Random
A Bit of a Follow Up
It is difficult to talk about race and stressful and awkward and exhausting. To my mind, one of the reasons these conversations are so difficult, particularly between white people and people of color, is because, so often, white people question concerns raised as if the question is not “how do we solve this problem,” but rather, “does this problem exist.” This is not a debate about whether there are racial and class (and gender and sexuality) disparities in publishing. These disparities exist whether you (choose to) see them or not. Instead these kinds of discussions are intended to function like a magnifying glass on a problem so big it should not require a magnifying glass.
And yet, the magnifying glass is clearly needed.
You want proof. You want evidence that publishing is biased where race is concerned. The world is biased so it should not be surprising, then, that the the publishing industry is biased. Are things better than they were 50 years ago? Of course. Are things okay? No. This problem neither begins nor ends with publishing. The problem neither begins nor ends with Best American Short Stories which draws its work from literary magazines which draw their work from the writers who submit and there are a whole lot of factors contributing to who is writing, where they are sending that work, whether that work is getting published before we can even talk about what’s being included in the “Best of” anthologies. This is a problem, that, as commenters noted in my previous post, is also an issue of class and the educational system that is failing so many people. It is an issue of who has the luxury of the time to write and send their work out. That doesn’t mean the absence of diversity in an anthology like BASS is inconsequential. That collection represents the “best” and most prestigious literary magazines in the country and so if there is little diversity in BASS, there is little diversity in the most influential literary magazines where most of us hope to someday be published.
Issues of race, racism, diversity and equality are issues we’ve been dealing with for more than 200 years. As long as there is difference, there will be disparity. You want statistics and to feel like this is an issue you should care about because sometimes, you just don’t. That’s fine. There are lots of important things I don’t care about either. Honestly, I don’t care if you care or not. Whether or not you care has no impact on the existence and severity of the problem.
The discussion in my previous post has been really interesting and multi-faceted. As these discussions tend to go, people got heated. I got heated. I used my favorite word (fuck) a few times. I will get heated again. This issue matters to me. That this issue matters, however, doesn’t mean this is strictly an emotional issue and to suggest that demeans the discussion. Emotions are involved but there is far more at stake. One of the points raised was that this issue wasn’t as serious as some of the global concerns people around the world are facing. No one is asserting that. At the same time, there’s little point in playing Oppression Olympics, or in saying, well, at least we’re not enslaved, working in conflict diamond mines in Africa. You simply cannot make such comparisons. It’s absurd. Everyone has some kind of privilege and acknowledging that things are still fucked up doesn’t deny those privileges. Saying disparities exist for writers of color does not negate that publishing, in general, is difficult for all writers, particularly given the current climate in publishing.
Discussing these issues is not complaining. When I say, “God, I’ve had a submission out at The Eternity Review for 434 days,” I am complaining. When I say, “I feel a profound sense of absence,” while reading Best American Short Stories, I am using my magnifying glass. Raising these issues doesn’t mean I feel particularly oppressed but it is, nonetheless, an acknowledgment that there are barriers writers of color face that white writers never will. As a writer of color, you have to worry about whether or not there is a readership for your work because many people believe that white people simply aren’t interested in reading about people of color. If you write about people of color, some editors want you to write about people of color in very specific and stereotypical ways because they’re simply not interested in those stories that diverge from the cultural narratives most publishers are comfortable with. Oftentimes, editors aren’t interested in stories where people of color are doing the same things white people are doing in their stories–dealing with life, love, sex, marriage, death, ennui, whatever. They prefer the tragic pornographic narratives and so sometimes, some of us play that game because that’s just the way it is. Anytime you achieve even a little bit of success there’s going to be someone who suggests you earned that success because you’re a person of color (or a woman, or both). Even though you might know you achieved your success because you’re awesome, because you worked hard for years, because you beat down doors until one fell down, you are stuck with the niggling doubt that they’re right. You worry that everyone thinks that way so you can never really enjoy your success, you always push yourself to do better, to do more, to be the best, to be so good they have to stop saying it’s just because you’re a person of color. It is exhausting. Some of the comments in the previous thread certainly bear this out. Anyway, I don’t say this to paint a tragic portrait of the writer of color. We’re fine. And people from other groups certainly have their litany of struggles. Life is hard. Life is hard for all of us. For some, though, some of the factors contributing to that hardness are so deeply embedded within certain institutions as to feel insurmountable.
I wish there were statistics on the number of books being published by writers of color, the advances writers of color are being paid, how those books sell, etc. Maybe someday, someone will do for people of color what VIDA is doing for women. Maybe this organization exists and I simply don’t know about it. I wish there were a way to truly prove what I know to be true, but there isn’t and I don’t have the time to compile that information, nor should I have to. If you really care, do the work to learn about what the publishing industry is like for people of color. Stop feeling defensive. Unless you work for a major publisher or one of the magazines represented by BASS, this isn’t about you, and even then, this is still not really about you. This is bigger than that.
In some ways, this is a matter of faith. You have to accept that these imbalances exist and that when people like me raise the issue, it’s not to make anyone feel guilty or uncomfortable or to say, “woe is me” or to deny your realities. It’s to say, this issue is on my mind and this issue is one I deal with or that people who look like me deal with to one extent or another.
Still, for those of you who want proof that race is a real problem in publishing, here are a few examples gathered from a very cursory Google search I did between classes today using the search terms racism + publishing + statistics.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has compiled some statistics about the number of books by and about people of color. In 2009, 1.6% of children’s books were written by people of color. That’s pretty horrifying.
In 2010, 41 (or 1.4% ) of the YA Books published, out of the approx. 3000 published, were written by black authors. The situation is even more ridiculous for Latino authors, with only 16 (.5%) YA titles published in 2010. Twenty-two percent of all children in the US are Latino. Imbalance? Yes.
Most of 2009, the science fiction/fantasy community was embroiled in a contentious debate about race that was so extensive and ongoing that it even got its own name and wiki: RaceFail, but hey, at least the SF/F community is talking about these issues which cannot be said for other writing communities.
Sometimes, people write books where the protagonist is black and white person is put on the cover anyway because hey, that will sell more books. They call this white washing and publishers actually think this is an acceptable practice.
I could list links about the many, many ways racism pervades publishing all day but students are actually stopping by for office hours. This isn’t incontrovertible scientific evidence but it should be enough for you to get the gist.
Ultimately, people who don’t want to be convinced that this matters won’t be convinced that this matters, but evidence is all around us and either you choose to see it or you don’t. I don’t have answers. I wish I did but I would like to think we can try to reach for answers and solutions. In the future, I’ll definitely post about some ideas I have about making things better. If you have ideas and want to do a post on this topic, just get in touch. Finally, I hope we can continue to talk about race, gender, and class alongside all the other interesting things we talk about here (books, submission fees, Barry Hannah, DFW, rejection, hip hop, massive people, JIMMY CHEN), even if we disagree. I leave you with Louis C.K. on The Tonight Show. All three clips are worth watching.
P.S. Here are some nice resources about reading and writing diversity.
Tags: best american short stories, Publishing, Race
i think BASS this year is more white than most. last year there were at least five writers of color of the 20. (including three Asian-Americans).
I’m interested in your “answers” end, yes,
give us some pragmatic magic!
A thought, an essay
once rubbed me the wrong way,
“against multiculturalism”…
the author preferring the prefix “cross-“;
it had attacked insularity.
pardon me, but would you like to dance with me?
(and may i call you madam, or ma’am,
shall i say hey, or yo, or just ask outright,
how might i not rub you wrongly?
(this sitch is ever apparent
when trying to jibe and be genial
with the transgendered.))
& yet i whimpered,
wanting to be amiable and kind to all people,
respecting and even querying
the unfamiliar homes from which they came;
always understanding how our outwardness is arbitrary.
(yes my frizzlock flyaways, even,
yet certainly selected, unlike my pale pallor.
&yet-yet: though
I actually just let them “be”,
similar to the bowl-“fro”
its pull to be full,
oh please allow it to be round,
like a mahogany halo!
Wow!)
I worry, or wonder, and want to hear your “answer” end —
could the egalitarian writer, wanting
to hark love for the other,
be spurned instead: “you you’re white,
you know nothin
bout how we feel walkin
down the streets
fullo poe lease!!”
This is the problem of multiculturalism (methinks?):
a group getting obliquely eyed,
or worse, ignored, can have allies
but still must assert its pride.
To speak about the problem,
to describe and circumscribe,
might mean we must draw lines,
using silly titles,
black dark queer African
color nigger motherfucker?
I hate it.
I want the problem dead and away.
But to hold my head high like Condoleeza Rice,
insisting, unless asked, that it’s trivial & over,
she so cordial and genial,
shouldn’t she be angry?
Aren’t those labels and lines important?
Am I asshole to quote Beatles, speak of rainbows?
Actually, I never thought nor looked,
but Rox, or others, I ask:
is there a whole body of philosophy
strictly about the interracial peoples,
something forward-thinking, not lamenting,
aiming for labellessness?
Such situations really get at the heart of it all.
I would like that a lot.
I am an anarchist I guess.
I admire that “cross-culturalism”,
nice nomenclature,
as it asks us to still talk about it.
Ever done a contra-dance?
You lose your partner really quickly,
end up holding the elbows of old ladies unexpectedly.
But my big worry is:
as such, an orgy of handshakes,
hodgepodge of cultural allusions,
does it dilute the rich language,
annihilate heritage?
Is there value in the “whole package”?
Or are we hippies, people, lovers, minds,
pepper, diamond, oboe, kudzu
sharp, full, infecting, lovely?
[…] A Bit of a Follow Up | HTMLGIANT […]
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I think she brought up Danielle Evans’ book in the first post. It’s called Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.
Did you read her last post? Where she spoke, pretty prominently, about Danielle Evans’ “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self?”
