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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @11:48PM
Same thing with jews in hollywood. The reason jews are over represented in hollywood is not a jewish conspiracy - its the result of anti-semitism that kept them out of practically all other industries. Same thing with jewish lawyers - for centuries most lawyers represented landed gentry and jews were excluded from that WASP dominated work. But corporate law was a fresh new field that really took off in the early to mid 1900s and without an established culture to keep them out jews were able to find plenty of work in the field. The average WASP lawyers could stick with the old firms where they had less competition.
FYI I am jewish and I have family that are hollywood lawyers so double whammy!