I'm thinking a lot about how epistemic humility and curiosity are so essential to better understanding the world around us and other beings. Yet, our education systems and anthropocentric (and other -centric) ways of thinking are designed to convince us of the completeness of our own understandings and even superiority over others. I recall being shocked that the central message of my (elitist) law school education was "you are one of the smartest people in society and therefore you get to be the arbiters of rules." The professors routinely shut down students that challenged, based on their own lived experience, the assumptions and hypotethicals the professors set forth in class. Because the hierarchy of knowledge has been settled, and everything must be rendered knowable and fit into the knowledge system of the existing institution of law. They couldn't even get to standpoint epistemology at the human level let alone conceive of the myriad Umwelten outside the realm of human perception. But an ecological ethics or even basic human empathy requires a certain level of acceptance that each of our perceptions and knowledges and interpretations are limited.

Also having a separate thought about how even among human beings, there is wide variation in our sensory worlds. I'm really curious, for example, about what a loud, crowded room "feels" like to someone who is not AuDHD and highly sensitive to auditory stimuli at the frequencies of human voices and music. I also wonder what it feels like to seamlessly pick up on social cues and almost reflexively deploy nonverbal cues in the same wavelength.

This isn't going to come out as well as I want it to, but I'm going to do my best.

It has come to my attention that there is some confusion about my Black Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Speculative Fiction list. Apparently, there was an understanding that only Black authors are included in that list, that I was specifically curating the list for that purpose, and some dismay when it turned out this wasn't the case. I understand that this is a conversation that could take place on the forum for that list. But because it's one of the most popular lists on Pagebound and what I have to say applies outside of the readers on that list, I wanted to open this conversation up to the wider community.

Black people are not a monolith. They exist in communities all over the world. Sometimes they're in community primarily with other Black African descendants, whether in diaspora or not. Sometimes they're in communities where they're heavily segregated, even within the Black community itself. And sometimes, racial admixture has been going on for so long, no one is "purely" Black or "just Black" anymore, because they're not purely anything else either! (Yes, race is a human construct. We're talking about how that construct is understood, not whether or not any of this has merit.)

Some examples of what I mean:

In South Africa, there are both Black and Coloured designations, with Coloured people being a distinct group of mixed race people. Those terms are not used interchangeably. These racial designations developed as part of racial attitudes and legal designations in South Africa, which are completely distinct from how racial designations developed here in the United States.

As a second example: Brazil. Every family who has been in Brazil long enough becomes mixed race eventually. Under the contructs of race in the United States, most folks in Brazil would be considered Black, very few of them would be considered White despite their lighter skin color. Many light skinned Brazilians come to the United States and are treated as Black for the first time in their lives. How do I know? Because I lived in Brazil for a year. I met many Brazilians who ended up moving to the US and having that experience. And for me, being in Brazil was the first time I'd ever seen myself being the default as a mixed race person. Brazil was the only place I've ever lived where I was recognized for exactly who/what I was, and was fully embraced for it anyway. That has never happened for me in the United States, not even in my own family. It completely changed my life.

There are communities of Black people in the United States who mixed heavily with Native tribes and Indigenous communities (note: I use tribes vs. communities meaningfully here because not every indigenous person is a recognized member of a tribe, and tribes don't determine or define indigenous identity). People in these communities may consider themselves to be both Black and Native, or Black and Indigenous. And when we get into the Caribbean (where my family is from) and Latin America, that becomes even more difficult because then there can be a third layer on top of that with "Hispanic" and "Latin" identities. They may identify in a wide variety of ways, all of which are accurate, and Black makes up only a portion of who they are.

I explain that so what I'm going to say next can make sense for exactly how I mean it.

I am not interested in determining and policing who or what a Black author is. What that means changes depending on what community you're talking about, what country you're in, and what culture YOU were raised in. I'm not interested in perpetuating the myth that only people YOU recognize as Black, wherever you live in the world, can write good fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction. I'm not interested in trying to determine for mixed race authors whether they're Black enough to qualify for a list like mine. And I'm not interested in making this determination for others that I am then expected to justify to anyone in a public forum.

What this expectation is asking of me, for all the authors on a list like this one to be Black, is to engage in a globally complex racial parsing of human beings that I personally find very distasteful. I don't want to be responsible for that. I am interested in curating "representations of the Black experience" in fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction. Regardless of how the author got there themselves, they created Black characters and stories in this genre. The vast majority of the books I find are recommended by Black readers who loved them and recommended them to audiences of (primarily) other Black readers.

That is my most important criteria. That is the purpose for which I created the list. It's not for White people who are trying to complete some diversity reading social media challenge, or to assuage their own guilt because of whatever national holiday is compelling them read books by Black authors for a short period of time. It's for Black readers to find books they will (hopefully) love that make them feel seen and valued for exactly who they are. I didn't experience that for the first time until I was an adult and I know how important it is. I know what it does to a person when they don't have that.

If you are interested in elevating Black authors specifically, in whichever genre, I applaud your efforts, especially when you make those efforts yourself instead of expecting someone else to do it for you. It's not a simple thing, especially on a global scale, which you only figure out when you've made the attempt yourself. And what's more, I hope we can also see better now as a community that the goal of increasing readership for Black authors can be accomplished in a lot of different ways, including with book lists whose primary question isn't "What is the racial background of the authors who wrote these books?"

But if you disagree and you want book lists that are specific only to Black authors you recognize, please make your own lists. Open yourself to the criticism and questioning you give to others. And prepare to spend a lot of time Googling author photos and looking at author bios that don't tell you other people's racial backgrounds because, predictably, an author's race is not the first/only thing they want you to know about them.

Thanks, heathersdesk