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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @09:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-how-do-you-fix-it dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:53AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:53AM (#387310) Journal

    "In most cases the reader doesn't even know what color the author is"

    Color, age, sex, sexual persuasion, or anything else. Some things can be discerned about an author, maybe. Or, more accurately, an author can lead you to believe certain things about him/her. One of the all time greats in Sci-Fi is Andre Norton. Andre doesn't sound like a feminine name to me - I always presumed that it was a guy. Didn't really think about it, I just made the presumption.

    One thing I've never seen, is a story preface, intro, or review that discussed the race of the author. I most certainly don't go looking for stories by white, or male, or Chinese, or Black authors. The last thing on my mind is the appearance of the author. It's possible that if the author were to personally narrate the story to me, then his race, age, ethnicity, sex, or whatever might influence me. But, black and white pages of text? Obviously, the story has to stand on it's own merits.

    Today, with the internet, it's so much easier to do a search on an author's bio. Three words, in this instance "Andre Norton biography", makes it obvious that Andre isn't a dude. What shocks ME about Andre, is that she is from Cleveland, Ohio. Who'da thunk that anyone from CLEVELAND could be smart enough to write not just ONE BOOK, but MANY?!?!?!

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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday August 14 2016, @12:25AM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Sunday August 14 2016, @12:25AM (#387664)

    I think I need some new sort of moderation option for "entire comment was excellent and then I got to the last line and suddenly a crappy joke derailed it." I keep running into them :)

    So um...good points, I guess.

    P.S: The "three words" you're referring to is plugging "Andre Norton biography" into a search engine?

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:18AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:18AM (#387731) Journal

      Yeah, those were the search terms - "andre norton biography". I plugged a few other authors in, and got some minor surprises - I leave it to you to find your own surprises if you care to.

      All the authors, however, are human. I did not uncover any artificial intelligences writing top selling science fiction.