Why You Should Examine the Diversity Quota Of Your Bookshelf
Bookshelves Can Fuel Prejudice. They Can Also Cure It.
I just finished reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own; an essay which incisively shows that women’s silence in fiction was down to their social marginalisation; they weren’t allowed the time, resources or the space with which to create masterpieces, and then were judged as creatively inferior on this absence. Upon finishing it, I had a sudden realisation: I noticed that I only had one female author on my bookshelf.
How had I been blind to such a glaring absence for so long? It shocked me, deeply, to realise that I had ignored half the human race’s output for twenty years. One can only imagine how creatively and experientially impoverished I am as a result. Moreover, the realisation sparked a memory: In my first year at University I clearly recall myself being caustic about a female lecturer’s attempt to rebalance the gender representation on the course syllabus. She showed us the exclusively male reading list and had interposed female authors to redress this, including Woolf. Woolf’s words, fresh in my mind, perfectly articulated why I was so hostile to the lecturers actions: “When one is challenged… one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively.” My privilege had been challenged and I floundered helplessly. Someone dared to rock the pedestal I had been placed upon at birth without realising it.
This exact same process is documented in Robin Diangelo’s book White Fragility, and I was a prime example. If anyone spoke out against the patriarchy or white privilege I checked out, too fragile to address these issues. I’m not sure if my whitewashed and male-centric bookshelf is a symptom or a cause, but either way, it certainly did nothing to open my eyes to the daily reality for other ethnic groups or the opposing gender. I sequestered myself away and ignored the struggles of others; it was easy enough considering the media and society as a whole never provoked me to question my privilege either, particularly my racial insulation. The point is, with social media tailoring content to support our views, and the media rarely willing to speak out about white privilege, the only way to challenge my prejudice would be to seek out others experiences myself.
This is where reading can help: reading’s greatest gift is that it allows you to see with others eyes, whilst remaining yourself. Good books can take you out of your experience of life and allow you to witness another’s. As C.S. Lewis famously said:
“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see.”
Unfortunately, I had subconsciously chosen only one pair of eyes; the middle class, white heterosexual male. Indeed, I had tailored my bookshelf to reinforce my worldview, and made sure that it never challenged my comfortable- but subjective- reality. We are living in an important time; a monumental shift is occurring and slowly but surely we are rooting out power inequalities, systemic racism and sexism. One way society is doing this is by diversifying the halls of power. Alongside this, each of us, on a personal level, can tackle these wider prejudices and power imbalances by making sure our bookshelves represent the healthy diversity of views and people also. By doing this, we can escape the perils of parochialism.
In short, we have a choice; our bookshelves can be bastions of comfort that reassure us of our views, or, we can make them truly representative of human experience and thus challenge our firmly held beliefs. Of course you can have escapist literature- the anaesthetics that take the edge of a hard day- but there is always room for a counter-opinion. Every now and then, I pick up a book that I feel not just indifferent to, but actively resistant to, because that is often a subtle sign that it has challenged a belief which has gone unquestioned. This is healthy and I advise you to do so also.
Take Why I’m No Longer Talking About Race With White People By Reni Eddo-Lodge. I walked past this book on multiple occasions in Waterstones; each time I eyed it, felt a pang of discomfort, and glided to a safer section of the store. One day I stopped by the book, read the blurb, recoiled, and threw it down on the heap of 2 for 1 Non-Fiction. Eventually, whilst passing the book yet again, I stopped and asked myself: why am I so offended by this cover? What is it about being addressed racially that makes me shut down? Why does this book make me uncomfortable? I picked the book up alongside some lighter reading, took it home, and thank goodness I did. It was eye opening, and believe it or not, it was actually the first book by a Black or for that matter a Female author on my bookshelf.
The more I read Of Lodge, the more I awoke to my own white privelege and realised that I was working from a script society had inculcated in me. What I thought was a reasonable objection to calls of white privilege quickly came to seem like a subconscious party line that white people are raised to recite. Black authors listed defences commonly used by white people and phrases that I had been using for years.
All this suggested that people were not reaching these views on their own, but being insidiously filled with such ideas by a dominant but fragile white ruling class. Thoughts that I believed to be my own were shown to be the result of a collective white script that was forever peddled but never questioned. It was alarming to see that I had fallen victim to unquestioningly saying these things. I had scoffed at prejudice in other forms, and yet here I was, fallen prey to it myself. By reading I had opened myself up to someone outside of the bubble of privilege; without that book, I might have gone to the grave ignorant.
Eddo Lodge also captured the real reason for my hostility to the female lecturer and her representative curriculum at University:
“White people are so used to seeing a reflection of themselves in all representations of humanity at all times, that they only notice it when its taken away from them”
Abundantly true, and if you change “white people” to “males”, you begin to see why 18 year old me, fed on a diet of male greats, felt so affronted by the introduction of females. For 20 years I allowed myself to be shaped and inspired by white middle class men; I existed in a creative world that was whitewashed and male-centric. I encourage you to take a look at your own bookshelf and to see how diverse it is- Be honest, and be objective. It is uncomfortable to root out your own prejudices, but it is necessary; it is our civic duty to self-educate.
In short, not to act is to act in the face of systemic racism or misogyny. Either we are against racial inequality and social injustice or we support it in our silence and dithering. This is not the time for “But’s” or silence, but the time for support and self-evaluation. This is the time to look inwards and to identify whether we stay silent because of privilege, the time to challenge intuitive biases that live within us, and to purge them. In short, now is the time to choose to be on the right side of history. The first step? Diversify your bookshelf.