And I don’t believe Toni Morrison is mentioned anywhere in the above.
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Roxane– that was strong and right on. You provided an awful lot of evidence for having claimed you needed no evidence! I was nonetheless with you that, really, statistics aren’t needed. It’s enough that I myself, a writer of color, can’t even name ten black contemporary latino writers or ten asian writers (or more than two Native American writers), while I could name a good thousand white writers. And I seek out literature that’s ‘ethnic’ or concerns minority experiences.
Michael, you didn’t read Roxane’s first post even though you say you did. She dropped the name Tayari Jones (at Indiana, isn’t she?) by way of starting in on Danielle Evans. And then in the comments you didn’t read, Kyle Minor dropped a bunch of names; other people mentioned the sort of heavies we’d be likely to recognize already– Edward P. Jones, Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer, and a bunch more. I’d make a plug for two writers you’ve probably already heard of: David Bradley and Walter Mosley (who was on Fresh Air today in a nice little interview). But honestly, you should go with Danielle Evans because, well, it was the start of Roxane’s entire post, since you only promised to read one.
Also, Michael, since I think Roxane would prefer this post to avoid getting heated, let me go ahead and mention that when you take the tone you did in that comment and then drop the ‘we heard this already in multicultaralism class,’ I find my temperature rising, as it would in anyone who was of color or who has real experience with minority students. I should qualify that claim in the following way: my job is to teach low-income, first-generation, at-risk students of color writing at the University as a way to retain them since they drop out of university (having made it against the long odds) at a rate three times that of majority students. So to me, the ‘same old, same old, why don’t you tell me how to start solving this problem instead of anatomizing the problem I’m sick of hearing about,’ is actually insulting: to me, that ‘problem’ has faces, names, and stories, which in the aggregate is one piece of ‘evidence’ for me that whatever the reason, we’re losing voices that have something to say.
Are the people questioning the premise of these posts really doing so in good faith? I just figured they were crypto-racist trolls.
i think BASS this year is more white than most. last year there were at least five writers of color of the 20. (including three Asian-Americans).
I believe they think they are. This subject breeds a lot of frustration, of course.
My Kindle battery is dead, so I can’t look up the title… but I’m as white and white-bread as you can get, yet I read every word of the slave narrative novel you left on the device. Every word. The very day I got it.
I couldn’t stop. I think I finished at like, four in the morning, on a day I had to be somewhere important at seven.
I didn’t think, “Oh, well, look at me, identifying with black America,” nor “This is multicultural enrichment and I’m reading this because I should.”
I read it because it was fucking excellent, because the characters were human and raw and real, and because I know I’d be mad as a motherfucker if someone treated me that way. I’d burn down the damn place, too. Screw the kids.
Some of us care enough to sincerely consider skin color a pretty nominal difference.
(SHIT, I can’t remember the name of that book, and can’t find it online based on what I remember. That’s really pissing me off… Though it was in April, I suppose, so it’s been a while since I read that it.. MAN, what was it?!)
Also, while I raise my hand as a middle-class white girl who genuinely does get riled all to hell about racism, I must admit I generally don’t give a shit who is president, nor whether food companies “go organic”, nor how balanced my checkbook is (or isn’t). I have my own vital areas of cultural neglect.
None of us care about everything.
Great post(s).
To clarify:
I agree with you. And it pisses me off, even though it’s totally unrelated to my problems in life. There’s a lack of voice there, and there shouldn’t be. The reasons that’s missing are all listed right there in your post…
But I can relate to the people that don’t get crazy and froth at the mouth about class divisions the way I do, because there are things I know I should care about, but don’t.
There. I think that makes more sense…
[…] 7, 2010 by Dinosaur Mom As part of my mission civilisatrice, I commend your attention to this item in HTMLGiant. The main part for me is not the racial composition of the authors in a particular story […]
The reason I want proof of this, which you suggested you weren’t able or willing to provide (scary) but then ended up providing (good evidence), is that people can just say anything. I know that isn’t what’s happening here, but it is a fact, and the phenomenon (being told something and then guilted into accepting its truth) is a scary one. I would love a comprehensive study of this. Who is willing to do it?
I would have thought that literary publishing, at least at the level of magazines, would be one of the levelest playing fields for writers. By its very nature the submission process allows writers to avoid revealing their race, their upbringing, their whatever else about themselves. Well, that might be drawn from the work itself. True. But have there ever been cases of people writing outside of their own situation, of a black man writing the story of a white man? Could we (someone out there) read portions of Another Country and think, hey, this is about a white guy, and I bet a white guy wrote it…(that’s not to discredit James Baldwin, whose nuanced perspective I am sure is not at fault, but to show that people who are ignorant about matters of race can make these assumptions, or can be tricked by the devices of race in fiction)
I just think that at the BASS level, the playing field is more even than it seems, and the problem lies with a lot of other (previously mentioned) factors, not so much with the mindset of literary journals. But as you get into the more face-to-face publishing world, which I (maybe wrongfully) imagine to be more invasive, then I could see it definitely become a problem of its own.
The reason I want proof of this, which you suggested you weren’t able or willing to provide (scary) but then ended up providing (good evidence), is that people can just say anything. I know that isn’t what’s happening here, but it is a fact, and the phenomenon (being told something and then guilted into accepting its truth) is a scary one. I would love a comprehensive study of this. Who is willing to do it?
I would have thought that literary publishing, at least at the level of magazines, would be one of the levelest playing fields for writers. By its very nature the submission process allows writers to avoid revealing their race, their upbringing, their whatever else about themselves. Well, that might be drawn from the work itself. True. But have there ever been cases of people writing outside of their own situation, of a black man writing the story of a white man? Could we (someone out there) read portions of Another Country and think, hey, this is about a white guy, and I bet a white guy wrote it…(that’s not to discredit James Baldwin, whose nuanced perspective I am sure is not at fault, but to show that people who are ignorant about matters of race can make these assumptions, or can be tricked by the devices of race in fiction)
I just think that at the BASS level, the playing field is more even than it seems, and the problem lies with a lot of other (previously mentioned) factors, not so much with the mindset of literary journals. But as you get into the more face-to-face publishing world, which I (maybe wrongfully) imagine to be more invasive, then I could see it definitely become a problem of its own.
Sorry I wrote a long-winded impromptu comment-poem. Also sorry I skirted your prime concern — the publishing disparity / institutional reticence.
On “white male” over-prevalence, then, being one of those dudes (a thing I didn’t either choose), I wonder what to do. My babble above concerns “content”, what to write, but I think you’re asking more about the publishing process, right?
For the insipid homogenous problem of television and its stereotypes, the trick is to smash that damned device. But for literature, it doesn’t seem so tenable to just jettison the whole mainstream. Does that leave anything except angry activism, or deep-breath tolerance of injustice?
As I said above, to huddle and hark within independent communities might only strengthen the walls of otherness, via “multiculturalism”. That’s how we have token status for P.O.C./otherness authors, (so sad, but institutions definitely do this to be PC).
I’m imagining a “nam-shub”, (Snow Crash anyone?) — viral memes to jam the brain, a mindfuck literary movement of interchangeable aliases, hundreds of Janey Smiths writing about Lakota casinos, Giovanni Moskowitz reliving a Muslim’s anxiety at the airport security, Yolanda Parks detailing grampa pipe tobacco circles at the country club, Fu-Ling Li writing about a hip graffiti-artist Mariachi.
With lit mags, is there a connection between so many of them being connected to universities and English departments?
I’ve taught at 4 universities and people of color, especially at professor level, are a rare sight. There is a lot of diversity talk, but I’ve never seen a diverse English faculty.
I bet it’s difficult to discuss race and racism in publishing here because you’re on a site where many of the white commenters are of the post-racial, liberal variety–the kind raised on the Cosby Show who thinks racism is a thing of the past, the kind of people who think they’re being progressive when they say things like, “I don’t see race! Gosh darn-it, I just like a good book and my best friend is black. She says the same thing!”
Probably a different kind of frustration than dealing with mouthbreathers, but in some ways, this form of patronizing racism seems more annoying and frustrating.
Ehh, I think when you hit at the big history of 20th century fiction, you’d get a pretty strong representative of minority writers… Much stronger than their statistical representation of the right here and now…. The main problem, as I see it, is that African American writers / Latin writers / other minorities and their writing is usually othered out of academic or mainstream fiction. As a Jew, I don’t feel like Jews really get othered out as minority writing and are automatically considered “mainstream” even if they are talking about Jewey stuff… depending on how accessible they are. Conversely, the history of African Am. Lit, like most African Am. culture is othered out even if it is accessible. See Nella Larsen / Jean Toomer / Richard Wright / Paul Laurence Dunbar… etc… point being, because it’s Af. Am. lit, it needed to be accessible because, to the publisher, the people in publishing, the content was difficult. (Black people!) It’s still taught that way, (difficult black people! even in academia) as segregated (!) from the mainstream (dead white dude) literary canon. (I had to take Af. Am. Lit classes just to find out about Dunbar / the history of early Af. Am. Lit).
Perhaps the most gifted, in my mind, writer of the 20th century is James Baldwin, who was a lesbian white girl from Boston (she wrote a really great essay on how Jews sold their blackness… which could have something to do with my previous comment about Jeweyness). She could write from the psychological standpoint of multiple races / genders. When she moved to France she got arrested for being a lesbian albino who purportedly stole a towel. But she stayed there, because to be a lesbian white girl from Boston in France was easier than kissing up to straight men in New York. Basically, my point is, we should re-validate Af. Am. Lit as great (raceless / genderless / canonical ) literature, not as its own sub-genre (kind of like sci-fi). We can reshape the way in which we teach / view history in order to solve a lot of the problems (bigger than literature) that we currently face. This doesn’t mean that blacks need sell their blackness, like James Baldwin said Jews did (they didn’t), but that we broaden the way in which our society interprets the cultural contributions of a given race of people (most people don’t even think about Seinfeld being a Jewish show.. particularly in the same way they would see Sanford & Son or the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air… Does anyone even remember Al Jolson?)
