As many of you know, I spent the last week on my regular meditation trip in Prague.
If you haven’t been out of the country, you simply must go. I don’t really know how anyone can have an opinion on anything without having left the country. Travel teaches you a lot about how other people live, and empathy is meaningless without direct experience. Empathy isn’t a general quality one can possess. It’s something that can only be earned by experiencing life in ways that imitate the lives others have experienced.
I was staring at the ceiling of my rented room when I thought about the fact that I needed to make a reading challenge this year.
The thing is, many of us read dozens of books every year. The people worth talking to, anyway. If you don’t read at least 10 books in a calendar year, I can’t even right now. You need to stop wasting your time doing whatever it is you’re doing and read a bunch of books.
But even though we read a lot of books and are therefore smart and educated and cultured and great, we don’t always take care to look at who is writing those books.
And all too often, it’s straight, white, cis men. They’re everywhere. I can’t attend a football match without being seated next to a straight white cis man, and he’s probably making sexist comments about the cheerleaders. Don’t these buffoons know that this is the MOST damaging part of cheerleading, the fact that oafs make comments? Women should be able to get paid to dress in almost no clothes and kick their legs high in the air and have underwear with words on it without you LOOKING at them. With your male gaze. Until you can learn to appreciate the art of synchronized dance moves performed while your fists are plunged into foil balls, and until you can realize that it’s not the concussive effects of football but the sexualized thoughts hurled at cheerleaders that are football’s primary problem, you should avert your eyes whenever a cheerleader makes a move. It’s only right.
Anyway, I’ve decided to make some reading pledges here. No, I didn’t take the example of K.T. Bradford who DID something similar and then wrote about it AFTERWARD. I’m writing about it first. That’s the right thing to do.
See, I’m a believer in something called S.M.A.R.T. goals. What are S.M.A.R.T. goals?
S: Shareable. Make it easy to share your goals online.
M: Marketable. Make sure your goal generates posts that can be used on other web sites.
A: Asinine number of selfies somehow. If you can’t take a picture of yourself that relates to your goal, then what are you even doing?
R: Retweetable.
T: Tweetable. I know this relates to the one above, but if you don’t know the difference between tweetability and retweetability, I’m surprised you’ve managed to survive this long.
Here are my pledges to you, the community of people who are not white, cis, straight men.
I pledge to recognize the magnitude of the sacrifice I’m making here. Yes, MY reading list for the next year is being devoted to a cause. I know that many POCs had to make big sacrifices to see their work in print, emotional, financial, personal sacrifices, and I’m matching those sacrifices by willfully creating this challenge for myself, putting us on a pretty equal level.
I pledge to not FORCE anyone to recognize this act of greatness, but if someone just happened to, I would definitely share that praise no more than 12 times on a maximum of 6 separate online platforms. Don’t want to get a big head.
I pledge to relentlessly Google any author who I can’t tell is immediately outside the category I’ve set. Is Seo Kim transgender? I don’t know. Is Jonathan Lethem bisexual? I actually don’t know. But you can bet your ass I’m going to find out before I read his new book, which sounds pretty awesome. This invasion(ish) of authors’ personal lives is the price they pay for not making it immediately apparent that they’re not straight, white, cis males. On this note, if I happen to call you because you happen to have been a roommate of Jonathan Lethem, and if I ask you whether or not you ever made out, your honesty is very necessary and very appreciated, and for the sake of reading Lethem’s new book, I’m willing to entertain the idea of a single drunken kiss on the cheek as evidence of bisexuality provided one of the two of you felt even a small spark of unexpected passion.
I pledge to only enlarge portions of book covers a maximum of 25% this year. I read on the subway, and I like to enlarge the author name, especially if it sounds very non-white, so that everyone else on the subway is aware of what I’m doing. This is easily done. Simply take a trip to Kinko’s, enlarge the cover, and cut off the extra bullshit. I also like to enlarge the back cover so everyone knows that the author is not white, when applicable. If there is no author photo on the back, I simply find one online, cut and paste, and a quick trip to Kinko’s solves everything.
