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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: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday August 12 2016, @11:20PM
Too many people nuke these arguments, the rebuttals are so obvious. Doesn't matter, these people aren't thinking so reasoning can't influence them.
For example, these are instant argument enders in any rational debate. Watch the hate that flows though.
The most obvious is to ask for the evidence the publication rate varies with the racial mix of submissions. There is of course no such evidence presented. It is impossible to publish that which is not submitted. One could ask why elite NY women (the majority of the editors of mainstream publishers) are being so racist. This is of course simply not done of course. One could ask HOW a race conscious filter could work on submissions sent in text format. Do publishers make prospective authors fill out some sort of questionnaire where race is asked? Why?
One could ask if it is even a problem. Is it evidence of racism if every possible field and subfield of human endeavor isn't populated with a demographic makeup exactly like the United States in 2016? SciFi authors don't just come from the U.S. so why should it? But to directly hammer the real question, why should even U.S. submissions exactly mirror the demographics? Isn't the whole point of diversity that we should be different? That we aren't all exact copies that all think and behave exactly alike?
Finally, it is time for crimethink. Consider what Democrats have done to blacks in America. The shocking miseducation, the illiteracy, the corrosive culture that sees striving for an education as 'acting white.' Consider the hundreds of SAT points of 'affirmative action' required to get any semblance of balance in college admissions. Is it any wonder that few blacks are writing books at all, and especially so in a subgenre that generally requires above average knowledge of fairly exotic subjects?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday August 12 2016, @11:48PM
> Isn't the whole point of diversity that we should be different?
There's a clear racist bias in the fact most electronics sold in the US are now built by Chinese people.
Are manufacturers racists against white, or are whites just incompetent at building electronics?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:07AM
> The most obvious is to ask for the evidence the publication rate varies with the racial mix of submissions.
> There is of course no such evidence presented. It is impossible to publish that which is not submitted.
Your failure to understand statistics is not proof of anything except your own innumeracy. Or perhaps illiteracy? Because that precise point was addressed in the article. In fact, half the article was dedicated to explaining how they were able to compensate by analyzing best case and worst case scenarios. Pretty weak sauce that you got a +4 informative for such an utter math fail on a site with a userbase that likes to think of itself as well informed and analytical.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @10:22AM
To adjust for the methodological flaws, as well as the fact that we don’t have access to submission-rate data concerning race and ethnicity either overall or by individual magazine, we used binomial distributions. The purpose of this was to find the probability that such numbers could be random — the chances that numbers like that could exist without biases in play (which could extend to biases that are literary in nature, such as story structure), systemic problems, and/or structural gaps. In the first binomial distribution we ran the data assuming that submission rates of black authors are equal to the proportion of the black population in the United States, which was 13.2% in 2015 (according to Census projections).
Translation: to adjust for the fact that we don't have facts we made shit up so that we could publish crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:49PM
Your failure to understand that the social sciences barely qualify as science has been noted.