Word.
This is very true. I am the only black faculty member in my department. As a grad student, I was the only one in my previous department too, aaand the one before that. It’s a real problem.
Students, too. I went to an MFA program and have close friends who attended two others (where I hung out and got to know students and faculty). Of roughly 80-90 students I met in these various programs, maybe ten or twelve were non-white.
Like, holy cow how the hell did this happen? I can’t comment on if this is fair or not, or a result of where the programs were located geographically, or how many students of non-whiteness applied vs white students, etc. I have no idea, but the issues go lower than that anyway. And the students in these programs are the most likely to be the people pushing to become faculty in the future, so it doesn’t look like anything but a self-sustaining issue.
Roxane, I admire most of the posts you write, most of the work you do. I think awesome of you.
I also just want to point out a small but significant difference to be careful of. In conversations I’ve had about race/gender/ethnicity, I’ve come across accusations of not wanting to fix the problem but say is it a problem, like you state at the top of this post. And I want to point out that not everybody who’s asking “Is this a problem?” is willfully ignorant. Sometimes it’s misconstrued, I think. Because there’s value to asking the questions: Is this a problem? In what way is it a problem? What is the root cause of this problem?
Only then can we really consider how to go about finding a solution, a fix. I find it helpful to break down an issue before jumping right into the how do we fix this mode. Because you can’t fix something you don’t understand.
But then there are instances of repetitive refusal to admit an issue exists in light of overwhelming evidence, and I’m sure that’s what you’re responding to here. I think we’ve all seen that.
Just wanted to point out that there are also those of us who ask for basis not because we don’t believe it exists, but because we have a hard time trying to find the solution without breaking down the problem bit by bit.
I know, different things. Just want to make sure you have faith that not everyone who asks simple questions is unwilling to listen to the answers. Some are. This is good.
Marcolop, you are right. Not everyone who asks, “is this a problem” is willfully ignorant. I’d guess that most of the people who are asking that question aren’t willfully ignorant.
MC,
I’m only suggesting that when the debate spirals down to people calling anyone who disagrees racist, which has just happened to me, again, here in this thread. If you can provide better evidence, please do so. I never claimed my evidence was scientific.
These are not reviews, btw. These are the books that were sent to the journal from the presses. It’s the presses pushing these books, and in one month, there are hundreds of new authors. It’s not the overall picture, but it’s a good representation of the reception one might expect as a new author.
You can dissect it as much as you want, but those were the literary novels by new writers in the bookstores for that month.
Roxane said people choose not to see, and I completely agree. People choose not to see.
That’s right, so what? It’s difficult for everyone, right? I’m not the one who started this conversation. I’m only saying the idea that writers of color aren’t represented doesn’t fit with what’s really going on in publishing.
Roxane,
Drop me a note at wickerkat@aol.com and I’ll do my best to do a review of an AA author for TNB. I mostly like dark stuff – I think you’ve seen some of my posts and/or reviews up there. If there is a hot book coming out by an AA author in early 2011 that would be good timing. My last couple of reviews at TNB were Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter, The Physics of Imaginary Objects by Tina May Hall, The Avian Gospels by Adam Novy, It Came From Del Rio by Stephen Graham Jones, and The Wilding by Benjamin Percy. I also interviewed Amelia Gray. I’d like to be part of the solution, so if getting exposure is the way to go, I’ll do my best.
Why can’t you do a little research and find upcoming books by black writers on your own?
wow. you are quite the condescending fuck, Michael Vegas Mussman. perhaps you should take the one multiculturalism class again. you missed something. a lot of things. perhaps everything.
what, let me guess, you read bellow in college as well. christ, go back there. or keep picking your favorites from the list of establishment favorites, you fucking moron
“Perhaps the most gifted, in my mind, writer of the 20th century is James Baldwin, who was a lesbian white girl from Boston (she wrote a really great essay on how Jews sold their blackness… which could have something to do with my previous comment about Jeweyness). She could write from the psychological standpoint of multiple races / genders. When she moved to France she got arrested for being a lesbian albino who purportedly stole a towel. But she stayed there, because to be a lesbian white girl from Boston in France was easier than kissing up to straight men in New York.”
Huh? I don’t get the joke.
(Also, Toomer ain’t accessible….Cane is one of the most dense, opaque, difficult pieces of modernist fiction that I never finished reading.)
Hi Richard. As I noted in my first post, I am part of the problem. (Do I practice what I preach? I don’t and I don’t know how.) I am not familiar with that many contemporary writers of color. I definitely appreciate that you’re interested in writing a review but this is the sort of thing where I’d say, do a little poking around, see what you find. The whole point of this is that we should all make the effort to stretch ourselves and learn more about writers of color.
the fiction pieces? or the whole book? the whole book is jarring… granted. the fiction aint too hard to read. the imagery is pretty dense. edited by crane. what do you expect?
Yeah, I am also confused about James Baldwin. On a related note, I think the point about the MFA being relevant, and the ‘Jewishness’ of that having an effect is important. On the final MFA ‘exam’, a Jewish fiction writer (and a quite talented writer, though one with an incredibly narrow aesthetic) failed me on an essay on the grounds that James Baldwin was not a part of the canon. Some of this stuff comes from within the Academy, then– to whatever degree the mfa is within the academy.
Rion, I don’t know if you’ve tried Cane recently. Don’t fall for the whole ‘Cane is a unified work of art,’ nonsense– Toomer’s themes were Toomer’s themes, and he cobbled together the best material he had, which is uneven at best. But some of the writing in that book is exceptional to the point of greatness.
The Creative Writing faculty at SFSU is almost exclusively comprised of minorities. ‘Course, this is San Francisco.
On the other thread you reacted to my post with emotion and excused yourself from engaging me in discussion. As a scholar I think you know you need to approach this subject with an open mind and to listen to what others are saying without accusing them of being racist. You weren’t calling anyone racist but it was implied by plenty of folks in the thread. You replied to a lot of commenters, but did nothing to encourage civility in the thread. Anyone following the thread might conclude that you like it when people agree with you, but get emotional when they don’t.
Because there is undoubtedly plenty of racism in our society, racism with real consequences, and because there are so many people who want to deny that racism exists, your approach and your conclusions might appear reasonable. It fits with the way things have been in the past and the recent past. But like a truism, it may fall apart with scrutiny
I would note that plenty of the regular commentators on the site opted out of the conversation, and since anyone who didn’t agree with you was implicated in racism; it wasn’t really a good atmosphere for reasoned debate.
I would hope that you would use your megaphone here and elsewhere to continue to talk about this issue, and that you will get better at it as you do. I would hope that you would continue to look for support for your claims, and that when the support is not there, or when the support suggests something slightly different than what you already believe, that you will amend your beliefs.
I do believe you are in a position to make real change, as an educator, an editor, an author, and an outspoken unflappable human being. You can have an impact on the literary writing community, and you already have, with the Pank queer issue an obvious and clear example.
I noted on the other thread that I wholeheartedly agreed with your previous posts on this issue: there does seem to be underrepresentation in literary journals and at indie presses. It’s difficult to assess the mire, but this is probably true. The problem with pointing fingers at indies and lit. journals is that most indie presses aren’t answerable to anyone (U Presses are – but there you’ll find black and latino voices). If someone wants to publish books and fund it with their own money, they can publish whomever they choose.
Likewise, literary journals. Anyone can start one, and because the editors make selections based on taste, they aren’t required to feel compelled to identify a writer’s race. Most of the time, they may not even know. Anyway, there are thousands of literary journals now, and I would hate to be the one to have to tally all those writers by race and gender – seems a task as large as Duotrope itself.
I’m not so sure about MFA programs. My gut tells me it’s better than it was and this is a direct result of the growing black and latino middle classes. I also suspect there’s better representation at top-tier programs, but like you, I don’t have numbers. In theory, the numbers could be obtained, except many writing center directors may not feel comfortable giving out information about their students.
Of the journals that comprise BASS, most of the writers are solicited. So it’s a small number of editors making those selections, where the longstanding reputation of the writers has more than a little to do with it.
I noted in my previous post that publishers actively sought out writers of color in the 1920’s and they haven’t stopped looking. In the 1980’s there was a multicultural trend where it was discovered that writers of color sell, and sell well. And agents, editors, and educators still actively seek out writers of color today.
If the best you’ve got is underrepresentation in children’s literature and sci-fi, it’s kind of off the point of where you began. Besides, it seems the folks in the field are well-aware of the problem. It’s already being talked about. Maybe I’m wrong, but HTMLGiant just doesn’t really seem the place to talk about the underrepresentation in children’s lit. and sci-fi.
The biggest changes in publishing in recent years are that the media companies bought and consolidated all the presses, so that the pressure for an author to sell is the main determining factor of getting an agent or a publishing deal.
The other change, which isn’t being talked about so much, and that I also pointed out in the previous thread, is that today, in 2010, women DOMINATE publishing.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/44510-where-the-boys-are-not.html
According to this PW article, 80% of the students in the publishing course at Columbia are female. Likewise, 85% of agents and low-level editors at the big presses are female. These are the people who decide who the debut writers will be. In the current atmosphere, indie publishers are now starting to sign writers through agents, and so the influence of these women may, in fact, be spreading. The tone of the PW article is one of concern. That publishing is likely to change permanently if these numbers continue as they are.
Well, it already has. For a while now, the perception has been that men don’t read, and that the reading public is largely female.
This deserves all caps: in publishing at least, WHITE FEMALES ARE THE NEW WHITE MALES.
But you want numbers…
The following isn’t scientific but it’s a good snapshot and it’s suggestive of something that isn’t really being talked about.
