Slightly sensitive book quiz round?

[mrsmootoo]

This is slightly niche but I am organising a book quiz and one round that has been suggested is to identify book covers of books by black authors (all sorts of writers, fiction/non-fiction - the Obamas, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith etc) and include an odd one out that would be The Help because it is actually written by a white author. There's something about this that makes me uncomfortable as it seems to suggest you can define all black authors together regardless of what they've written. Am I being over sensitive?

I don't think you're being over sensitive but thoughtful. But it's a good topic for a round. I would be inclined to either skip the odd one out or have a different reason for including it though. Why not challenge people to see how many black authors they've read.

Hopefully if they're readers you'll draw their attention to some new books to look into later. Include that round but maybe if everyone can take away answers and/or a list that they can use to look up books from libraries/Amazon/whatever later.

It suggests that black authors are a category defined entirely by skin colour and not sex or culture or geography.

We’d only talk about white writes en masses if it was a diversity issue, such as who gets published the most. Otherwise we’d talking about Irish writers or French writers or Scottish crime writers or American essayists and so on.

Black writers could be English writers or Nigerian writers or American writers, or feminist poets or crime writers or anything else.

Is Obama an author?

Both Barack & Michelle are authors.

Why don't you just do an identity by author round, and the odd one out can be a different genre, so all literary fiction (or whatever) and one sci-fi.
I agree it's a bit lame to group authors by their skin colour.

Obama wrote a memoir, Dreams frommy Father, and The Audacity of Hope before he was elected. He also wrote a children’s book.

Thank you.

Barack Obama published a book before he ran for President, possibly 2, and might have written another one. Michelle has published her memoir.