Diversifying Your Reading List? Don’t Expect Me to Do Your Research
By: Lindsey Danis
Tags: Self Improvement, Books, Women In Tech, Diversity, Feminism

Diversifying Your Reading List? Don’t Expect Me to Do Your Research

I’m done congratulating semi-woke dudes.

Midway through my reply to a tweet asking for book recommendations, I second-guessed myself. Why should I help you, I found myself thinking.

The you in question was, unsurprisingly, a white dude.

The dude in question had tweeted a version of what first seems innocuous, laudable. A worthy goal.

He said that he’d recently noticed his bookshelf was full of books by white men and announced that he wanted to read more women, POC, and LGBTQ authors. Who could recommend some good books?

I could, and I’d started to (pointing to Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Tommy Orange’s There There, recent reads, then suggesting T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls) but something stopped me from tweeting out my recs and it wasn’t worry over literary Twitter judging my taste in reading.

I wanted the dude to do his own research.

I didn’t know what kind of books he liked to read — if he was a fan of mysteries, he might not have liked my picks.

I did agree with his sentiment — we should all be reading more books by historically marginalized authors, and I’ve been working on diversifying my reading lists in recent years, too.

But his ask felt both self-congratulatory (I mean, it’s Twitter) and lazy. Dude just noticed? Yeah right.

I’ve noticed that certain men, when they try to be good allies to women and queer folk, often expect to be appreciated for their efforts in allyship, and I didn’t have that in me.

Yes, I can recommend you some books I enjoyed. Yes, I have a library science degree and I worked in a bookstore, and I do actually enjoy recommending books and sharing books and talking about books. But websites from Bustle to Electric Literature are full of reading lists containing popular books by authors who happen to be fill-in-the-black: Queer, immigrants, black, POC, women, and so on. Whoever you want to read, there is a done-for-you list that will diversify your shelves.

Dude does not need me or anyone else to tell him what to read. He can just Google it and help himself.

As a queer woman trying to make a living and get published, I don’t have the time to help bring dude up to speed on the literary contributions of everyone else. No more free emotional labor in the form of a retweet or a reply.

I’ve got nothing against trying to diversify your reading list. Certainly, we could all use a different perspective or different lens than how we normally see the world. It’s just that I don’t need to help you get there if you’re a well-meaning white dude.

Consider this the invitation to step up, and do better.

Dig in, and do your homework to read more inclusively

The journey in discovering new-to-you authors who happen to be women or queer or POC (or all of the above course) is a rich one that will surprise you if you’re willing to take it.

But you gotta take that journey for yourself. You know what you like much better than I do. And after recognizing the cis-hetero white goggles you’ve been wearing all these years — the stories you value and the voices you’ve heard (check out this Fairer Cents episode on men’s reaction to women’s voices), it’s time for you to get down to the work the rest of us have been doing.