Any trip I take to a bookstore begins, ends, or often begins and ends in the travel section. Today, I conducted something of an informal survey:

• 99% of travel writing books are by White authors
• 90% of those authors are male

I have never, at any point ever in my 27 years, found a book about travel by a Black woman, though to be fair, I do have an anthology of essays of women traveling solo that I have yet to finish so one could be in there.

Tessism is doing a 30-day challenge that I have just started reading up on and I love the idea of making requests instead complaining about things.

“I noticed today that complaining is one of the ways we Jedi mind-trick ourselves into believing we’re in action when we’re doing absolutely nothing to affect the situation. We give an unfavorable weather report with no intention of putting up an umbrella.

When we complain, we seem to get away with not liking a thing, doing absolutely nothing about it and pretending that the complaining changed something. Even a basic ‘complaint letter’ to an airline works best when, after outlining the offense, you request they take actions to amend said transgression. Focusing on what’s not working gets you more not working. A request will move you past it regardless of whether the request is fulfilled. The request breaks the cycle of illusory inaction.”

So in the spirit of that–which I think is a very lovely spirit–I don’t want to lament the lack of diversity present in travel writing, I want to be a face that changes it.

Now, I just need to request that someone pay me to go somewhere and write about it. 🙂