I tallied the race and gender of 81 literary books from an edition of LibraryJournal.com, March 2010. This is a list of “first novels” in the areas of pop fiction, literary, thrillers, sf / fantasy / horror, historical fiction, mystery, and Christian fiction. I only analyzed the books in the literary category, because I don’t have the time or energy to do more, and it seems the literary category is the one of most interest to those of us who identify as literary writers. And that the “first novels” category is the one of most interest to the emerging writers here at this site.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6722507.html
A broader study might change the numbers, but I feel confident that this matches pretty closely with what I’ve seen going on out there.
In the literary category, 81 novels overall.
male whites: 24
female whites: 38
white writers: 62
writers of color: 19
blacks: 8
asian: 7
latino: 3
native american: 1
male writers: 34
male writers of color: 10
male black: 4
male asian: 3
male latino: 2
male native american: 1
female writers: 47
female writers of color: 9
female blacks: 4
female asian: 4
female native american: 0
whites make up 3/4 of the first novels.
white females 1/2
white males less than 1/3
writers of color 1/4, with male and female writers of color splitting equally about 1/8 each
likewise blacks 1/8 and asians 1/8
latinos and native americans hardly present.
I was surprised black males and females came in the same. I expected fewer black males.
It’s also worth noting that of the 24 white males listed here, 10 were on small presses.
So…it seems white females are leading the pack by quite a lot, and I would also note that many of them seemed to be young. If you are a white female, you’ve probably got a much better chance of publishing a first novel than anyone (not surprising, given what the PW article says about agents and editors). If you are a white male, your chances of publishing a first novel greatly improve when you include consideration at the small presses. And when you subtract the small presses, at least according to this particular list and this particular category, the chances of publishing are better for a writer of color than for a white male.
Nobody wants to hear that, but you asked for numbers.
Well… I suppose that more role models who are educationally and intellectually ambitious and diverse is probably where it has to start . . . and generalizing American society in the media and entertainment and the arts and so on . . . and rebuilding communities would be nice, although I expect this would require a good deal of money that I don’t believe cities are generally willing to ‘risk’, nor generally have much to spare of that they wouldn’t prefer putting someplace else, and at any rate does anyone really know how much a person should feel comfortable asking for from governments that ought to be critically concerned about how its populace lives and interacts?
At any rate, I think the question at this point seems to be not how but rather how quickly. How quickly depends upon how much people care, which depends a lot about how much people are talking about it.
…Not that this is very helpful.
Boston decided to ignore the problem and just start reclaiming certain ghettoized areas for the economically mobile. The state removed rent control and the landlords started raising the rents. The universities started buying up the houses in Mission Hill and kicking out the families, the projects were mowed down and the residents shipped out of town. They haven’t been quite as successful in Jamaica Plain or Roxbury.
There’re actually [generally white/privileged] liberals arguing over whether or not people have a right to live where they want to live, whether taking one bus to work or three buses to work is something that less economically fortunate Americans should have a say in. I guess it’s too bad everyone can’t be this clinical. To quote the band Lush out of context, I feel so lucky, sometimes.
Yeah but then there’s that whole brilliant thing Roxane Gay does, where you ask her for a specific and concrete solution to the problem, never once questioning that there is a problem, and she just brushes that off, because actually wanting to solve a problem is a lot less fun than having a lifetime of bitching to do.
It depends on more things than you’re describing. I think many people view publication as like a sporting event, and nobody cries racist if a white person outruns a black person on the track, do they? So many people have this bizarre notion that there is no such thing as nepotism in publishing and really only the best writers are getting into the best magazines etc. And those people are lying to themselves and others and so forth. Yeah but in any case whatever.
My favorite book by a black writer was called The White Boy Shuffle. Let me look up the guy’s name right quick. Paul Beatty. Glad I remembered about him now that I’m reading more. I’ll probably read another one of his books next year. I read it in 2007, a year in which I read maybe four books. I recommend it to anyone. It covers ghetto life in an an unjudgemental way–it doesn’t beg the reader’s sympathy as much as it entertains the reader. Which can be a good thing. I vividly remember the scenes of the 1992 LA Riots in the book. Hilarious.
Now that I think about it, I read more than four books that year. They were just mostly non-fiction and biography.
John, I do not mind disagreement. I disagree with you. I don’t know what more I’m supposed to say. You feel that white women are the new white men. I think that’s…an inaccurate assessment and most women i know would say the same. I see the numbers you have presented and they only comprise part of the picture. Yes, the evidence is compelling and yes, it is something to talk about, but what is it you want me to say? Getting a book published is only one part of the process. There is ample evidence about the issues women face in publishing even though that’s… not what I was posting about. As for encouraging civility, I am not the hall monitor and I felt that the other discussion was fairly civil. Of course I’m going to get “emotional.” That’s what happens when people argue. I’m not a robot. And finally, I didn’t call anyone racist nor did I suggest it and I am not responsible for what other people say, Yes. I love when people agree with me. Who doesn’t? That doesn’t mean I can’t handle disagreement. I can compromise on all sorts of things but you want me to change my mind and sort of get on board with the idea that white men are the new endangered species in publishing? I’m not that open minded, Im afraid. I have no problem admitting that.
Great post, Roxane.
–Rachel Swirsky
Great post, Roxane.
–Rachel Swirsky
What I’m having a hard time understanding is why you wouldn’t be happy to see these numbers.
If these numbers mean anything, then you should be kind of glad things aren’t as bad as you’ve made them out to be.
Apparently, you’d rather change the parameters of the debate instead of address what you specifically asked for…
A magnifying glass distorts, so maybe it really is an apropos metaphor for how you see it.
John, I think those numbers are fantastic. I never said I didn’t. Stop trying to manipulate my responses. My only point is that those numbers don’t mean that white men are the new oppressed class in publishing. Those numbers are far more encouraging than I would have guessed. I truly do not know what you expect from me.
Yikes. I’ve hit a nerve. I don’t mean to be bullying. Seriously, in life I’m a soft-spoken pacifist and I care about this and have for a long time.
Likewise, I feel you’ve mischaracterized what I’ve said. By no means am I suggesting white males are “the new oppressed class.” But it is more difficult for emerging writers who happen to be white males. The landscape has changed and I don’t want to write a thriller.
That problem– along with MFBomb’s noting of the generational/generally (allegedly) post-racial attitude of many of the people who frequent this site– is exactly what caused the whole discussion to derail into name-calling on Roxane’s last post. Well put, phm.
Publishing is almost exclusively cronyism and nepotism. A google search tends to explain how a person might have come to be in a prominent venue.
Yeah, how come Roxane hasn’t solved racism yet? This is total bullshit.
Also, I need a jetpack pony, and Christmas is coming up soon. Just saying!
Are you being facetious or are you really asking for a “specific and concrete solution” to the problems addressed in this post?
I think part of the problem with having these discussions is that people have learned, and in their defense, been taught by most diversity seminars/trainings/programs that racist behavior=a racist person. This isn’t always true. I’ve said/done/believed some horrible things when it comes to race (often directed at my own). Often I’ve behaved this way out of pure ignorance.
When someone points out a racist behavior/belief/practice, they aren’t calling YOU a racist. They’re saying what you said/did/thought that ONE time was racist. Don’t get defensive and stop listening to reason because you feel like someone is calling you a racist and don’t be ashamed of being ignorant about certain social issues.
For the most part, writers are liberal smart kids and you can’t tell us that we’re leaving anybody out consciously or subconsciously because we know better. The truth is, sometimes we don’t. I know so little about Latino, Asian, Native-American, and Queer literature, partly because so little is made available, partly because I rarely seek it out. That doesn’t make me a bigot, but it does make me ignorant about a lot of issues concerning those communities.
If I spend all my time being defensive about it or ashamed of my ignorance, When will I have any time to increase my knowledge on those subjects, if doing so is important to me?
hi roxane,
i am super glad you are bringing this discussion to the table.
htmlgiant readers can be hostile to this kind of talk and it can be a lot of pressure to absorb all the criticism/backlash… when i am not out of my mind because of life turmoil, hopefully i’ll be able to add more to this conversation….
Hey Roxane, let’s not be so quick to accept this evidence. Um, first, what is ‘Library Journal’, from which you pulled a sample from a particular month in 2010 (why March– was May or June or July or August not quite as far in your favor?):
“In its 133rd year of publication, Library Journal is the oldest and most respected publication covering the library field. Considered to be the “bible” of the library world, LJ is read by over 100,000 library directors, administrators, and staff in public, academic, and special libraries.”
Ok. So Library Journal reviews a certain number of books (on what criteria?) each month– those books which would be most likely to be of interest to librarians stocking the shelves of public libraries and school libraries. That world of libraries and librarians is, I should point out, only tangential to the world of commercial publishing (not to mention that it almost entirely ignores the world of indie publishing). And this particular snapshot– a certain, mostly idiosyncratic list of genres; an assessment of numbers based on your assessment of the race of the author (did you just assume, from the names? I say so only because I’m Japanese American, but have a Jewish last name); a list of REVIEWS, not of the actual books published, but of the books that this website for Librarians chose to review– is so odd, distorted, and incomplete (who knows the taste of the librarian world, or of this particular publication aimed at the librarian world, which has some system for soliciting reviews from– what, librarians? staff? the pr firms of publishing houses? critics, that small and receding group? or do they aggregate a couple big review clearinghouses, like Kirkus?) as to be, well, almost meaningless. Certainly more meaningless than Roxane’s examination of children’s literature and Sci-Fi, which while perhaps obtuse in genre, at least deal directly with publishing numbers, not the reviews of the librarian journal for librarians.
