Over on Ain’t I A Woman, in a post entitled, “How do we hear certain voices?,” Dawn’s started an interesting discussion about the concept of minority shelving in bookstores — you know, the whole “Gay/Lesbian Literature” and “African-American Literature” thing (actually, the post is about the more abstract concept of “categorization,” but she gets into it through the bookstore question). Normally, I just lurk on the class blog, but this one seemed to hit something in me, and I ended up leaving a long comment.

Unfortunately I know a lot of you might not check Ain’t I A Woman very often, and I’m rather interested in your take on the subject. So, to that end, I’m reposting my comment here.

As a dude who is slowly trying to turn his home into a bookshop, or at the very least, a library, I only have one concern about the division of literature into different categories, and that is cross-referencing.

When I’m looking for a particular author, how am I supposed to know who the bookstore considers a minority writer when I might not even know what writer I am looking for? I don’t often go into bookstores with an agenda. I’d rather sit there for 45 minutes and browse. For some reason though — my gender, my skin color, my middle-class uber-comfortable background — I never end up browsing the minority sections. It’s not that I wouldn’t; it’s just that I don’t. The writers categorized in that section don’t even enter my radar screen. But who’s to say I wouldn’t find a book I love in there?

So my only request is that the bookstore also put a copy of a book by a minority author, a book which is marketed in a minority section, in the “general” section (whether it’s history, philosophy, fiction, politics, etc.). It’s not like these bookstores are only buying one copy to sell. So, use the other copies. Spread them around the store and market them in all the different places they make sense (pun intended).

Not because it’s more politically-correct, but because it makes it easier for readers to find the writers that might interest them.

If minority writers were put on the “general” shelves like everyone else, then without a doubt, I would check them out — not that I would necessarily read them, but they’d be submitted to the SAME weeding out process as all the other books on the shelf, as opposed to the way it is now, where the bookstore “weeds” them out for me.

Of course, one person’s weed is another person’s flower. Which is all the more reason to spread the seeds throughout the bookstore.

On a slightly different note, I think it’d be awesome for a person who doesn’t read minority literature to accidentally buy it off the general shelf, go home, read it without suspicion, and totally be enlightened.

I’m reminded of the (possibly fake) review an evangelical Christian left on IMDB.com about Brokeback Mountain, where he wrote:

I honestly was trembling at one point during the credits before we got up to leave, and I had to struggle to re-gain my composure. Now that I am remembering that, it reminds me of the way I trembled when I first asked God to forgive me of my sins and accept me as I am.

Again, it could have been a fake review (you never know on the Internet), but even so, it would be a testament to the power of art to transform the way we see the world. But there are a lot of people out there who, though they may need to be, don’t want to be transformed. Perhaps an accidentally purchased homosexual, biracial, multiethnic, age-differential romance story…

…(a kind of Brokeback Mountain meets Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner meets My Big Fat Arab-Indian Wedding [a real play] meets Lolita)…

…perhaps such a story would be the mind-opening experience that the accidental reader needed to face his or her own sense of identity and social love.

But such a thing ain’t gonna happen if the books are kept segregated in their little sections.