The Hind End of Space

medievalpoc:

ktempest:

I Challenge You To Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors For One Year

The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women, books by people from outside the US or in translation, books by people with disabilities.
After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent a marginalized identity or experience by any author. In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths, working class or poor, and asexual (as a start).

This article by my friend K. T. Bradford  for XOJane seems to have attracted a silly amount of controversy, and unfortunately, hatemail. I have certainly done versions of this Challenge myself in previous years, more than once. Which is how/why I have so much to say and post for Fiction Weeks here at Medievalpoc.

All this is about is making thoughtful choices about what you read. It’s about diversifying your own empathetic capabilities. Instead, a rather ridiculous bunch of people seemed to take this as “Gaiman hate”, which is of course, absurd. Especially considering Gaiman’s response:

Pretending that grabbing books at random is somehow “more fair” than actually making thoughtful choices about the books you read not only ignores systemic inequality in the publishing world, it’s silly. We all choose books to read for reasons. A challenge to read, say, only women authors, only disabled authors, only authors of color, for a limited time is a fantastic way to discover new and fascinating worlds and perspectives.

zentastic:

redamancer:

coonami:

Why

holy shit okay this is, again, people applying western race relations to other countries and i will not have it

japan is notorious, absolutely notorious for fetishizing and being outright racist when it comes to stereotypes and other races. if you live in japan or you’ve ever experienced what it’s like to be a non-japanese person in japan,

japan is not the united states. the race dynamics are incredibly different. there are plenty of restaurants and businesses which have the sign ‘japanese only’ brazenly hung outside their walls. if you’re korean in japan? good fucking luck taking on the immense amount of racism that both the government and the general populace will hurl your way. there are third generation korean kids, who for three generations have had their families live in japan, who do not have japanese citizen ship purely based on the fact they have korean blood in them.

black people? a joke too. in japan they’re all buff, they’re all angry, and there is little presented to the country outside of outrageous stereotypes.

white people? you’re ignorant or you’re all idiots. that’s the truth, and it starts to deviate once you get into country by country. americans are all loud and fat and ignorant. british people are all upper class or fucking royalty of some kind. 

so yes, it is offense. it’s offensive to not ‘white people’ in america, it’s offensive to the white demographic of japan, who funnily enough, don’t benefit from white privilege in a country in which they are not the ones on top of the ruling power structure.

i’m so sick and tired of westerners applying their racial dynamics to countries that have nothing to fucking do with them. 

what’s even worse is white bloggers reblogging this going ‘oooh lmao’ about a country that has nothing to do with their racial politics in an attempt to seem more open-minded, which has the opposite effect when you’re basically imprinting your own views and your own country’s status on to another country’s. but i guess colonialism is dead, right?

not everywhere is america for fuck’s sake

no don’t you dare say that about the glorious Nippon land of the rising sun D8 they are a perf civilization duhhhh