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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: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:50PM
Exactly what I was going to post. How many black SF writers are there? I'm guessing very few. Plus, how can I tell what race any given author is? Charles Finlay doesn't know I'm white.
Magazines like his (F&SF) get a thousand submissions per month, and publish only half a dozen every two months.
I'd like to know why the hell this got posted in the first place? Submitter is a black SF author who can't get published? I smell sour grapes.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:55PM
TFA has been getting press all over the place. I'd guess it's not only virtue signalling, but mostly meant to draw attention to a micropress that no one knew existed before they got attention for running this piece.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.