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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: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Friday August 12 2016, @10:17PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday August 12 2016, @10:17PM (#387210) Homepage

    "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.

    Okay, that's some maths, well done. Did you calculate the probability that it's actually down to racism and not (at least partially) some other factor? A cultural one, perhaps?

    I don't see anyone going without sleep until exactly 86.8% of hip-hop perfomers are non-black...

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @11:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @11:23PM (#387243)

    Since most afro-americans are barely literate, how could they write science fiction. It requires both literacy and an understanding of science (beyond how to convert crack from the solid to the gaseous phase).