actually I secretly “did not like [her] much all this time,” because why else would I do something horrible like post about how hurt I was that someone I thought was a friend had upset me. Why couldn’t I just realize how sorry and reflective she was about all of this? Wasn’t it enough that she made one self-righteous post after the other about how I am intensely raging or unhealthy or an asocial bookend no one asked for or maddening or too online or off the rails or posting my fully untrue misinformed opinion or venting spleen or lacking object permanence or or or? Why can’t this fuckin Jap just acknowledge how good she is, how righteous and correct???

It is the same trick that led Amy Cooper to think she was right to call the police on a Black man in Central Park. It is the same trick that white women have used throughout history to punish non-whites into quiet obedience. The constant threat of sudden violence erupting out of a white friend or acquaintance is meant to keep the rest of us in line. It could happen from anyone, even folks you thought were friends and tolerated your Oriental ass, so you’d better be on your best behavior at all times. Protecting the sanctity of whiteness and especially white cis women is a major driving force behind anti-immigrant, violently racist, wildly homophobic and transphobic rhetoric currently playing out on the world stage. All this is deliberately performative, both to teach other whites how to keep the non-whites in line, and to remind the non-whites of their place in the hierarchy. Anyone who steps out of line, who talks back, who gets a little too lippy, gets put down like a mad dog.

In short, yes: I am mad. LOL. I am, as a white woman might put it, an intensely ragin’ Asian. Of fucking course I am. It’s fuckin preposterous to demand otherwise. I have simply been on this good earth for too long to un-see how the stratifications of race, class, and standing affect my everyday interactions. I have experienced too much to un-learn how essential white tears are to maintaining this hellscape we all find ourselves in.

# We need diverse books

We need diverse books. We need books that deliberately de-center Western white voices, by writers who no longer instinctively wince when the whites show up like a hurricane to dominate and oppress and overwhelm. We need books that center Black voices and Latine voices and Indigenous voices and Asian voices and queer voices and disabled voices and trans voices and and and. We need worldbuilding where the whites are not at the top, imperiously demanding we dance and entertain and amuse, who throw us out and expect us to stay out once we’ve outlived our usefulness. We need books where white tears are as cherished as dog piss. We need a world where the whites don’t feel so emboldened to cow and threaten and harass and intimidate non-white folks who are just trying to live our fuckin lives without them.

The incredible thing is that, stripped from its buzzy marketing, “diverse books” as we know them already exist. You could fill a library with all the “diverse books” you’ve never heard of, and here’s the thing: they do, and they call them libraries. The only thing is they’re not being published in English and marketed to Western majority-white markets. We need a world where the term “diverse books” is considered redundant and obsolete and borderline meaningless, and incredibly, we’re already there. No, you’re probably not going to encounter them by remaining in your comfortable Western majority-white literary bubbles, you’re not gonna see them by using algorithms fed on the biases of millions of Karens. The world is so fucking rich with text and culture that is multilayered and imperfect and confusing and confused and shameful and ashamed and curious and sparking and breathing and pulsing and alive. This is because, believe it or not, there are people who exist beyond the borders of your skin.

It is a deeply incurious person who doesn’t realize this, who thinks that diversity and culture are things to collect like baubles and consume, to neatly label and put away into their little boxes and gaze upon with satisfaction, to take out and show off to guests when they come over to emphasize your status as One Of The Good Ones. Why should non-white, non-cisallohet, disabled people let you come gawk at their communities? Are you a fuckin tourist, or are you an ally? Are you here to loot and ransack, or are you here to contribute? Is “diverse book” just some marketing buzzword, or is it a belief that you are not, actually, the Protagonist of Reality? There are whole worlds out there filled with people doing absolutely incredible shit that you’ll never even have the privilege of knowing about.

The only thing stopping you from reading “diverse books” is your own fool self.

# This sure was a lot of words

Yeah, I’m sorry, lmao. The worst part when someone tries to rewrite reality is that you are forced to remember it for everyone else, to keep painstaking mental records of what was said when and to whom lest reality gets overwritten, and after all that you look absolutely fucking insane for still chewing over it months later.

I don’t have an ending paragraph or pithy sign-off. This is just something I’ve been thinking about a lot, against my will, and I needed to extract this poison out of my system and see it all written out in front of me so that I can reassure myself that no, actually, all of this really DID happen. And it will keep happening, again and again, forever, because there is no end to these Karens doing their part for white supremacy. We don’t need diverse books to educate and entertain Karens; it is, actually, perfectly fine to leave them far in the past where they belong.

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