Booktube Stats and the Denial of Intersections
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” –Toni Morrison
The tracking of one’s reading goals and trends throughout the year is very popular on #Booktube. There are an abundance of Reading Stats videos where one talks about whether or not they are on track with their bookish goals. There are graphs and charts galore. As a reader, I think it’s a great way to track how our reading changes throughout the months and years. However, there is one thing that continues to pop up in these videos that makes me cringe: The diversity graph.
It might look something like this:
A while back, my friend and I were discussing this type of categorizing and she said something that really stuck with me, “You look at someone and you [think you] know their background or how they define themselves. White privilege allows for that.” I would add, so does cishetero privilege.
What is wrong with these graphs?
The term, “People of Color,” or POC, can be incredibly powerful when used in the right context and with full comprehension. However, when this term is used in communities that still center whiteness, it becomes just another way to point out the non-whites. So, for me, these types of graphs provide visual proof of the lack of understanding of the political, social, economic and racialized nuances of the term, “People of Color.”
How do I know this? Because of who is using the term, how they are using it, and where this all started: Booktube’s “Let’s Read Diversely” movement. (To be fair, that’s not its official title, but it feels appropriate.) With this “movement” came a group of people that, while still centering whiteness, wanted to read books that were more ethnically diverse. It then evolved to include books by/about LGBTQ+, women (usually white), and just about anything outside the reader’s comfort zone (genre, POV, etc.). This conversation on diversity took place among mostly white and cishetero booktubers. And when a person of color did talk about diversity they were either token-ized or erased.
That leads us into the real issue with these graphs: the denial of intersections.
For example, you read a book and see that the writer is a black woman. You decide she fits into the category of “POC.” However, what else do you know about her? Is she non-binary, queer, biracial, trans? These are intersections, and for many people one intersection cannot be placed higher than another because they all are equally important to that person’s identity.
And reducing someone’s identity to the label that you find most important is harmful and often triggering.
“For me, personally and politically, there’s NO separating my woman-ness, my black-ness, my trans-ness from my me-ness.” –Janet Mock
You are ignoring and denying their intersectionality, defining them without their input, and centering whiteness and cisheterosexuality at the expense of these POC and LGBTQ+ people.
With specificity comes empowerment.
To be able to identify myself as a cis queer black woman is incredibly empowering. And to have someone reduce my identity to just “person of color” for the sake of haste (FOR A GRAPH) is not okay. This is why the understanding and acknowledgment of intersectionality is important.
Although one might argue that this is all harmless fun and isn’t meant to be about something deeper than just tracking goals, that person would be wrong. You can’t argue that “reading diversely” and representation matter when you are doing something that is counter to those ideas. If diversity and representation do matter, then so does respecting how a person identifies. And it isn’t for you to decide what is harmful to someone else. By the very definition of a microaggression, these reductive categorizations can seem relatively innocent when viewed individually. And, like other microaggressions, they are often dismissed by those who perpetrate them. However, their pervasive and cumulative quality means they cannot be ignored.
The harmful nature of the graphs becomes even more apparent when compared with these creators’ graphs of their genre trends. There may be twenty categories representing all different types of books, but individual identities get boiled down to a mere two. Can a graph featuring two identifiers really represent all the diversity that exists in literature?
If you care about people of color, whether they be the writers you read or the viewers of your channel, then you will think about why you feel the need to track and graph them. If you care about the LGBTQ+ community, you will think about your use of only two gender identifiers. The graph is representative of more than just a way to measure how your reading differs over time. It is yet another way in which white, liberal guilt manifests itself. It is the feel good-ery that comes with reading more POC and/or LGBTQ+ writers than your fellow white cishet friends. It is the reduction of art and someone else’s hard work to a moment of humble brags. It is boiling down someone’s identity to the color of their skin or your perception of their gender and sexuality.
So, does a graph seem worth it?
This was in no way meant to attack anyone who might have made a stats video, I just wanted people to be more aware of these things. I hope the world is entering an age where these discussions are not only occurring more often but are thought to be necessary.
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