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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 Francis on Friday August 12 2016, @10:49PM

    by Francis (5544) on Friday August 12 2016, @10:49PM (#387221)

    Black people represent about 13% of the population at large in the US and so them only being published 2% of the time in one genre isn't necessarily unreasonable.

    The assertion that this is by design makes some assumptions that aren't valid. Blacks are significantly less likely to graduate high school than other groups. They're significantly less likely to graduate college than other groups are. Black men in particular die much younger than other groups do. They're more likely to be in jail and when they are convicted they spend more time behind bars. So it's probably not the result of systematic racism in the publishing world that makes them underrepresented in this particular niche.

    And that's before you even take into consideration taste. There's no reason to believe that black people have the same tastes as other groups do. No doubt part of the under-representation comes from them just not being exposed to as much sci-fi as other groups are.

    That's not to say that there can't be any racism in the publishing world, but realistically publishers pretty much just care about whether or not an author is going to sell well enough to turn a profit. In most cases the reader doesn't even know what color the author is unless there's a picture or the author is particularly well-known.

    As I've noted, the racism that's likely related to this mostly has nothing to do with the actual publishing world as there's a disproportionately small group of blacks that are in a position to publish in the first place. It's probably not that much different from screenwriting where the roles being written for them aren't good enough to garner nominations for the Oscars.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:12AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:12AM (#387271) Journal

    That it's racism by the SF publishers is quite questionable. There have been many popular black authors, that I only found out were black years after first encountering their works.

    OTOH, I find it quite believable that fewer black people leave school with the ability to write well. This isn't to say that they don't have the capability, but rather that it was, for various reasons, not developed during their schooling. E,g, people who are hungry have a hard time concentrating on spelling. And when classrooms are being disrupted, everyone in the class has a hard time learning. Etc.

    There are multiple levels of racism present, some are in the school funding levels, some are in the selection of teachers, some are in the impoverished society, and some are in the parents of the students. There are also economic constraints that translate into poorer learning. A huge proportion of black male parents are imprisoned, whether justly or not, and this means that black children tend to grow up with one parent who is extremely stressed by working two or three part-time jobs with no benefits and often more than 8 hours per average day, but unpredictably. This makes it difficult to encourage children to study.

    So if you want to talk about structural racism, yes, it's present, but I don't think that the racism is present among the SF publishers who often have never seen the author and have no idea what his/her race is. Sexism, however, is a bit prevalent, though not excessively so. Various genres tend to attract different sexes to different degrees. Fantasy has more female authors than does traditional science fiction, even though it often has the same publishers. Were I to talk about romance novels I'd need to be guessing, as I'm largely ignorant there, but one may guess that women are more common as authors. Because of pen names this is not easy to tell. In science fiction Andrew North was popular during the late 1940's and early 1950's...and eventually segued into Andre Norton. This still is not easily recognizable as a feminine name, and is probably still a pen name. C.L.Moore was a popular author during the 1940's, and few people knew that the C. stood for Catherine. The publishers did, and didn't discriminate on that basis, but may have insisted on the ambiguous name.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:53AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:53AM (#387310) Journal

    "In most cases the reader doesn't even know what color the author is"

    Color, age, sex, sexual persuasion, or anything else. Some things can be discerned about an author, maybe. Or, more accurately, an author can lead you to believe certain things about him/her. One of the all time greats in Sci-Fi is Andre Norton. Andre doesn't sound like a feminine name to me - I always presumed that it was a guy. Didn't really think about it, I just made the presumption.

    One thing I've never seen, is a story preface, intro, or review that discussed the race of the author. I most certainly don't go looking for stories by white, or male, or Chinese, or Black authors. The last thing on my mind is the appearance of the author. It's possible that if the author were to personally narrate the story to me, then his race, age, ethnicity, sex, or whatever might influence me. But, black and white pages of text? Obviously, the story has to stand on it's own merits.

    Today, with the internet, it's so much easier to do a search on an author's bio. Three words, in this instance "Andre Norton biography", makes it obvious that Andre isn't a dude. What shocks ME about Andre, is that she is from Cleveland, Ohio. Who'da thunk that anyone from CLEVELAND could be smart enough to write not just ONE BOOK, but MANY?!?!?!

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday August 14 2016, @12:25AM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Sunday August 14 2016, @12:25AM (#387664)

      I think I need some new sort of moderation option for "entire comment was excellent and then I got to the last line and suddenly a crappy joke derailed it." I keep running into them :)

      So um...good points, I guess.

      P.S: The "three words" you're referring to is plugging "Andre Norton biography" into a search engine?

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:18AM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:18AM (#387731) Journal

        Yeah, those were the search terms - "andre norton biography". I plugged a few other authors in, and got some minor surprises - I leave it to you to find your own surprises if you care to.

        All the authors, however, are human. I did not uncover any artificial intelligences writing top selling science fiction.

  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:35AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:35AM (#387333) Homepage

    And it's not like publishers have a checkbox for race on the submission form. Fact is they don't KNOW the race of the submitter, unless it's under some obviously ethnic name... which might be a pen name; there's no way to know that up front, either. (Someone pointed out that adding an accent to your surname, to make it look exotic, improves your submission's chance of being accepted. In the current climate, an obviously-ethnic name would be an advantage.)

    The ONLY time I've ever seen anything like a racial criterion was when someone did a special collection for PoC or LGBT or some such group (excluding anyone not of the correct checkbox... hmmm.)

    Larry Correia fisks it:
    http://monsterhunternation.com/2016/08/08/fisking-the-latest-diversity-in-sci-fi-freak-out/ [monsterhunternation.com]

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.