SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:16AM
It kinda is. White Men Can't Jump after all...
The funny thing is -- professional basketball used to be dominated by Jews, particularly short ones with good balance. Seriously. [thesocietypages.org]
According to the New York Post in the 1930s, "the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness," or, in other words, a bunch of stereotypes about Jews. Short Jews had "God-given better balance and speed." The gameplay was far different from today, given the size and abilities of players.
Think about that the next time you hear someone talk about why African-Americans dominate sport X because of "natural athletic ability." There are all sorts of cultural stereotypes that often play into what we think of as "natural ability," particularly once you separate people into categories like race or ethnicity. In previous generations, those were strong enough to convince people that a short Jewish guy was obviously the ideal basketball player. (And, as an intriguing historical sidenote, the early Jewish contingent is likely one of the reasons for the earlier widespread acceptance of Blacks in professional basketball. Jews had to fight to be accepted into mainstream society in the early 20th century, and their victories were used as precedent to integrate African-Americans into the sport early on.)