Sponsored by TorDotComPublishing (@TorDotComPub).
Andrea Hairston’s award-winning alternate history adventure transports readers to turn-of-the-20th-century America, where diverse audiences hunker together in dark theatres to marvel at flickering images. Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from haunted Georgia swampland to a “city-of-the-future” Chicago. They’re gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, struggling to call up the wondrous world they imagine, on stage and screen, and in wounded hearts. The power of hoodoo is the power of the community that believes in its capacities to heal. Their search for a place to be who they want is an exhilarating, painful, magical adventure.
Welcome to In Reading Color, a space where we focus on literature by and about people of color.
In tired, are-you-still-on this news, there has been backlash against the diverse casting in the new Lord of the Rings series. There’s a Black dwarf princess and an Afro-Latine elf, and the racists are big madT. I have to admit my… I don’t know, maybe I should refer to it as naïveté, because I really thought people were over this. I mean, we are in the middle of a pandemic still, and there are disaster-fires of various severity still going on all over the world. People are still taking the time to be mad about a fictional world not having all white people in it, though. I can’t.
l remember years ago when the Hunger Games movies were coming out and people were mad that Rue was cast as a Black girl, even though she was Black in the books. More recently, John Boyega in Star Wars and Halle Bailey as the future Little Mermaid also ruffled racists’ feathers. The logic against diverse casting in a lot of these complaints always seems to be that these non-white characters wouldn’t have existed in middle earth/space/undersea. All of the other non-realistic elements— like the existence of mermaids, magical elves, sci-fi wars in space, etc.— are perfectly acceptable, though. Plus, these people never seem to keep that same energy for when white people are playing Black or other non-white characters. Just say you don’t want to see non-white people and go.
Another argument against swapping races for TV and movie adaptations is simply that it’s not canon, which may be tempting for some to accept as a valid argument. That is, until you start accounting for all the times white actors have played non-white characters and no one batted an eye. This article by HuffPost is a few years old, so it doesn’t have more recent examples, but the side-by-side comparisons make such a good case. Non-white erasure has been so prominent in Hollywood that giving a few actors who aren’t white the chance to play traditionally white characters is just the beginning of fixing a system that is so dangerously discriminatory.
Still, there are some people of color who think that instead of putting non-white characters where there were none before, we should just produce more works by authors and screenwriters of color. I personally think we need to do both. We need that different perspective that comes from non-white writers, but we should also continue to diversify previously non-diverse scripts and books because there is still discrimination— that has been going on for decades— concerning whose scripts get chosen. What do you think?
A Few New Books Out
Middle Grade
A Comb of Wishes by Lisa Stringfellow
Rima’s Rebellion: Courage in a Time of Tyranny by Margarita Engle
Young Adult
Cold by Mariko Tamaki
Cherish Farrah by Bethany C. Morrow
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Lulu and Milagro’s Search for Clarity by Angela Velez
Ophelia After All by Racquel Marie
Sunny G’s Series of Rash Decisions by Navdeep Singh Dhillon
You Truly Assumed by Laila Sabreen
Reclaim the Stars: 17 Tales Across Realms & Space by Zoraida Cordova
The Chandler Legacies by Abdi Nazemian
Make sure to get your own Read Harder Book Journal from Book Riot to track your reading for the year!
Adult
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God Is a Black Woman by Christena Cleveland
Homicide and Halo-Halo by Mia P. Manansala
Jawbone by Mónica Ojed
Nobody’s Magic by Destiny O. Birdsong
Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James
The Almond in the Apricot by Sara Goudarzi
Don’t forget you can get three free audiobooks at Audiobooks.com with a free trial!
A Little Sumn Extra
The cast of Washington Black looks really good so far!
Take it back to the ’90s with these series you should read this year
Glory Edim Launches Well-Read Black Girl Series
Jaime Herndon reread Fahrenheit 451 and compares it to the current state of book banning and censorship that’s going on
Here are some South Asian books to read this year
Here are some Affrilachian poetry collections to get into
DC shows its lineup for 2022 movies, one of which is Black Adam, played by The Rock
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I’m a sucker for a nice bookmark, and this one featuring Zora Neale Hurston is deliciously vintage. $12
Erika Hardison’s list of bookish Black Etsy shops has a lot of other cute things, like washi tape that has a super kawaii Meg Thee Stallion in cowboy chaps (!!).
Thanks for reading; it’s been cute! If you want to reach out and connect, email me at erica@riotnewmedia.com or tweet at me @erica_eze_. You can find me on the Hey YA podcast with the fab Tirzah Price, as well as in the In The Club newsletter.
Until next week,
-E