Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Genre preferences and separately displaying them in a bookstore is completely different from a split in ethnicity. As long as we draw attention (positive or negative) to arbitrary groups of ethnicity, there will be injustice.
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I'm a white romance reader. It wouldn't occur to me, unless I had specific knowledge of this sort of kerfuffle, to go and search for an ethnicity-specific bookshop section in order to find a romance that might have a lead that's not white. I'd just look in Romance. And I very happily like and read a lot of romance with non-white leads. I just expect to find romance books in the romance section. Do I also have to go find the Arab section for romance heroes/heroines with that ethnicity? Is there a Hispanic section? Where is the gay interracial romance shelved?
That's a problem.
If what they're trying to do is also pull in general AA readers who wouldn't look in Romance otherwise, as well as general Romance readers, the logical thing to do would be to shelve the book in both sections. And hand-sell as appropriate.
(As a disclaimer, I've not actually heard of specific fixed ethnicity-specific sections in bookshops in my country. There might be a special front-of-store display of books of Aboriginal relevance, particularly at this moment with Dark Emu in the news, but I've not seen a permanent section.)