Heritage months (also sometimes called history months) are designated periods of time during which various ethnic groups, often ones that have traditionally been viewed as outsiders or other, are recognized. They are like temporal landmarks, calendar events that create opportunities. I love temporal landmarks.
Various organizations recognize and support different heritage months. Northwestern University does a good job of recognizing more than one group per month.
Right now, the U.S. Department of State recognizes nine heritage months, which I am listing here, just for the record.
- Black History Month
- Women's History Month
- Arab American Heritage Month
- Jewish American Heritage Month
- Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
- Military Appreciation and National Veterans and Military Families Appreciation Months
- Caribbean-American Heritage Month
- Immigrant Heritage Month & World Refugee Day
- Hispanic Heritage Month
My plan this year is to observe the months as the U.S. Department of State has listed them, because when I was planning this last fall, this was the most official looking list I found. I will stick with it to the extent that I can.
Now why would I want to plan a year of reading around heritage months?
So Many Books
Over the last 20 years or so, there have been surges of interest in just how many books are published each year in, let's say, the United States, since that's Original Content's home country. Here's one source that says 4 million books were published here in 2022. The same source says that 2.1 million books were self-published the year before, to try to give us an idea of what's going on with that. Quite honestly, though, I thought I saw a figure recently that said only 500,000 books are traditionally published in this country each year and another 1 and a half million are self-published, which would bring us to 2 million books, not 4.
Because 2 million books is so much more manageable a number than 4 million.
I am nitpicking in order to make the point that a lot of books are published each year. And then all those books are out there, and more books are published the next year and the next, plus there are all the books kicking around from years gone by.
So many books. I can't read them all. Neither can you.
So Hard to Find Numbers
Though there has been a great interest in increasing diversity in publishing since 2020, I can't find a lot of numbers to tell me what's happening with that. How many of those 2 or 4 million books are written by black writers or Asian writers or Arab American writers? If you scroll down here, you'll see that these people say that at whatever point this was published over 75 percent of writers in the U.S. were white, 7.6% were Hispanic, 5.9% Black, 4.9% Asian, and 0.4% American Indian/Alaska native. (These are their terms.)
The point I'm making now is that when a writing group is a small percentage of the whole writing group, they're going to produce a small percentage of the total number of books published. They can just physically only write so many books. Those books can easily get lost in the millions of books published. Even white readers who consider themselves color blind in their reading interests are not going to have a lot of books from nonwhite writers showing up in their personal book radar.
Where Heritage Months as Temporal Landmarks Come In
Writers can use temporal landmarks to help focus on particular things--using weekends for specific writing projects, assigning the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day for revision, using periods organized by groups, like National Poetry Month, to be their new draft time. This writer is going to use this year's heritage months as temporal landmarks to organize reading.
Why not just read these writers all year long? I do. But, like the people I described above, I only read what happens to pop up in front of me. Observing heritage months gives me an opportunity to do a little seeking out.
Additionally, as I said last year when I announced that I was going to do this, "when times are...strange, shall we say...publicizing the work of groups whose work didn't always get much attention in the past is something positive we can do. It doesn't involve name calling or ranting, which I've never seen doing anything for anybody."
Also, I love temporal landmarks. Focusing on one thing is just so freaking exciting. I am so up for this. I am actually reading two books now for Black History month. Sadly, I often peter out toward the end of a temporal landmark project, so I am worried the heritage months at the end of the year will be getting less attention from me. But I will just have to plan more carefully to avoid that, won't I?
My Real, and Very Shallow, Reason for Observing Heritage Months with My Reading
Lulu Blog has a lovely post on The Importance of Reading Black Literature. But it doesn't mention what I get from reading literature written by anyone from a group I don't belong to.
If you are a reader who has been around a while and has read a great deal...has read so much...a lot of what you read isn't what we might call new. There is a lot of sameness. There is a lot of old wine in a new flask kind of thing going on in books by your favorite writers or books in your favorite genres. Reading books by people in groups you're not as familiar with opens up opportunities to read about new characters and experiences. To read something different.
That's not a very virtuous reason for doing this. But maybe that's the best reason of all for reading the work of writers you're not familiar with.
You should be hearing about my heritage month reading throughout the year.