In which I plea for the establishment of Library of Congress Subject Headings for URBAN FICTION (Sandy Berman's suggestion, actually) and various forms of PRIVILEGE:
I support and second Sanford Berman's call for the establishment of URBAN FICTION as a genre heading.
From a letter sent to the Library of Congress Cataloging Policy & Support office and copied to me and who knows how many others?
"URBAN FICTION
"UF Gangsta lit
UF Street lit
"BT African-Americans--Fiction
BT Fiction
"The linked New York Times report, 'Urban fiction goes from streets to public libraries,' cites numerous authors whose works may be assigned the new form."
Now as for PRIVILEGE, that's a term I could really use as a cataloger to describe the focus of a large percentage of the zines in the Barnard collection. It's also a term I could really use as a scholar doing research and writing a paper on the discussion of WHITE PRIVILEGE in zines.
In addition to WHITE PRIVILEGE I would also like to see the establishment of headings for HETEROSEXUAL PRIVILEGE, MALE PRIVILEGE, and plain old PRIVILEGE (which would cover discussions of privilege in general).
btw I did not spend a long time searching for or vetting the privilege sites to which I linked. If you have better ones to suggest, I'll make the change STAT. Thank you very much.