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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: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday August 12 2016, @11:42PM
Its going to be savaged as an argument when the IQ stats come out.
For obvious political reasons, it can't be talked about directly, but the best I can find is a SFWA article
http://www.sfwa.org/2014/01/reads-science-fiction/ [sfwa.org]
A majority of Sci Fi readers make more than $80,000.
The only real question is how many standard deviations above normal are into sci fi, not the absolute number.
Then very uncomfortable (from the progressive POV) questions start getting asked. Hmm so we have a hobby essentially staffed by IQ 120+ people, and its all whites and asians, why what does that imply about...
If your question was a weirdly phrased request for "lets try and list some" a black guy named Delany wrote some story with a long name about helix something or other that won plenty of awards in the 60s about a crazy (ish) thief who worked in a test tube meat factory/farm and his interesting adventures. Its solid. You just have to realize that due to IQ variations there IS world class sci fi written by black folk but its going to be very rare and in a field that's basically entirely white/asian. That's just how the bell curve is...
The article makes the hilarious assumption that sci fi is IQ independent just because hollywood action flicks suck.
Another way of looking at it is the article is like claiming there's a deep seated wide spread conspiracy to keep bookstores out of poor black areas. Occams razor and all that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:12AM
I'm not sure how you went from my unquestionable "blacks are more poor" basis for argument to IQ, which is an imperfect and biased notion (indeed biased against poor people).
(Score: 2, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:44AM
You just have to realize that due to IQ variations there IS world class sci fi written by black folk but its going to be very rare and in a field that's basically entirely white/asian. That's just how the bell curve is...
I don't know anything about the correlation of IQ to sci-fi readership or authorship.
But I do know that the "bell curve" as supposedly skewed for race is controversial and likely entirely bogus. In the U.S. we're talking about a ~15-point gap between whites and blacks. Some studies [wikipedia.org] have indicated that this entire gap can be explained by factoring in socioeconomic status and parental IQ. Studies of adoption from lower-class to middle-class families experience a 12-18 point gain in relative IQ. The poor health and nutrition [wikipedia.org] experienced by greater numbers of blacks compared to whites also can explain a lot: iodine deficiency alone (a frequent problem in poor African Americans) causes a fall of 12 points on average. Blacks receive worse medical care on average, and some studies indicate that many inner-city black communities lead to worse conditions even than for poor whites. And we haven't even gotten to social differences in education availability, etc. yet. Actual adoption studies [wikipedia.org] where black children are brought up by white parents are inconclusive (and obviously suffer limitations because black children in dominant white communities may still suffer bias in education, etc.), with some showing a small persistent IQ effect and others showing no statistical difference between races.
And none of these even gets into possible bias in the structure of IQ tests, various potential limitations of IQ tests and whether they truly test "general intelligence" and all that.
I'm not trying to say there's absolutely NO racial differences in IQ. The research is inconclusive. But if there is a genetic racial effect, it seems to be much smaller than effects created by socioeconomic effects, differences in family structure, differences in health and nutrition, etc. Maybe if you factor out all of those things in some idealized scenario, you might still end up with an IQ differential of a few points at most. Maybe.
But that's hardly enough to explain the disparity with sci-fi interests. That, my friend, is most certainly primarily cultural. It's NOT "just how the bell curve is."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 14 2016, @11:47AM
But if there is a genetic racial effect ... most certainly primarily cultural
I don't think we technically disagree on the major issue of black authors of sci fi. You went into a list of non-genetic reasons a cultural subgroup might have lower measured IQ for non-genetic reasons. I went in a different direction, given that we're talking about behavior the cause doesn't matter much anyway.
An interesting thought experiment is coincidentally IQ and income strongly correlate, and at least theoretically its possible that sci fi fandom correlates with income not IQ, in which case a logical outcome would be pro NBA athletes would tend to be rabid sci fi fans, which seems unlikely.