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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."
(Score: 4, Funny) by tangomargarine on Friday August 12 2016, @10:00PM
"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.
There is no way in hell they arrived at it by correctly using math.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @10:05PM
Writers Cannot Do Math [tvtropes.org]
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:29AM
3.21E-76 (on the Excel sheet, didn't actually try counting the zeros). 63 magazines reviewed. 1.9% average publishing rate for stories written by black authors across all 63 magazines. It's as though somebody found the binomdist function in Google Docs without knowing WTF they were doing and remembered something about multiplying probabilities from high school. It's just soooo strange. I'm sure I'm just demonstrating my own lack of extensive knowledge about statistics here because I'm a racist!
(It's been a very long time, but isn't a binomial distribution itself a completely inappropriate tool to use for what they're trying to demonstrate?)
Let's give them credit. They did at least publish their data. 1.9% is the only figure I think we can do anything useful with and, as others have suggested, compare to the demographic breakdown of authors submitting stories to the 63 magazines studied.
I can say from experience that one cannot even get parity with general population demographics by offering free healthcare services to black people. I see that as an evidence of institutional, generational racism and a deep seated suspicion of whites bearing gifts in black communities. Leveling a charge of racism against healthcare services for this phenomenon is pointless and counterproductive. It builds walls. I'd expect SJWs to at least try to be more thoughtful about these problems than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump: privileged white upper-class twit with too much time on his hands going full right wing retard who wants to build a wall and make them pay for it.
SJWs: privileged white upper-class twits with too much time on their hands going full left wing retard who want to build a wall and make them pay for it.
This is not the path towards diversity. But what does a racist like me know.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:41AM
Saying there are 63 magazines is extremely charitable to start with. There are probably only about 20 that are pro-paying markets.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:38AM
This is a good point. There were some magazines that had published a whopping single digit number of short stories. One thing somebody who wants to demonstrate racism in a credible way would need to do is get the standard deviation of number of stories published and eliminate at least the 1st quartile and high/low outliers I'd think in order to try to eliminate magazines that are too new or essentially vanity. That would probably move the 1.9% number down further. Granted, it's a poor proxy when you're correct that we really need to know which magazines are pro-paying as part of this whole determination.
Hadn't even considered that. (If I ever express ambition to be a professional statistician, run for the hills!)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:54AM
And other than a very few, mostly no one knows these online wannabe-rags exist. I came across one with a page counter up... and far as I saw, no page had exceeded 50 hits (most of which were probably crawlers).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.