Speculative Fiction Is exclusionary of POC
Anne Leonard ND the editor of the first critical anthology to focus on race in speculative fiction ND https://mythicscribes.com/miscellaneous/racial-diversity-in-speculative-fiction/ ‘Racial Diversity in Speculative Fiction’ 7/22/23//LAT
A current – and recurring – topic of conversation in the SFF writer/ blogger/ reader community is the lack of people of color (POC) writing and publishing in the field. (This is also an issue in the literary community in general; here’s a recent that appeared on the Book Riot website.)
People of color are underrepresented in SFF for a lot of reasons, but one which I see frequently mentioned is that books without diversity make POC feel excluded. This creates a vicious circle – POC don’t read SFF, so they don’t write SFF, so there aren’t POC in SFF books, so POC don’t read SFF. One way to break the cycle is for white writers to include more diversity in their own work.
Diversity issues extend far beyond SFF, of course, but speculative literature has a different stake in the conversation than a lot of other literature. Speculative literature is about what is not real. It therefore has a special capacity to imagine and examine alternative worlds, where race is not part of the culture in the same way it is in the societies we live in. If you’re making up a world, you don’t have to comply with historical racial and ethnic diasporas.