It Don't Matter if You're Black or White

Or does it?

Since I've been spending time on Blogging in Black, my eyes have been opened to the (subtle) institutional racism in the publishing (and other) industries.

I spent some time talking with a couple of friends of mine about the issue of the bookstore placement of books by black authors - in the "African-American" section. As I said to them, no other race or nationality has a designated section in bookstores.

It bothers me because the explanation given by the major chain bookstores is so weak. Basically, they say that they group "our" books together so that first-time authors will have a better shot at getting noticed.

Noticed by whom?

As I've been perusing Christian fiction by African-American authors, I am disturbed when I go into Borders to find their novels placed next to Zane and "Riding Dirty on the I-95". (And before I get flamed, this is not to disparage these works; it's just to call out the disparity in these types of fiction.) Why shouldn't works by Victoria Christopher Murray, ReShonda Tate Billingsley and Tiffany Warren sit next to the works of Neta Jackson, Karen Kingsbury and Angela Hunt?

I recently went to a Borders store in Las Vegas. There was no stand-alone African-American section. It was just a couple of columns in the fiction section. Now I don't know if that made things better or worse. If I had to guess, I'd say worse because I wouldn't have found it all without a lot of searching.

I guess my point is that all writers should be treated equal - in marketing, publishing and book displays. But I suppose that's wishful thinking on my part. Until African-Americans can play a bigger role in the publishing industry, we should be grateful that we can get our books in bookstores at all.

In Him,
Donna