What's Race Got To Do With It?

An ongoing debate continues that I suspect will eventually rival the “What came first, the chicken or the egg” question, and that is the question of how booksellers should shelve books by black authors.

This has been brought to the forefront by a well-written article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. (For a link to the article, visit author Monica Jackson’s web site at www.monicajackson.com .)

The issue seems to affect writers of contemporary fiction more than anyone else, and it’s a lot trickier than it seems on the surface. There are arguments on both sides that have some validity. I’ve given this matter a lot of thought, and I’ve come up with a possible guideline.

Do it like the library.

For instance in libraries, non-fiction books are usually shelved by subject matter, but with sub-categories. A soul food cookbook is likely to be shelved with other soul food cookbooks within the cookbook classification, but so are books on Creole cooking, Italian cooking, etc. This makes it easier for library patrons to locate what they’re looking for swiftly without having to thumb over books on things like desserts and Thai cooking when they’re looking for a recipe for seafood chowder. Similarly, a library patron looking for a book on New York doesn’t have to go through books about Australia, Spain, or Kenya to find what they’re looking for, because the geography books are grouped by subject.

Most tellingly, in the library, all fiction is grouped together. Whether it is Charles Dickens, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, or Eric Jerome Dickey, for the most part they make no distinction. A few exceptions: New books are displayed prominently for both fiction and non-fiction, because they are likely to be more popular with the public. Mystery, westerns, science fiction, and romance do have their own sections, the latter two usually exclusively in paperback, simply because each of these sub-genres contain large numbers of books. And still other books are given prominence if they are timely: The memoir The Pursuit of Happyness [sic], the basis of the critically accalimed, about-to-open Will Smith movie, or a biography of any recently deceased public figure, or books relating to a current holiday or milestone, anything from Valentine’s Day to the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, which happens to be the day I’m drafting this column. Then there is the obligatory Black History Month display every February.

I’m not a librarian, but I don’t believe that any public library has works of fiction clumped together on the sole basis of the race or culture of their authors.

So why do the bookstores do it? The ever-important bottom profit line clearly has something to do with it. The belief that black people are too stupid to be able to find the latest book by their favorite author alphabetized within the fiction section probably figures into the mix as well.

Maybe there’s too much effort to categorize fiction, to put authors in a cubbyhole. I write in two genres, romance and women’s fiction, under one name. I remember being livid when I saw my mainstream title, Nothing But Trouble, on an aisle display at a Barnes & Noble that said, “Street Lit.” (?#!) I promptly removed my books and placed them on the table in front of the store where other new trade-sized paperbacks lay. I can’t say I was angry when my first work of mainstream fiction, The People Next Door, was shelved in the romance section along with my other titles – that’s too strong a word – but I didn’t like it, because this book cannot even remotely be characterized as romance.

Why can’t the distinctions on those special bookstore displays be merely based on book size within fiction and non-fiction? I’m sure it’s easier to display similarly sized books together. All new and featured hardcover fiction together, nonfiction together, trade together, and mass market together?

And leave race out of it. Just like the library.