Page 22 - BCALA Summer 2018

22 | BCALA NEWS | Volume 45, Issue 3 and windows (Bishop, 1990). The
purpose of the article was to address the need for literacy stakeholders to broaden the mirrors and windows used to represent Black girlhood. Specifically, I wanted to highlight the importance of introducing books that represented strong, Black girls beyond contemporary realistic and historical fiction texts that often center around Civil Rights, slavery, poverty, struggle, and death. What
I found was that although Black women were pushing the boundaries of SF in young adult and middle grades literature, publishing was impacting which books were more prominent in educational spaces.
This led me to question how Black women accessed SF books when
they were younger and whether or not their access to SF books written by and about Black women and girls were limited. To find out more, I conducted a survey study on Black women’s SF reading histories. Academically, I wanted to know
how Black women came to know about SF, what attracted them to
SF, and what specifics helped them to continue reading SF. Personally,
I wanted to know if there were
other Black women like me who had long histories with the subgenre. I wondered about the stories they read and their access to diverse futures that included Black women and girls.
For the survey, I expected approximately fifty to one-hundred responses because I had narrowed the criteria to only include Black
women who were at least 18 and who were avid readers of SF books. In other words, I limited the survey by race, age, type of narrative,
and number of books read. Yet, I received over 350 responses to the survey within the three weeks that the survey was open. Even after culling the responses to eliminate respondents under 18, respondents who read less than one book per year, and trolls who submitted racist remarks, I still had over
300 responses to examine. I was pleasantly surprised.
What I found in my initial analysis was nothing short of amazing. Of the respondents, approximately 93% had been reading SF for six or more years, 81% had been reading SF for at least 10 years, and 60% had been reading SF for 20 years or more. Additionally, although only 46% of respondents said they were assigned a SF book
as part of a middle or high school assignment, 80% of respondents stated that they read SF on their
own during their secondary school years. Essentially, the respondents represented a group of Black women SF bibliophiles who read SF as young people even though it was a genre that supposedly wasn’t written or created for Black girls.
Although this data is important,
one aspect of the data is greatly important for librarians and media specialists to know: how Black
girls gained access to SF books in middle and high school. Specifically, I asked respondents who or what
introduced them to SF, and the top three responses were family members (33%), film/television (23%), and libraries/librarians (18%). I also asked respondents how they found SF books to read outside of the classroom when they were in middle and high school, and the top three responses were libraries/librarians (35%), family members (16%), and friends (14%). Basically, the library
is a place where Black girls are introduced to SF and a place where they can obtain recommendations for reading outside of the classroom. This makes the library a major resource in assisting Black girls
to find, read, and engage with SF texts. It makes the library another transportation device that can ensure Black girls have access to futuristic worlds.
Even though the library provided necessary introductions and recommendations, however, I noticed another trend that was slightly disheartening. The books that the women remembered reading, in
and outside of middle and high school, were mostly books written by white authors and included white protagonists. They recalled reading “Fahrenheit 451”, “1984”, “Frankenstein”, “Uglies”, “The Hunger Games”, “Animorphs”, and “Slaughterhouse Five”, among numerous others. Only a small percentage had read authors like Octavia Butler or Samuel Delaney during their secondary years. Yet, 68% of the Black women who responded to the survey noted that