Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I think it’s disingenuous. A reader might not, probably does not, care, but to say they don’t have a pretty good and accurate sense of the author’s particulars most of the time I think is unrealistic and dishonest. This is most especially true when it comes to race, where the descriptors contain all sorts of clues. Take J.K. Rowling, for instance. The initials were intended to obfuscate her sex and given her eponymous character, the assumption could have been made that she was a man. But could there have been any doubt at all that she was white? The overwhelming majority of the time, the race of the author will be blindingly obvious. In fact, I have no issue with an imaginative work’s being about an experience that’s different from the author’s and that includes race and ethnicity. But they need to get it right, and it needs to be of such a caliber that it precludes the notion of exploitation, as with Alexander McCall Smith’s deeply offensive books about the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Oh, those charming Africans. How very droll.
Heinous deeds done by the author are different; I agree that you wouldn’t necessarily know or find out and why should you? However, if you do find out, then you can choose whether or not to continue to support the person economically. I’m just not all that fond of arguments that cite either the “greatness” of the work or that the work stands on its own merits as justification. That’s a judgment for time to make. But I’m also not a moral arbiter or the internet police, so I don’t care, either. Read what you want. But if you’re going to post about it, expect blowback.
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I agree that race (in the US sense of white/non-white at least) is relatively easy to guess, if one bothers to do so. I generally don't, because I'm just not interested. I don't care what the author's skin color is. It has nothing to do with my enjoyment or lack of enjoyment of their book. Admittedly I read almost exclusively modern books these days, so any ignorance or prejudices in them are a lot less glaring than in older literature (there are exceptions, of course).
And of course the reader's background is crucial in how sensitive they are to racial issues; I'm sure that many things a reader from the US immediately notices go right over my head, because I have lived in a racially homogenous country all my life. The only non-white people I saw while growing up were tourists, and even they were very rare. So I'm probably pretty insensitive to racial issues in books.