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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: 1) by Francis on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:13AM
Perhaps, but in this day and age anybody can self-publish and self-promote. Sure, they might not get into any of the big magazines, but if there are a considerable number of black sci-fi authors writing quality books, they have options now that didn't in the past.
Most likely, the reason for the disproportional amount of works being published is that there are a disproportional number being written. There's many different ways in which they could address the problem themselves from self-publishing on Smashwords and Kindle to creating their own web zines featuring the content.
These sorts of articles just tend to reinforce the idea that blacks can't do anything to help themselves. In this case, if there is a problem causing them to be underrepresented, it almost certainly happens before the point where there's a manuscript in the hands of publishing agents and publishers.