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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: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:12AM
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.
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