avajae:

So as sometimes happens when something negative goes viral, bookish Twitter took action on Monday and responded to an anti-diversity rant that had gone up the night before with a powerful message—that we as a community support diverse narratives.

It began with an author asking people to raise their voices and support diversity and the marginalized in the process. The author later asked to become anonymous and people not connect them to the hashtag anymore, because the backlash against the positive hashtag that came out of it unfortunately brought loads of racists and hateful people into their mentions—another problem all on its own. The hashtag began as #IStandForDiversity, but later transitioned to #ISupportDiversity because the first hashtag was unintentional ableist, but important tweets were shared at both, so I’m going to share some here.

As Paul and Heidi said, one of the best ways to really support diverse books and marginalized authors is to buy books and request them at the library. So, of course, here are a couple book recommendation threads.

• Michael Waters on diverse YA releasing soon.
• Sam Taylor’s diverse book rec thread.
• Sam’s second diverse book rec thread.
• Julie C. Dao’s list of POC kidlit authors debuting in 2017.
• My #ownvoices book rec thread from August 30th.
• Marieke Nijkamp’s thread full of diverse books giveaways ending on 9/9!
• Ashley Herring Blake’s #ownvoices books giveaway ending on 9/13!

And, in conclusion:

So there you have it. Support with your voices, and more importantly with your bought and requested books. Because representation is so, so important and we’re just getting started.