And what you can do to help.
How many of the books on your shelf were written by white people? |
I asked myself that question during this year’s Black Lives Matter protests, as the publishing industry reckoned with decades of racial inequality. When Richard Jean So, an assistant professor at McGill University, contacted me with data he had collected on authors’ races, I wondered if we could quantify the extent of the publishing industry’s race problem. |
In an Op-Ed we published this morning, we estimated how many fiction books released by large publishing houses between 1950 and 2018 were written by people of color. We guessed the number would be low, but were shocked by the extent of publishing’s inequality. |
Of the 7,124 books for which we were able to identify the author’s race, only 5 percent were written by people of color. |
Maybe you’re thinking: But wait, what about Michelle Obama’s “Becoming,” or “How to Be an Antiracist,” by Ibram X. Kendi, or Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere,” which have spent months on The New York Times’s best-seller lists this year? What about Colson Whitehead’s two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction in the past four years? |
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Those success stories can be deceptive, according to Marie Dutton Brown, a literary agent and former editor at Doubleday who got her first publishing job in 1967. Brown said that it’s publishers’ less famous “mid-list” authors who are overwhelmingly white, because white editors’ interest in Black authors fluctuates with the news cycle. |
“Black life and Black culture are rediscovered every 10 to 15 years,” said Brown. “Publishing reflects that.” Brown attributed the lack of diversity in who gets published to the racial homogeneity of editors and marketers. |
The data backs up her observation. The heads of the “big five” publishing houses are white. So are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books, according to a 2019 industry survey. |
After this summer’s protests, publishers named several Black women to senior editorial roles. And the #PublishingPaidMe movement exposed the gap in how much publishers are willing to pay for books by white writers and writers of color. |
Will publishers stick to their promises to diversify author lists? The stories and data that we looked at suggest that there are decades of inequality that publishing executives will need to address first. |
In the meantime, it might be worthwhile to assess what kind of signal your own book-buying habits are sending to publishers. Of the 58 books on my shelf and e-reader, just 10 of them are by writers of color. |
That realization, along with reporting this story, has motivated me to put my money where my mouth is. My list of books to buy is long, but I’ve bumped two to the front for my holiday break: “A Wild Sheep Chase,” by Haruki Murakami, and “Dhalgren,” by Samuel R. Delany. |
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