We need to talk about how the very-white writing industry expects diverse authors to explain every cultural term in their books.

THREAD

The industry wants anything slightly diverse to be explained to the reader because it assumes the reader can't 1) look things up 2) wouldn't be from that culture

This places an unfair expectation on diverse authors.

No one wouldn't expect white authors to write "As we prepared for the bridal shower (an event where people give gifts to a new mother) we stopped along the way at starbucks (a local shop for coffee) to get drinks."

This is because we're familiar with these things and we expect the audience to be familiar with these things. And we reward an ignorant audience when we expect a diverse author to write to the ignorant. We exclude other readers for whom the authors' life is normal.

When books that have starbucks or bridal showers are republished in other regions or countries, readers are expected to google unfamiliar terms. They don't add lines to the to the book explaining what a starbucks is.

Books written by diverse authors do not need to be dictionaries for their cultures. It is not the author's job to explain their culture like it's a fantasy world or to teach away folks' ignorance.

If a reader is ignorant of something, that's okay. But it is the reader's job, not the author's job, to go elsewhere and figure it out. Like Google. Google exists. Don't expect books to be written to the barest level of familiarity. It infantizes the rest of us.

A compromise is to describe a potentially unknown term through prose that won't bore or infantize those already in the know. So if I say "we picked up two coffees at Starbucks" you know it's a coffee shop. I didn't have to say "We stopped at Starbucks, which is a coffee shop."

In conclusion: Don't expect diverse authors to write for an ignorant reader. The reader's ignorance is not the author's fault or responsibility. Let authors write the story they want, and if some folks don't get it, not every story written for every reader anyhow