I pledge to look up authors before I buy the books this time. I’m not making the same mistakes I have before. Seriously, who names a man “Kim?” That’s a trap set by the patriarchy. Nice try, the patriarchy.
I pledge, in fact, to look up the authors of any and all books before reading the descriptions, starting with Google images and moving from there, if necessary.
I pledge that I will not hire a man to give George R.R. Martin a handjob in the event that his next book comes out sometime this year. I will also stop researching his genealogy in hopes of finding he’s got a significant percentage of non-white ancestry. Basically, I will accept that George R.R. Martin is who he is, and is therefore ineligible this year.
I pledge to review all of the books I read as part of this experiment, and to start each review with a reminder of exactly what I’m doing and why I’m doing it as that is significant information for a book review. It’s very important that other readers know that I know that this author is not white/cis/straight/male.
I pledge to stop telling people they “simply must” read Ulysses and/or Infinite Jest and to start telling people they “simply must” read White Teeth and/or Interpreter Of Maladies whenever the topic of books comes up.
I pledge to continue talking about the idea of gender and sexuality being spectrums in all realms except for this one. Does James Patterson crank it to videos of men getting it on exclusively? Doesn’t matter. He’s still straight. Not enough to flip that on/off switch in this case.
I pledge to read nothing by straight white cis men this year EXCEPT for other blogs by straight white cis men about how they’re not reading anything by straight white cis men. Straight white cis men do the best blogs about not reading straight white cis men.
I pledge to write fan letters to the authors I end up liking as a result of this, starting each letter with “I might not have picked up your book, but I looked at your author photo, it checks some of the demographic boxes of this challenge I’m doing, so I thought I might as well give it a whirl.”
I pledge to stay in my book club and force my book club to either go this route OR suffer through me booktalking whatever I’VE been reading for the last month while they read their tomes of oppression.
I pledge to dress with my penis on the right side, as per usual, but to make sure I don’t stand on the subway with a woman on my right. There’s no way she would know this was happening, but I find my penis pointing at someone, even in a 100% flaccid state, fully covered in clothing, to be an aggressive act that’s inexcusable. Some have told me this is an odd practice, but that it’s just an odd practice until you announce it online to the world, at which point it becomes very, very strange and creepy. But my policy is to announce my decisions online, this included. I know this doesn’t really relate to a reading goal, but it’s been surprisingly difficult to figure out a jazzy way to make this into a Pinterest pin, so here we are.
I pledge, that if I HAVE to read a book by a straight white cis male, not by choice but for work or other obligations, or that if I accidentally do it, that I will cleanse and renew myself by:
A) Flipping through an entire collected works of Georgia O’Keefe.
B) Extra super huge tipping the nice lady at the [country of origin removed to avoid stereotyping] restaurant.
C) Writing lots of margin notes in the book regarding the ways in which Chang Rae-Lee would have written it better and passing this copy onto others.
I pledge to solve, once and for all, whether trans writers are always “trans.” For example, Caitlyn Jenner will always be trans, never a cis woman? Or is now a cis woman, therefore does not count as a trans writer? And if Caitlyn previously felt like a woman in a man’s body (to grossly oversimplify), does that mean the book Finding The Champion Within credited to “Bruce Jenner” counts as a book by a trans author? Normally I wouldn’t make these judgments, however it’s required for this project, and this project seems like the best basis for making such distinctions in a very uniform, binary way. Normally, these categorizations are unimportant to me and people can be whatever they tell me as I believe that gender is a construct and genitals do not equal gender. However, this is a reading list, and we need to treat it with a level of gravitas that precludes people making their own decisions willy-nilly.
I pledge to find a way to overpronounce “Ta-Nehisi Coates” with just a slight affect. Not enough to get anyone to say anything about it, just enough to make people distracted by it and think maybe they heard it wrong before, and then listen really closely to how NPR says it.
I pledge to find out whether Jewish people count as white or not. Possibly by asking a Jewish person, if that can be arranged.
I pledge to memorize the title for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf including proper placement of the slash, to to have it memorized to well that I can rattle it off like it’s nothing.