Why We Need Diverse Books (and 24 Amazing Books You Can Read Now)

It was about an 11-year-old girl genius that was already in high school, which like me, was mildly awkward and was desperate to make friends. The book tackled themes like, social acceptance, friendship, and family, which made it similar to other young adult novels.

But what made it stand out for me was that the girl in the story is Chinese-American, like me. I’d never read a book that had an Asian-American character, let alone a main character. The book touched on so many things I could relate to, from the view of Asian nerds to growing up with Asian parents, all things that I’d faced growing up and it finally gave me someone to relate to and look up to.

The author was herself a Chinese-American woman, born and raised in Southern California, similar to myself. Looking back I realize how rare it was for me to find a book that I saw myself in — so few books are written by people of color, and even fewer women of color at that. Even looking at today’s list of New York Time’s bestsellers, not a single person in this week’s top 25 is a person of color.

In an attempt to correct this, Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo launched the campaign We Need Diverse Book, advocating for more diverse experiences in books, “including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities.” They’ve provided lists of books by authors of all different experiences as well as resources for budding writers themselves.

Their work illustrates how many experiences, including those of women of color, have been ignored. It is time to begin bringing their stories out of the darkness. By making books by women of color more accessible, we can prove their stories are not tangential to the rest of society, as media so often depicts them.

We need these books to create the heroes young girls can look up to, to shape the dialogue that will help the people of diverse society we live in relate to each other, and create the cultural shift that will bring down the foundations of racism and sexism.

If my argument isn’t convincing enough, here’s a list of 18 Adorable Reasons We Need More Diverse Books from BuzzFeed. If you are convinced though, below you can find a list of create books by women of color for you to pick up this Women’s History Month.

Novels:

• Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett
• She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan Barry
• We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
• I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Conde
• If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan
• The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
• The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
• The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James
• A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor
• Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok
• Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera
• Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
• Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
• Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
• Re: Jane by Patricia Park
• Voodoo Dreams by Jewell Parker Rhodes
• The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer
• The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Memoirs:

• Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
• The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee
• The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min
• Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
• I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

Happy reading!

 

COVER IMAGE COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK.

By Lacy Wright on March 18, 2016
Lacy Wright is much like her coffee, short, hot, and comes with quite a kick. A second year at UC Santa Barbara studying Art History and History of Public Policy, she has been a long time advocate for consent education, teen dating violence awareness, and expanding mental health services for high school and college students. A gastrotourist stricken with a constant case of wanderlust, you can always find her setting off on some new crazy adventure, searching for the next best meal.