It happened during my lifetime, and I saw it all on television, on the news. As I was saying to one of my younger co-workers the other day, who was telling me about visiting a Civil Rights museum…I remember the Civil Rights Movement. My adult life has been an education on race, an education that continues as I grow older. If I am going to talk the talk I need to walk the walk. I came to realize this was white privilege in a nutshell and kind of a subconscious bow to white supremacy whether it was intentional or not I would buy the books but when it came time to select something to read…I always reached for a book by a white writer and justified it with the rationale well, women writers are also marginalized this is why Sisters in Crime exists in the first place.īut it isn’t enough and it’s definitely the mentality of the limousine liberal–who is all about marginalized people and their rights, but never has anyone from a marginalized community in their home. Over the years, I’ve been supportive of marginalized writers I’ve been buying their books and helping to publicize them on social media…but I’ve not been actually reading the books, despite hearing wonderful things about the writers and seeing them win awards. I’ve been reading mostly women authors for the last few years, with the occasional straight man thrown into the mix, and my reading has primarily focused on crime novels, with the occasional horror novel thrown in. Marginalized authors, of course, can mean anything from authors of color to queer ones to women, for that matter pretty much anyone other than a straight white cisgender man. I decided that for 2019 I was going not only to continue, regarding my reading, with the Short Story Project but was also to create and dedicate myself to a new reading project: The Diversity Project, which entailed reading books and stories by marginalized authors.