John, you fail to distinguish adequately between the increasingly female audience for books, and the still predominately male writers who get published. If VIDA tunes in, they can make their case– I know it’s a strong one– but basically, despite the fact that more women read, more males are still writing, and the way our literary apparatus considers males is still biased (the whole debate over the ‘great’ American novel). I’m not convinced it’s better to be a female writer in 2010 than a male writer– perhaps it’s better than it ever has been, and over time, the dominance of female readership will lead to changes in who gets published, just as there has been some progress toward equal pay for equal work as women have become more likely to succeed academically and graduate college than men. But even there, it’s not like you see an equal playing field among the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
To return to the issue of race and publishing and these last couple threads: you should be careful about branding (and so dismissing) responses as ’emotional’, as if there were some calm, rational, dispassionate realm in which true scholars such as yourself practiced discourse so logical that it could easily resolve every problem. So there’s force and heat, perhaps even temper, polemic, and occasional f-bombs to discussion of an issue where Roxane has, at the risk of pun, skin in the game. So be it. Don’t pretend you deserve some pedestal from which you can pronounce cold, perfect judgment: coldly dissecting the anatomy of an argument can only yield results as technique when applied to a dead issue, and this debate is about now, here, on the web and in journals and in the judgment and actions of editors and publishers and readers.
“But it is more difficult for emerging writers who happen to be white males.”
More difficult than what? Than the entire history of publishing up until the last few years? Dude, so what. White Men have the entirety of the written word on their side.
John Minichillo, I was wondering if you share your observation that black males are only good at music and sports with the students in your classes. If there’s nothing racist about holding such a view I don’t know why you should feel it necessary to conceal it from them, and I’m sure they would appreciate knowing where their teacher is coming from. It might explain a lot for them, actually.
I thought Roxane might have a few in mind, that’s all. I can certainly do some research. I mostly focus on small indie presses at TNB, so (and maybe this is part of the problem) I don’t know of many. Mostly I just pick up books that sound interesting, and only then do I notice if the book is by a man or woman, what color they are, etc.
Thanks for that, Roxane. Will do.
And if any titles come to mind, I will e-mail you.
Well, it’s true that’s there’s plenty of defensiveness – all around – when the conversation leeches, from blood into air, responsibility and blame at competing levels of immunity and virulence.
But I think it’s also true that the valences of racial mistreatment – that is, its irrationality, cruelty, and neutralizing discouragement – excuse any careless statement made ‘against’ racism. This acceptance is learned behavior, too – and obtuse-sounding questions and complicating evidence aren’t to be dismissed automatically as willful or unconscious “racism” – as they seem (to me) to have been in both recent threads.
Let me say that I think darby was wrong in doubting that a society shot through, historically and contemporaneously, with racial preference could have “art” as a zone of life uncontaminated by “race”. But, you know, hardly anybody took her or him up on that – I think: unwisely inaccurate – assertion — I think, because that’d have been an intellectual distraction from luxuriating in rage at injustice. I simply think this soothing of oneself with indignation is ineffective.
Is that self-righteous? Well, ok – is what I’ve said incorrect?
This is sort of a side point or a side question: Roxane (with one N), I’m curious as to your feelings on white writers writing about characters who aren’t. Just as an example, I’ve written some things that have either Native American characters (want to talk about an under-represented minority, especially with women), or English-Indian, African American etc… And I don’t say this to be all Benetton-ad, that’s just how the characters came into being. (sorry to sound horribly student, using a phrase like “came into being,” but I’m being inarticulate this evening, it seems.)
I guess my question is, in addition to more attention being paid to writers of color, wouldn’t it also be helpful if white writers wouldn’t only write about white people? Not in the stereotypical ways, as you mentioned.
Racial equality isn’t anywhere near something I feel qualified to talk about as far as facts/examples/history goes (and my genetic background is a bit of a European grab-bag anyway).
However, when it comes to issues of gender or sexuality, I have similar complaints. Labels like “women’s fiction” when there isn’t “men’s fiction” (because the pesky uterus just changes everything, dontchaknow…) The rarity of bisexual characters that aren’t used as novelty or stereotype, how people must get awfully sick of being portrayed as the sassy gay friend (or in horror movie parlance, the black guy who dies at the beginning)…
Anyway, these are all big issues in which some internet commenters think snarking is the answer. Screw them, and fair play to you for trying to make sense of it all.
MC,
I’m only suggesting that when the debate spirals down to people calling anyone who disagrees racist, which has just happened to me, again, here in this thread. If you can provide better evidence, please do so. I never claimed my evidence was scientific.
These are not reviews, btw. These are the books that were sent to the journal from the presses. It’s the presses pushing these books, and in one month, there are hundreds of new authors. It’s not the overall picture, but it’s a good representation of the reception one might expect as a new author.
You can dissect it as much as you want, but those were the literary novels by new writers in the bookstores for that month.
Roxane said people choose not to see, and I completely agree. People choose not to see.
That’s right, so what? It’s difficult for everyone, right? I’m not the one who started this conversation. I’m only saying the idea that writers of color aren’t represented doesn’t fit with what’s really going on in publishing.
Alan, you’re an azz.
It’s not my observation, it’s how they identify themselves. It’s no secret. It’s not how I see them, it’s how they present themselves to the world.
If someone plays sports or music, white or black, male or female, it’s none of my business. Plenty are able to negotiate these other interests and still be good students. Some aren’t. All I was saying was, that in my experience, when it comes to writing, the athletes and the musicians – they don’t have the time. They are very busy people. That’s OK, lots of people aren’t interested in writing.
The black males who don’t self-identify as athletes and musicians are very much aware that the majority of their black male peers do. Again, I don’t think any of my black male students would be surprised or offended by what I said.
You’re taking my comments out of context, so I’m forced to defend what I said. I don’t really want to have to rehash it here, but because you’re making a strong accusation, here goes…
What I said was that in higher ed, black males are in crisis. There are very few of them in higher ed. White and black males are both outnumbered by their female counterparts in higher ed, black males more so. Females are getting better grades, and in some cities, better jobs.
I’m not making any claims about what’s right or wrong, or the course of human history or whether racism and sexism are still factors in the daily lives of women and people of color (this is unquestionably true).
Add to that that a large percentage of the black males in higher ed are underprepared, and are failing and dropping out at higher rates.
It’s a serious problem.
Alan, I hope your comfortable wrapped in self-righteousness.
I’m at least doing something, trying to help all my students succeed and addressing racism and sexism in the classroom, to a generation of students who often believe Civil Rights was won a long time ago and that working class whites are discriminated against because of affirmative action. You know, women who actually believe they are not feminists, and men who think feminists hate men. That’s what I do to earn a paycheck and it’s important.
For the rest of the week I try to find time to write.
If in one month there are hundreds of new authors, why is your sample size 81? Why the month of March last year? What presses are we actually talking about (is presses the right word– ie, does that count commercial houses? Do small presses get included– who submits to this journal, why, and what kind of source of information is it? How did you ascertain the ‘race’ of the authors?)? Look, John, the social scientist who looked at this sample, both in size and source, would almost certainly disqualify it out of hand. As meaningful evidence of what’s happening in American fiction, BASS being assessed is ‘unscientific’, but at least makes sense to discuss because it’s the top. This is like, I don’t know, the needle buried in the center of a stalk of hay somewhere indeterminate in a pile that may or may not be part of the stack general. But you’re right; I should admit, I was blind, and still am. I refuse to see the light.
I’d rather light the pile on fire.
And I, at least, wasn’t calling you a racist. I’m just suggesting that your argument’s evidence is poor and incomplete if it has any meaning at all, and that your rhetorical strategy and position is flawed. At least in reply to me, complaining I’m dismissing you as a racist is poor a response to what I said as if I’d dismissed you as a racist.
And what of your claim about women and publishing? Would you care to, as you urged Roxane to do, ‘alter’ your opinion when confronted with other claims?
Mike,
Don’t be lazy. Look at the link.
81 first novels in the literary category. There are probably 300 first novels overall when you add other categories.
As a writer, I’m very interested in publishing. I’ve been paying attention. In the post I admitted I was surprised by some of what I saw. I’ve already demonstrated I’m open to changing my POV on this. I’m not wedded to any POV. I’m not all that invested in the results of any analysis of who is and who isn’t being published. I am invested in trying to find a way to the truth. I’m not saying those numbers are the truth. But there’s no reason to believe they might not be an OK estimate.
Nasty much?
The Creative Writing faculty at SFSU is almost exclusively comprised of minorities. ‘Course, this is San Francisco.
Great post, Roxane.
–Rachel Swirsky
I have less than zero business commenting on any of this, and have recently visited this site again with some hesitation and probably against my better judgment. I do think the whole discussion here is massively interesting. I would like to add, or introduce with all possible due sensitivity, that publishing is first and foremost a business and power and status always acts to preserve its own interests, no matter who holds it. Power and status isn’t gifted or bestowed or granted for ethical or altruistic reasons, it’s created or taken. This is an area where I have extreme expertise, but only an extreme not-quite-well-read interest in literature. People of color, any of the underrepresented, will need to create/inject their own genre and narratives, then have a critical and market audience to consume and sustain it. Apologies if I have sullied this page with a lost/forgotten/despised uniquely American ideal. When I read work by “people of color” which to me is strange phrasing from academia, I end up feeling, like after a trip to Europe, “That was interesting” but merely interesting, and the work I personally identify with, that has staying power, is the kind of white middle class material selected for the BASS. It is a numbers game and people of color will also need to be cognizant of the Elvis and Eminem effect if and when their work gains the kind significant market/critical momentum enjoyed (and never to be just surrendered because it’s the right thing to do) by the status quo.
John, empirical compulsion is irrelevant in the teeth of grievance commitment.
You respond to a “wish for statistics” with a slice of numbers, with provenance laid out for examination/qualification, and you get “I don’t know what more I’m supposed to say.” and, worse (to me), the narrowness of the slice pitched back (as though you’d made for it some claim of comprehensive entailment).
