Burnout By the Book
They didn't love it. And I learned a lot.
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A delightful and ultimately growthful thing happened! And as we approach Black History Month and I think about my role as a white person who is a health educator, I thought I’d share my thoughts on this growthful thing.
I'm a longtime listener to the podcast By the Book, where two hosts live by a self-help book for two weeks and report back on whether or not it helped them. And they just lived by BURNOUT! That's the delightful part! As far back as 2019, before BURNOUT had even been published in the US, Amelia and I spoke with an Irish journalist who mentioned the podcast, and I was like, "I've listened for ages!" and she said she'd love to hear the hosts live by it, and I was like "ME TOO!!!" And now it has happened! I'm really excited.
Now comes the growthful part.
They didn't love the book. That's fine, no book is for everyone. Jolenta disliked the little stories we used to help illustrate what we were trying to explain and Kristen felt like the book focused too much on parenting, which isn't relevant to her life. They wanted a book that was about dealing with stressors, solving specific problems, and this was a book about dealing with the stress itself so that you can be well enough to solve any problem. Fair enough. It wasn't for them. Ah, well.
But there was a more serious critique. Kristen, who is Asian American, experienced the book as gaslighting and erasing her! Those are the words she used! GASLIGHTING. ERASING! Oh fuck, oh no! That's basically the worst thing someone could say about our book! I'm so sorry that was her experience, yikes! I immediately began thinking about what could we have done better, and she herself took the time to dig into why the book felt so uncomfortable for her. She went through, page by page, and counted the names we mentioned, whether fictional characters or real people, and sorted them by white or non-white, and––
Before I tell you what she said about the result, let me tell you what I found when I did this same exercise, inspired by her. Our book names 73% white people and 27% people of color.
This is not an amazing ratio. I mean look how bad that looks:
When in doubt, make a spreadsheet
We could nitpick forever about how meaningful this kind of list is - we mention Hobbes and Nietzsche once each, and only to disparage them. Do we count them at all? I spend extra time on Tricia Hersey and quote directly from Audre Lorde multiple times. Do we count them extra? And there's the question of other domains of oppression. Do we count Jewish people, refugees and their children, fat people, LGBTQIA2+ people? Race isn't the only kind of diversity.
But let's go with the rules we've got, the simple proxy of names and race. And it’s not amazing. I would call it barely adequate. It manages to exceed the ratio of the population of the US by a few percentage points. Meh. And this is after years of Amelia and me putting active, deliberate effort into making the book diverse! Not an amazing result.
It's so not amazing, that Kristen, when she counted names, called the book "almost exclusively white."
Oof. Ouch. Wow yikes.
Now, there's a moment in the podcast episode where how she represents her experience is, I would say, disingenuous. We hear her reading a list of ONLY the white people in the book, plus Moana, the Disney princess, making it sound as if the book truly is just 100% white and Moana.
She didn't say the names of Tona Brown, the first out trans woman to play Carnegie Hall, or Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic director of the Johnson Space Center, or Tricia Hersey or Lynn Chen or Sonia Sotomayor or any of the other people of color we include. Click through these links and read all about these amazing women!
I do feel like there's a meaningful difference between 99-100% white and 73% white, and it would have been more transparent for Kristen to mention some of the people of color.
But while I don't agree that the book is "almost exclusively white," it is easy to see why she experienced the book as overwhelmingly white. It is. It’s super white. It’s 73% white. Here’s a square that’s 73% white:
That’s light gray, right there.
So, what to do about it?
This counting thing feels like a good starting place, and other people have done it, too. Inspired by Adrienne LaFrance, Ed Yong, the science journalist, wrote about his process of analyzing, in his case, the gender diversity of his sources. He knew it wouldn't be 50/50, but he was surprised at how low it truly was. Like Ed, I too am surprised at how low my ratio of people of color is.
Of his own process, he says,
"Crucially, I tracked how I was doing in a simple spreadsheet. I can’t overstate the importance of that: It is a vaccine against self-delusion. It prevents me from wrongly believing that all is well."
And now I understand how fully necessary that is.
We could have shifted the ratio in BURNOUT a lot if we had tried a little harder. Like I keep thinking about how I read Sonya Renee Taylor's The Body Is Not an Apology when it came out, a couple months before our book was due, and I wanted to add something in chapter 6 about how her 3 Ps paralleled our steps, but I thought it was too late to make a change to the chapter, when we had so much else to write.
I keep thinking how I started out with the 2010 Karate Kid, with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan, instead of the 1984 version. But I couldn't make "pick up jacket" work with the same pithiness as "wax on, wax off," so I traded diversity for pithiness.
If I had been keeping a spreadsheet, it would have offered objective information to motivate me to go ahead and put in that extra effort.
This is the "inside baseball" of writing a book, the countless choices you make. Just these two choices could have made a palpable difference in the representation of people of color so that the book didn't feel so very white.
I truly am a fan of the podcast so I've listened to all the episodes AND I've read and really enjoyed both So You Want to Start a Podcast, Kristen's book, and Kristen and Jolenta's co-authored book How to Be Fine.
So I went through the podcast and Kristen's book and did the same counting exercise. The podcast itself has featured 83% white authors and 17% authors of color - eep. By contrast, SYWTSAP, by my count, has 35% people of color named, which feels like a giant leap from my 27%! The podcast and Kristen's book together average out to 27%.
(This isn't a "so there," it's just another illustration of how even authors who actively very much try to pull from diverse sources and include the voices of people of color don’t always get there.)
What's "enough"? With gender, it's reasonable to aim for 50-50 – or really, 47-47 with room for trans and nonbinary folks. And it's also reasonable to aim higher, to compensate for historical non-representation. The reasoning for what counts as a "good" proportion of people of color is less straightforward. Do I aim to represent the population of the US? Well, I did that and it felt suuuuuper white. Do I aim to represent the population of the world? Most other places don't use the categories the U.S. uses, so even trying to impose them on the rest of the world is in itself racist, yuck.
Well. I'm currently writing my next book, and you can be sure I'll be literally keeping a spreadsheet of names I mention, pop culture references I make, and sources I cite. I'm going to aim for 36%. Is it “enough”? I don’t know. But I feel like it’s a place to start.
I’m grateful to have been shocked into thinking quantitatively, not just qualitatively, about how diverse my own work is. I wish it hadn’t come at the cost of making Kristen feel so bad that she created an even-worse-than-it-really-was moment in the episode. But I’m learning from it. Sorry, Kristen, and thank you.
PS: The ratio for this newsletter post is 62% people of color, 38% white people.
I really enjoy both their podcast and book – Please give them a look!
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