Ash-Lee sent me this update to her original post on Johnson City, TN Barnes & Noble and the exploitative books it is pushing as African American literature.
A friend of mine that is currently an employee at Barnes and Noble read this blog (specifically where I write about the store management being ok with taking the endcap down if they could) and remembered something that occurred at our store very recently. Two wealthy white women came into the store, and happened to run into our "Love and Sex" bay (a bay being a large section of bookshelves), that has karma sutra books and stuff like that. When the two women complained, the bay was immediately shifted to books that dealt with those subjects that didn't have "offensive" cover art.
Question: If they can change a bay that was and is mandatory and given to them by the corporate office, why can't they take down or modify an endcap??
(It seems some of the words in the original post were tripping the spam/security settings on my webhost's servers, making it difficult for people to post comments. Comments should work better on this post.)
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If the store has a bay devoted to erotica, why can’t the “urban fiction” erotica go there? Cover art aside, if I wrote and published a book of erotica (one that did or did not exploit stereotypes) it wouldn’t go with “Jewish fiction”–it would go with erotica. It seems like a much less offensive way of dealing with this material, and would free up the endcaps for displays of the stuff readers go to the African American fiction section to find.
What a sad sad state when that is passed off as Af-Am lit. I wouldnt even classify it as erotica.