You get your numbers – with the limited suggestiveness that you seem already to know they can sustain – plainly disregarded: “the still-predominantly male writers who get published” – the slice of 81 first-novels is 47 women : 34 men — with no competing data or methods presented, just emphatic iteration of the limitation claim that . . . you‘d already made.
You bend over backwards to point out that there is racism, and you get asked whether the students of color whom you teach are clear about your ‘music ‘n’ sports’ assumptions about their futures, to which are-you-still-beating-your-wife question you can only answer that the grievance mentality that you actually cope with professionally is the bizarre package of ‘conservative’ memes about how unfair things are for European-Americans.
You stick scrupulously to low-key fact-based argument, and you’re a bully – because you don’t accept, in this limited, remote format, position-taking based on stubbornly impressionistic refusal “to agree” with data – or, perhaps more frustrating, to allow for complexity, for the reality not simply of historical ‘inertia’, but also of (incomplete and inadequate) historical ‘momentum’ in progressive directions.
You get distracting arguments that you’re asking for hypocrisy from your conversation partners (“compromise”) and a warning to avoid explosive language (like “emotional”, as opposed to “fucking moron” – ??).
It’s, as Roxane has said on both threads, a tiring and dispiriting conversation at times, but that’s the weakness and (eventual) strength of progressive politics – progress requires intellectual energy, rather than rewarding energetic resistance to intellection.
What Baldwin says applies to a lot of the ethnic white populations that were enculturated up until the late 20th century.You can see it in writers like Eugenides and Papaleo. They represent ethnically when they want but get by as white writers in a way that doesn’t happen for brown people.
White Boy Shuffle was good. His next book Tuff I think was not so good, but that’s just what people are saying.
I think the entire problem Roxane has been trying to describe is portrayed in Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. It’s about a black writer tries to write on his own terms and is ignored. When he’s finally convinced to write a book that plays to jigaboo stereotypes he makes millions.
I bet it’s difficult to discuss race and racism anywhere where there’s many conversation partners of the christ,-I-wanna-be-on-the-‘winning’-side variety — the kind raised on the smugly circular confusion of ‘still not perfect’ with ‘nobody is gonna think things are worse than I say they are’, the kind of people who think they’re being progressive when they say things like, “Ah-hell no! Axes in school-house doorways! Dude, there’s gonna be a revolution! Hey! Cool Cliche Guevara tat’, bro!”
Probably not as frustrating as dealing with science-deniers, but every bit as impenetrably insulated in share-the-grief rhetoric.
I love that book so much. I read it last year and thought, “Yes.”
Oh, is that how THEY are? And the good ones agree, you say?
Black directors have had the same situation when they don’t want to make a “black comedy” like Barbershop. Actually Ice Cube has talked about this, saying he would make two “barbershop” comedies to get in the door and make the movie he wanted to make.
But now I’m talking Hollywood…
Black Oscar winners gimme a historical yell!!!
crickets….sound of.
Well, it’s true that’s there’s plenty of defensiveness – all around – when the conversation leeches, from blood into air, responsibility and blame at competing levels of immunity and virulence.
But I think it’s also true that the valences of racial mistreatment – that is, its irrationality, cruelty, and neutralizing discouragement – excuse any careless statement made ‘against’ racism. This acceptance is learned behavior, too – and obtuse-sounding questions and complicating evidence aren’t to be dismissed automatically as willful or unconscious “racism” – as they seem (to me) to have been in both recent threads.
Let me say that I think darby was wrong in doubting that a society shot through, historically and contemporaneously, with racial preference could have “art” as a zone of life uncontaminated by “race”. But, you know, hardly anybody took her or him up on that – I think: unwisely inaccurate – assertion — I think, because that’d have been an intellectual distraction from luxuriating in rage at injustice. I simply think this soothing of oneself with indignation is ineffective.
Is that self-righteous? Well, ok – is what I’ve said incorrect?
Spike Lee is a good example of breaking through the line, but he kind of flamed out. To keedee’s point above, I get that, I never miss Sanford and Son, especially is Grady is on… sorry, it’s just too hilarious
To be fair, Bamboozled is the cinematic equivalent of Erasure, no?
History shows that I always respond with more enthusiasm to people who actually postulate solutions to the problems they have the nuts to identify. Roxane once basically told me that I had no right to ask her for answers. I hope that as she grows from victim to victimizer she eventually really considers what can be done and does some things. Then I’ll be with her. In the mean time, all power to Pank etc and so forth.
One thing I have noticed about the arguments of Roxane Gay is that she often tells people to stop doing things. To me, this is not the best way to argue things. It decries weakness and more than that it eschews a certain sense of superiority.
Stop telling me what to do, asshole, and start making real progress in the areas you identify.
Stop generating ad revenue for fucking country clubs like HTMLGIANT and start embracing fucking GRUNGE.
I am drunk, but fuck your collective mother post-mortem and with vigor.
Um, kettle? You’re black.
Yeah, and NO, I’m not being racist.
Sara, I think anyone can write about anything. We are talking about fiction, after all. I do think it can be difficult to avoid writing the Other in ways that are inappropriate or inaccurate but hell, it is difficult to write authentic characters regardless. I’m sure it would be helpful for white writers to write about non white people to diversify the kinds of characters, and in turns, stories that are being put out into the world. I also think many writers are intimidated by the prospect of doing that. I know I read somewhere of a woman who gives a writing workshop called Writing the Other and that’s definitely something I find interesting.
Hi Jackie. I look forward to your contributions. Thank you.
“I simply think this soothing of oneself with indignation is ineffective.”
Who’s doing that? Who’s soothing? I don’t feel soothed.
What in the fuck is going on here? You losers really need to get over yourselves and worry about getting jobs that pay real money. You’ll never solve the world’s problems and all this navel gazing is not only preposterous but embarrassing.
If htmlgiant is a country club, it sure ain’t one with desirable facilities or paying members. Or a fucking golf course, for that matter. Where people can hit balls. And I wish Roxane Gay would stop telling me not to hit balls at the china, in the imaginary dining room where the damn ethnics is trying to eat.
I looked at the link.
Why in the name of all things decent and holy are we in the month of March?
I’m glad you’re in favor of the truth, whatever it takes from you, whatever awful and unfair price you pay for being the bearer of KNOWLEDGE.
Ok. That was harsh. Look John, to be less unfair: no piece of evidence presented here has been adequate for real conclusion. Let’s commission somebody, or… I don’t know. If you’re so sure of your source, do a tally that represents all of last year, and THEN go ahead and see if we can get some direct statistics from Publisher’s Weekly or some direct source. I don’t know where you think you’ve demonstrated your open-mindedness, but I’ll say this: you haven’t had an easy run of it in this discussion, and there is apparently the history of some past comment string come back to haunt you.
I return to the part where I mentioned your chance to reconsider the whole ‘women writers are in, male writers are the new troubled minority’ part of your previous argument.
Also, phm, I am drunk as fuck too, as I just finished my grading for this quarter and evidently have no life greater than the comment strings of htmlgiant (this comment is meant to come before what I said next). And so, though I think Roxane deserves respect far greater than she’s being accorded here, your response seems personal. And so excuse me for interjecting.
Mike,
I just used what I found, what was convenient. Roxane did the same thing and nobody had a problem. I was at least looking at literary books, which is more relevant to what she was talking about.
Since you are done grading and have so much time to kill, YOU look at the lists and tally them up. You seem a little a paranoid to me, so I hope you’ll double-check your math. You want to know why I didn’t do more? BECAUSE IT TOOK ME HOURS. I had to look up 81 authors and determine their race, which, you can’t always tell just by looking at a photo.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/collectiondevelopmentprepubalerts/855802-293/falling_into_bounty_fall_amp.html.csp
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6641651.html
There…I’ve just tripled the sample size. Have fun. If you want to do a whole year, this thread will be dead by the time you’ve finished. And it’s not easy. You’ll have to triple-check your numbers.
If the numbers come out the same, are you going to cry in your beer? Because you really really seem to WANT for the numbers to bear out that these writers are underrepresented.
You’re being kind of vague about my comment history in the threads, but are insinuating something and I really don’t appreciate it. If you have anything specific to say to me, please say it so I can defend myself in front of the lazy readers who aren’t going to take the time to see what I’ve actually said.
By the way, the BASS gender gap breaks down to 11 men and 8 women. It’s pretty equitable and I have a feeling they are conscious of who is represented. It’s been that way for a long long time. There are certainly years of BASS with more women than men and writers of color are ALWAYS present. With only 20 stories it may not be as many as we would like to see, but they are getting in. I don’t doubt that there are discussions between the guest and series editors about whether the writers being selected will look representative or not.
If I exaggerated by calling white females the new white males, the point is the same, white female writers of literary fiction outnumber white males and they have for a while now. Accepting that doesn’t mean we are no longer on the lookout for sexism in publishing. But let’s please keep in mind that sexism cuts both ways and male writers are being pigeon-holed into genre roles.
Thanks, becker. You saved me from having to ‘cry into my beer,’ and spend a year! But hey, I’m SO HAPPY that women are under-represented! Because I love inequality! And I’m a man, so it breaks my way! Oh, frabjous day!
Or, wait. Never mind. “Sexism cuts both ways.” Now that I remember, I feel double-bad for myself– bad that sexism no longer afflicts me in publishing, and bad that sexism still afflicts women as it traditionally has. WHY do I have to think about such unpleasant things?
I especially want to find awful inequality most of the time because– well, why indeed? Because then I can be glad I have something to wring my hands about? Because then I can feel bad for myself about it being hard to publish my work, and avoid chalking that up to my own lack of merit? Because that’s how these blind, ideological ethnics ACT– always so stirred up and emotional?
