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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @09:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-how-do-you-fix-it dept.

The Guardian reports on a new study which has found that

The world of speculative fiction publishing is plagued by "structural, institutional, personal, universal" racism, according to a new report that found less than 2% of more than 2,000 SF stories published last year were by black writers.

The report, published by the magazine Fireside Fiction, states that just 38 of the 2,039 stories published in 63 magazines in 2015 were by black writers. With the bulk of the industry based in the US, more than half of all speculative fiction publications the report considered did not publish a single original story by a black author. "The probability that it is random chance that only 1.96% of published writers are black in a country where 13.2% of the population is black is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000321%," says the report.

The editor of Fireside Fiction goes on to say...

"Fiction, we have a problem. We all know this. We do. We don't need numbers to see that, like everywhere in our society, marginalisation of black people is still a huge problem in publishing ... The entire system is built to benefit whiteness – and to ignore that is to bury your head in the flaming garbage heap of history."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @09:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @09:55PM (#387200)

    Eh, this seems to be riffing on the Academy Awards controversy. While pure chance has that at least a few worthy people were denied, jumping from that to institutionalized racism seems to be a stretch.

    Have to admit this new McCarthism is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving. Is there no area of society that hasn't been infiltrated by by secret racist?

  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday August 12 2016, @10:54PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday August 12 2016, @10:54PM (#387229)

    The obvious counter to that is "check your privilege".

    That is to say, the theory goes that people are racist (or sexist) without even realizing it.

    The sad part is that it makes it hard to have a conversation about it.

    People get defensive, when the people pointing out sexist or racist things may simply be pointing weird things out in case they are part of some overall pattern (ie: as a talking point).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:36PM (#387628)

      The difficulty is racism/sexism has many different shades and no one has made a direct link between racism and discriminatory behavior. Certainly it happens, but even for a majority of cases, it's assumed, not proven.

      People get defensive (and rightfully so) when assume motives for any behavior. If a particular behavior is problematic, it should be for all races, not just blacks.