When the GOP was founded in the 1850s, how many of the key players were Southerners — or at least people who thought of themselves, culturally, as Southerners?
That would be pretty much zero. The Republican Party is the first really sectional party. The parties had always been national, in part because they didn’t have telegraphs (so it was easy for you to say one thing in one section of the country and another thing somewhere else) …
But during the Civil War, the Republican Party ran the country itself — not all Democrats, but many of the Democrats had left — and what they did was so enormously popular that when the war was over not only were all African-Americans in the South Republican voters … [but many whites were too].Many universities and events deliberately try to select diverse speakers, and I think it’s a fine way to expose audiences to writers of different backgrounds. But I was startled to hear there weren’t many Asian American women fiction writers. Off the top of my head, I could think of several dozen.
Still, I’d heard similar statements throughout my book tour, in multiple cities: sometimes in delighted surprise at having found me, sometimes in disappointment at finding only me. I heard it enough to realize that even many serious readers — the kind of people who come to author readings on gorgeous summer evenings — just can’t name any Asian American women writers beyond the phenomenally well-known Amy Tan.
This blind spot is all the more surprising because 2014 has been full of attempts to highlight issues of diversity in literature, and to move the literary default away from, well, white men.
Early on, 2014 was designated the “Year of Reading Women.” Partly inspired by the annual VIDA count — which for four straight years has shown a huge gender disparity in major literary publications — the #ReadWomen2014 movement encouraged readers to do just that.
In May, Book Expo America was widely criticized when the initial lineup for BookCon, its public event, contained virtually no women and virtually no people of color. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign arose in response, to promote greater diversity in children’s and YA literature. (Full disclosure: I took part in a BookCon panel myself, in the awkward position of a woman of color who had actually been invited months before the controversy.)
The 500-plus pages of the Senate Committee report that was publicly released is less than 10 percent of the more than 6,000 pages compiled by the panel’s investigators, the remainder of which remains classified. No telling when we will get to read it. Consider that the full text of the Vietnam era Pentagon Papers did not see the full light of day until 2011.
Although white New Yorkers may still be inclined to give the police the benefit of the doubt – as I saw on my Facebook page this year – the video of Eric Garner being killed has had an effect on their certainty that cops are always the good guys. The murders of officers Ramos and Liu may have changed that, at least temporarily.
But we should also remember that the officers killed were named Ramos and Liu. The NYPD has diversified enormously since my childhood, though its leadership has not. The families of the two dead officers haven’t joined in the denunciations of De Blasio, or the movement against police violence.The way that last part repeats, year after year, can make it seem like homelessness is an entrenched, unchanging part of our society. But data from recent years shows the nature of the problem is shifting dramatically before our eyes.On social media, many people were understandably offended at the suggestion that Asian American women weren’t writing fiction. “People think we don’t exist???” tweeted @NayomiMunaweera. “Like Bigfoot? Ridiculous. We are everywhere if you only look!” But I’ve mostly found that this perception comes from lack of awareness, rather than dismissiveness. The readers, professors and event organizers who’ve said such things to me sincerely want to add diversity to their lineups. They just don’t know where to look.
When the GOP was founded in the 1850s, how many of the key players were Southerners — or at least people who thought of themselves, culturally, as Southerners?
That would be pretty much zero. The Republican Party is the first really sectional party. The parties had always been national, in part because they didn’t have telegraphs (so it was easy for you to say one thing in one section of the country and another thing somewhere else) …
But during the Civil War, the Republican Party ran the country itself — not all Democrats, but many of the Democrats had left — and what they did was so enormously popular that when the war was over not only were all African-Americans in the South Republican voters … [but many whites were too].Many universities and events deliberately try to select diverse speakers, and I think it’s a fine way to expose audiences to writers of different backgrounds. But I was startled to hear there weren’t many Asian American women fiction writers. Off the top of my head, I could think of several dozen.
Still, I’d heard similar statements throughout my book tour, in multiple cities: sometimes in delighted surprise at having found me, sometimes in disappointment at finding only me. I heard it enough to realize that even many serious readers — the kind of people who come to author readings on gorgeous summer evenings — just can’t name any Asian American women writers beyond the phenomenally well-known Amy Tan.
This blind spot is all the more surprising because 2014 has been full of attempts to highlight issues of diversity in literature, and to move the literary default away from, well, white men.
Early on, 2014 was designated the “Year of Reading Women.” Partly inspired by the annual VIDA count — which for four straight years has shown a huge gender disparity in major literary publications — the #ReadWomen2014 movement encouraged readers to do just that.
In May, Book Expo America was widely criticized when the initial lineup for BookCon, its public event, contained virtually no women and virtually no people of color. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign arose in response, to promote greater diversity in children’s and YA literature. (Full disclosure: I took part in a BookCon panel myself, in the awkward position of a woman of color who had actually been invited months before the controversy.)
The 500-plus pages of the Senate Committee report that was publicly released is less than 10 percent of the more than 6,000 pages compiled by the panel’s investigators, the remainder of which remains classified. No telling when we will get to read it. Consider that the full text of the Vietnam era Pentagon Papers did not see the full light of day until 2011.
Although white New Yorkers may still be inclined to give the police the benefit of the doubt – as I saw on my Facebook page this year – the video of Eric Garner being killed has had an effect on their certainty that cops are always the good guys. The murders of officers Ramos and Liu may have changed that, at least temporarily.
But we should also remember that the officers killed were named Ramos and Liu. The NYPD has diversified enormously since my childhood, though its leadership has not. The families of the two dead officers haven’t joined in the denunciations of De Blasio, or the movement against police violence.The way that last part repeats, year after year, can make it seem like homelessness is an entrenched, unchanging part of our society. But data from recent years shows the nature of the problem is shifting dramatically before our eyes.On social media, many people were understandably offended at the suggestion that Asian American women weren’t writing fiction. “People think we don’t exist???” tweeted @NayomiMunaweera. “Like Bigfoot? Ridiculous. We are everywhere if you only look!” But I’ve mostly found that this perception comes from lack of awareness, rather than dismissiveness. The readers, professors and event organizers who’ve said such things to me sincerely want to add diversity to their lineups. They just don’t know where to look.
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