John, I was actually, genuinely being sympathetic to the ‘past comments’ thing– I don’t know what the dustup was with that one commenter, nor did the whole thing make sense, but it was clear someone felt you were being racist in the past, and it hasn’t been my impression that you’re racist based on your comments here. I didn’t dislike your disagreement– I like a good argument and value discourse– but that was before your last comment there, when you started speculating about my motivation and character.
If I was going to tally something to try to figure out the publishing landscape in terms of race and gender, I wouldn’t use Library Journal on account of my doubts about it as a meaningful source. Also, I have five years of experience with this issue, dealing directly with literary magazines, commercial magazines, and the commercial publishing industry, and already published an essay last year about race and publishing in Luna Park– that, and I have another full essay about Race and Publishing in the new issue of Copper Nickel. My arguments are based in evidence and analyzed specifics, though I know, it’s all invalid because I didn’t tally library journal. I’m glad you spent hours, John– you do seem tired of the subject. So give it a rest.
There’s the Hughes Brothers too, they did From Hell. Spike Lee did S.O.S. which was a clusterfuck of otherness: it was ethnic, working class, and gay.
Link between the two: serial killers. There’s a white stereotype for you.
All right, here’s a year-end 2009 tally from VIDA–not at who’s getting published, but at who’s getting the “best of” and other awards. I would argue that that’s what really counts, and determines who gets read; it at least has a little more bearing than one month from 2009.
http://vidaweb.org/best-of-2009
*Of” who’s getting published, not “at.”
Me neither.
The only indignation I see is that deadgod has been forced to bold and italics in the course of two sentences. What’s next, bold CAPS !!!
Thanks, becker. You saved me from having to ‘cry into my beer,’ and spend a year! But hey, I’m SO HAPPY that women are under-represented! Because I love inequality! And I’m a man, so it breaks my way! Oh, frabjous day!
Or, wait. Never mind. “Sexism cuts both ways.” Now that I remember, I feel double-bad for myself– bad that sexism no longer afflicts me in publishing, and bad that sexism still afflicts women as it traditionally has. WHY do I have to think about such unpleasant things?
I especially want to find awful inequality most of the time because– well, why indeed? Because then I can be glad I have something to wring my hands about? Because then I can feel bad for myself about it being hard to publish my work, and avoid chalking that up to my own lack of merit? Because that’s how these blind, ideological ethnics ACT– always so stirred up and emotional?
John, I was actually, genuinely being sympathetic to the ‘past comments’ thing– I don’t know what the dustup was with that one commenter, nor did the whole thing make sense, but it was clear someone felt you were being racist in the past, and it hasn’t been my impression that you’re racist based on your comments here. I didn’t dislike your disagreement– I like a good argument and value discourse– but that was before your last comment there, when you started speculating about my motivation and character.
If I was going to tally something to try to figure out the publishing landscape in terms of race and gender, I wouldn’t use Library Journal on account of my doubts about it as a meaningful source. Also, I have five years of experience with this issue, dealing directly with literary magazines, commercial magazines, and the commercial publishing industry, and already published an essay last year about race and publishing in Luna Park– that, and I have another full essay about Race and Publishing in the new issue of Copper Nickel. My arguments are based in evidence and analyzed specifics, though I know, it’s all invalid because I didn’t tally library journal. I’m glad you spent hours, John– you do seem tired of the subject. So give it a rest.
welcome to HTMLGIANT.
That’s kind of my thinking too, was just curious about your thoughts on the matter as well. And you’re right, it IS hard to translate the authenticity of anyone to the page.
I suppose that one step to diversify the attention we pay to different kinds of writing is to encourage writers to write in diverse ways, if that’s what moves them, if course.
“Publishing is almost exclusively cronyism and nepotism”
You don’t think book sales or quality have something to do with it?
“I would note that plenty of the regular commentators on the site opted out of the conversation, and since anyone who didn’t agree with you was implicated in racism”
I think this is projection your part.
I love this post. I admire Roxanne’s patience in describing things that are frustrating to point out because they feel obvious. Sometimes my disbelief that people don’t see the disparity – or even worse think that people of color have an advantage – makes me too upset to communicate my perspective. It’s easy to talk from a high horse – it takes energy to patiently cast out and reel back in every red herring one by one.
“this soothing of oneself with indignation”
Ashley, the point was that people soothe themselves by being righteously wrathful: one sometimes feels better about the aptness of her or his perceptions of injustice, especially when one is powerless in relation to some particular injustice, when one makes, of those perceptions, stirring rhetoric.
Do you disagree that identity-political theatrics are “learned behavior” – that is, behavior rewarded in some way? ( – in my view, self-defeatingly rewarded.) Do you think hyperbolic denunciation is useful in ‘opposing’ racism?
Really? You “neither”, Michael Copperman?
You didn’t “feel soothed” by the kiddie-pomp of Um, first, what is ‘Library Journal’ or as to be, well, almost meaningless? or by the phonily methodical cavils of (on what criteria?) or some system for soliciting reviews from– what, librarians? [etc.]?
You weren’t “soothed” by the inaccurate scholasticism of the world of libraries and librarians is, I should point out, only tangential to the world of commercial publishing?
Not “soothed” by the bumbling laziness of a certain, most idiosyncratic list of genres? or the botched hypocrisy of did you just assume, from the names? or, indeed, by the risibly inert intellectuality in the adverbs of fail to distinguish adequately between the increasingly female audience for books, and the still-predominantly male writers who get published?
It’s hardly believable, Michael, that you weren’t “soothed” by announcing the rule Don’t pretend you deserve some pedestal with such chesty self-implication, nor by the muscularly obvious assertion this debate is about now, here, and especially not even by the bravely muted threat I’d rather light the pile on fire.
But surely you were “soothed” by the comical self-confidence of those rapid-fire hammerstrikes If in one month?, Why the month of?, What presses?, Do small presses– who, why, what kind?, How did you? – and by the smugly mis-asserted almost certainly. No?!
You weren’t “soothed” in your self-canceling ‘support’ of Roxane with BASS at least makes sense to discuss because it’s the top? – odd, that.
Not “soothed” by wrong-footed accusations like complaining I’m dismissing you as a racist?
And not a bit “soothed” by damp hyperbole like in the name of all things decent and holy? That’s a damn shame, Michael!
– as is not being “soothed” by the flail at scientificity in no piece of evidence presented here has been adequate for real conclusion, nor by the misshapen sneer of Oh, frabjous day!, nor the repellently cloying I was actually, genuinely being sympathetic.
Is it not incredible, Michael, that you were not “soothed” by the out-loud-laughable I have five years of experience with this issue – hilarity compounded gleefully by My arguments are based in evidence and analyzed specifics? – even more so, not “soothed” by the airily casuistical dismissal So give it a rest.??
–
Oh, “I see”. You’d only have marked that your “indignation” was being soothed if you’d bothered to embolden or italicize “REVIEWS”, or “KNOWLEDGE”, or “THEN”, or “SO HAPPY”, or “ACT”.
Have an lollipop angrily, Michael.
Was that supposed to be a close reading, deadgod? Your diction is so high as to suggest that the level of ‘indignation’ is, well, yours– were you not ‘soothed’ by taking the time to go through all my comments, take phrases out of context, ignore the parts that were sarcastic, the parts that were quite intentional hyperbole, the parts that that were serious, and then lump on every insult you could over-write, attempting to dismiss argument on the basis of its motivation– an argument is not made invalid just because a writer takes pleasure in making it. That’s why YOU (I don’t know how to make this do caps, or I would) just spent your time going through this all so thoroughly, deadgod– because you get a charge from it. Because thinking, and arguing, and responding, can be invigorating, and because as a smart person (actually, I get the sense you think you’re a really, really, really smart person) you enjoy exercising those muscles.
Now, then. To ‘flail’ at ‘scientificity’ is to mix metaphors by verbing, and your repetition of questions doesn’t disqualify my objection to the source, supposed method, sample size, or idiosyncrisy of an 81 entry Library Journal listing from March.
Why is a reference to Jabberwocky a ‘misshapen sneer’?
Calling the questions I raised ‘inaccurate scholasticism’, ‘kiddie-pomp’, ‘inaccurate scholasticism,’ ‘bumbling laziness,’ ‘botched hypocrisy,’ ‘phonily methodological cavils’, (you do like to modify, don’t you?), ‘chesty self-implication’, and so on (while you’re own points are ‘muscularly evident’? Really?), and to keep on, ‘airily causisistical dismissal’, ‘wrong-footed’, ‘smugly missasserted’, ‘damp hyperbole’, and oh goodness, I run out of desire to keep on. A series of scathing-cum-overwritten insults do not make a critique valid– you’re borderline using the name-calling device made popular in propaganda, if in the fashion and style of one with the severely unabridged Websters loose in your skull. And you’re so– ANGRY! Yes, it must serve your interests to be so OUTRAGED! IT! MUST!
Or perhaps someone took away your lollipop when you were a child, deadgod?
Why is it ‘inaccurate scholasticism’ to note that “the world of libraries and librarians is, I should point out, only tangential to the world of commercial publishing?” I don’t know that it’s ‘scholasticism’ at all, but the way distribution and purchasing works at libraries, and the function and content of Library Journal, the journal of Librarians for Librarians, is indeed distinct and distinctly different than that of publishing proper.
Why is it a ‘wrong-footed accusation’ (wrong-footed?) to note that while John was suggesting I’d just branded him a racist, I was doing no such thing?
Here’s the part that really gets me, deadgod– when you suggest it’s ‘out-loud-laughable’ that I say I’ve had five years of direct experience as a writer of color, having a written a book about black poverty and black characters, trying to deal with literary and commercial editors and publishers. That’s invalid why? And how would you know that my essay isn’t based in ‘evidence and analyzed specifics’ (you pretend I was talking about what I’ve said here– but I wasn’t… perhaps you’re so excited by this discussion you ran out and purchased Copper Nickel 14 and read the essay in question?)? Perhaps that statement right there does explain my ‘indignation’– I’m tempted to go to where Roxane did in the last discussion. No, I will: deadgod, if you can both dismiss an argument about race in publishing without having read it, and dismiss the experience of a writer of color in publishing as ‘hilarity’, fuck you. No, really. I’ll take the lollipop angrily– it’s bait. I bit.
