4 ms·

The USA's obsession with race is still surprising, from my perspective. The article believes that (English-speaking) users of Goodreads read few "Black writers"

The USA's obsession with race is still surprising, from my perspective. The article believes that (English-speaking) users of Goodreads read few "Black writers" like Alexandre Dumas because they're mostly White people. I read many novels of Dumas, decades before I learned he had Black ancestors. Why does the color of his skin matter? It has no visible (at least to me) influence on his novels. Forcing him in a racial category seems ridiculous. Supposing that one day he had an affair with a man, would Dumas be classified as a LGBT writer? I can understand that people would select books because of the cultural or racial themes they contain (James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer...), but the nationality or the "race" of the author is a poor discriminant for this. When I read "Cry, the beloved country", I wondered the author was a Black South-African, but I didn't care enough to search for an answer to my own question. And maybe Jorge-Luis Borges in in the "Latinx" category and Ohran Pamuk is a "Middle-Easterner", but are their books less "Western" than those of Herman Hesse or Nicolai Gogol? A nitpick: Khalil Gibran is certainly not a "North-African" writer. He lived in Lebanon, USA and France, and, as far as I know, never went to Africa.

mxxc 5y ago
i agree with all of the above. i learned that alexandre dumas had caribbean ancestry in this article. would have been more interesting to add more details, like the fact that his "caribbean ancestry" was due to a nobleman marrying a slave, which definitely gives an indication of the class dynamics of the time and could be an interesting fact in itself. i would go one step further and, exaggerating, claim that putting alexandre dumas and chinua achebe in the same bucket is, in fact, racist.
arbitrage 5y ago
> from my perspective Since it is the first thing you mention, what is your perspective, then, that makes your opinion extra qualified?
- mxxc 5y ago
  it's several people's perspective. labelling authors and personalities according to 2021 america's standard of race is a bit ephemeral, as it assumes that a. everybody agrees with america's definitions b. those definitions are here to stay. assuming that rashid al-din, al-idrisi and khalil gibran have anything to do with each other despite coming from three extremely different places and three very different historical periods is a bit obtuse and doesn't do them any justice. it's fine that america labels people by skin colour for their own political purposes – although i'd be interested in seeing what the difference between the average italian and the average lebanese is, in the classification – but if we're doing any sort of analysis of humanities, it seems a bit amateurish.

mxxc 5y ago

i agree with all of the above. i learned that alexandre dumas had caribbean ancestry in this article. would have been more interesting to add more details, like the fact that his "caribbean ancestry" was due to a nobleman marrying a slave, which definitely gives an indication of the class dynamics of the time and could be an interesting fact in itself. i would go one step further and, exaggerating, claim that putting alexandre dumas and chinua achebe in the same bucket is, in fact, racist.

arbitrage 5y ago

> from my perspective Since it is the first thing you mention, what is your perspective, then, that makes your opinion extra qualified?

mxxc 5y ago
it's several people's perspective. labelling authors and personalities according to 2021 america's standard of race is a bit ephemeral, as it assumes that a. everybody agrees with america's definitions b. those definitions are here to stay. assuming that rashid al-din, al-idrisi and khalil gibran have anything to do with each other despite coming from three extremely different places and three very different historical periods is a bit obtuse and doesn't do them any justice. it's fine that america labels people by skin colour for their own political purposes – although i'd be interested in seeing what the difference between the average italian and the average lebanese is, in the classification – but if we're doing any sort of analysis of humanities, it seems a bit amateurish.