Oh, and I bite. Keep that in mind.
Fair enough.
I only meant that if this conversation is going to mean anything it needs to remain civil.
It hasn’t. It won’t. It continues to spiral.
Not disputing that at all. The general question here was aimed at the publishers, not the reception.
The reception of the work is a different matter entirely.
I don’t think getting a “Best of the Year” from a metro newspaper is really an “award,” where most of the numbers come from, but that’s beside the point. If what comes to mind when one thinks “literature” is a bearded old fellow that’s a problem. Sexism is rampant and pervasive and this is a consequence.
I don’t think it has “more” bearing, however. These issues are both important. If an agent or editor gives less consideration to a male writer because of his gender, that’s still sexism and it has consequences.
Congratulations on the publications. I agree that this is an issue that should be talked about. Luna Park is a good good thing.
You should let the pets out of the dark more often down here, Victor. They grow pale, vicious, and their growling bloviation has evidently upset me:-)
That’s kind; I didn’t mention it to solicit congratulations, just to suggest that there a lot of ways to consider this question, and there, I do so at length, trying to spell out an aesthetic and ethical position. Despite having been so critical of your sample-size, I do think somebody ought to find data and try to figure this out, and I may even take you up on your offer of using my free time constructively and finding a source I think is valid to crunch numbers on.
Thanks for the invitation to defend each of (quick count) 20 hostile characterizations of your rhetoric, Michael. Let me respond to the two that “really get [you]”:
I have five years of experience dealing with this issue: My guess, based on your “just having finished [your] grading for this quarter”, is that you’ve been “dealing with” the larger issues of race, representation, and books for decades. (Most commenters here have, eh?) To the point of ‘out-loud-laughability’: ‘Arguments from authority’ are always at least faintly comical; when the verecundia asserted is one’s own, I laugh.
My arguments are based in evidence and analyzed specifics: In order to make his (inelegantly overstated) proposal – ‘representation in main-stream publishing is not so dire for women, nor for women of color’ – , John copied out the breakdown of his (I think he’s agreed: local and tiny) sample. In response, bragging about the scientific methods of your own essays? which had been nowhere referred to, even less challenged, much less challenged as incompetent? in order to give, to your final cough of sarcasm, gravitas?? Ha ha.
Now, the Fixodent is in the cabinet, dear.
–
[for italics: < i > word(s) < / i > – eliminate all the spaces between the first ” < " and the second " > ” and the “word(s)” will be italicized. For emboldening, use ‘b’ in the place of ‘i’; all four angles and the front slash are the same. For block-quoting, use the word ‘blockquote’ in the place of ‘i’ or ‘b’. Be careful with ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ – they will garble the text badly if they’re hard by the wrong symbols.]
[…] read recently, check out Roxane’s essay on inequalities in publishing here and her ever-fine follow-up here. Thank you for raising your voice, Roxane, for the power and reach of your […]
LOL
One of the things I find silly about a lot of the conversation that has occurred in both of these threads is the idea that the market isn’t large enough to include multiple trends. All the bickering about whether the market is this (based on this set of seemingly conclusive statistics), or that (based on this set of seemingly conclusive statistics), is not only comical, erroneous and a bit daft, but probably very damaging.
Well, with regard to race and publishing, dg, I’ve only been submitting my work for 5 years. Maybe six. And yeah, I’ve lived in the world longer and been reading longer, but that seems a pretty irrelevant point– I wasn’t in a position to know how my work would be received by editors or by agents until this last half-decade. Are the problems I’ve had in placing my work, and the sorts of responses I’ve gotten hilarious? Is my experience irrelevant to this subject, which is after all, the sort of barriers that writers of color might face in placing their work? I’m not telling you to take my word for it, but I am saying, you probably ought to consider what I’ve seen and experienced and noticed. It might even be that I have some idea of what I’m talking about, though not of course the full picture.
Claims to authority– evidently both of those examples are really, finally, claims to authority as you’re reading them– are not necessarily invalid. No, really: believe it or not, there’s substance and credence that accrues to actual experience, and lacking it, there’s a lot of assertion and reasoning in a vacuum. In fiction, that’s why Flannery O’Connor noted that “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.” Here, from an absence of experience and a wealth of self-regard, with diction blazing and particulars lazing, you want to discuss this issue, you want to laugh when someone notes they have some sense of what they’re talking about because they encounter it regularly, as it concerns them directly. Fixodent, dear? I’m done trying to chomp. I’m actually, genuinely, unconvinced you have any damn idea that one foundation of argument is experience. You’re a writer– you should know that.
Regarding the couple pieces I’ve written– I wasn’t bragging about my ‘scientific method.’ There’s nothing scientific about evidence and analyzed specifics… rather, evidence and analyzed specifics are a part of any good argument, whose basis is, at least for most arguments, unlikely to consist primarily of statistics (which everyone now seems to have concluded we’re lacking– at least those that are not hopelessly tiny and local and so not informative if they’re accurate at all).
Actually, to return to the post proper, what Roxane began by arguing and then finally abandoned in favor of the sort of numerical breakdown that still, on both sides, is still completely inadequate (I’m with NLY’s latest comment here), was that as a writer of color, she has experience with representation in literary and commercial publishing– and there’s a problem, she sees it and encounters it, she knows it. Perhaps numbers are necessary to really make this argument fully– numbers we can count on. But there’s also the question of what we’re speaking of, what it looks like in actual examples, what it plays out like in the broad world of books and publishing, online and print, commercial and indie, and what the consequences are of the lack of minority voices and the lack of market for such books. In that case, I’d say Roxane has something to say; so do I; and I suppose, so do you, dg. I’m just more convinced of Roxane’s authority than your own, especially this critique about how ‘soothing’ writers of color find indignation, or how irrelevant their experience is to the subject.
Hey Roxane,
You’re awesome. Thanks for breaking it down. I anticipate forwarding this link many, many times…
Nobody’s said anything about your “problems placing [your] work”, Michael.
You brought up “five years of experience” and two published essays precisely in order “[to tell us] to take [your] word for it” – you were credentialing yourself in the context of sneering (I’m glad you spent hours, John– you do seem tired of the subject. So give it a rest.) at John’s modest numbers-crunching.
Of course “experience” is “relevant” – it’s a word for ‘personally determinate evidence‘.
But “substance and credence accrue to actual experience” all by themselves?? No, for the genuinely compassionate, they do not, in my view; substance and reasonable credulity accrue to the application of logically consistent, reproducible methods to empirically determinate data. (And even then, in the case of the most methodologically rigorous investigation of a constitutive social experience, disagreement over the meaning and even the fact of that experience will reasonably arise.)
Michael, you can go to dozens (I guess) of white-power sites where you’ll get testimony of lifetimes of personal “experience” of the inferiority of non-European people. Are these perspective compelling because ‘substance and credence accrue to their experiential basis’??
Do you understand how reasoning impressionistically that a person’s own grievance lays bare social injustice is simply Not Reasonable? that giving free rein to that connection occludes actual social patterns, to the points that: a) many European-Americans think they’re constantly being mistreated systematically on racial grounds; and b) less egregiously??, that a woman might deny the truth or relevance of the fact that as many or more women make decisions in publishing as or than men?
Whether I’m coming from an “absence of experience” has no bearing on what I’ve said in these two threads – in fact, you don’t know much of anything about my “experiences” or ‘identity’ – unless you’re a Reptilian invader of our planet?
Again, I did not laugh at any racial hostility you’ve received trying to get published – or received anywhere else, though racial hostility is surely richly, though bitterly, comical – ; I was laughing at your proud suggestion that “five years of experience with this issue” has been a tremendous enablement for you.
I laugh incredulously when the “life-experience” of a white supremacist is metabolized ‘critically’ into the grounds for perception of a shared reality, Michael. I laugh mirthlessly at the deformations of political progress by identity politics.
I don’t know what S.O.S. is (?) but Bamboozled represents the point at which Spike Lee turned away from his original approach of instructing the African American experience to broad audiences in a way that was not a finger shaking lecture, but top shelf complex story telling with characters that whatever color person developed empathy for, which is what good storytelling does. The “otherness” was built into the narrative implicitly and the observer could not help but arrive at his own anger about the situation without feeling some racial duty about it. Do the Right Thing was amazing in that it went general broad release and packed theaters everywhere, everybody was talking about this move. I saw Do the Right Thing with a friend of mine who was as close to The Great White Male Oppressor as you can get and he was stunned by it, the movie truly changed his perception, he just didn’t know. The white stereotype is that whitey will only pay to see the jigaboo Step and Fetch It version of black America, but in many cases, the presentations offered are not real in other ways, only vehicles of the agenda, a manipulation, or cartoons, such as some of the misogynist sociopaths that hijacked the original subversive/instructive intent of rap music from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Dimples C to make Big Time $. This happens all the time with seminal work, it happened with punk rock.
Then again, there’s an argument to be made that Spike Lee is upper-class, grew up in a middle-class home, and like many black and white people in the middle and upper-classes, prefers art that’s relatively safe for the masses.
I’m reminded of the feud between Richard Wright (bourgeoisie—later in life— cosmopolitan black writer) vs. Zora Neale Hurston (poor/lower-class throughout her life, rural Southern black writer). Wright had issues with her use of dialect, for the same supposed reasons you mention above (playing to white stereotypes). While I understand the larger context behind his position, I find an aspect of his argument against Hurston to be troublingly classist. I find many of Spike Lee’s arguments to possess a similar classist strain.
We can take this to hip-hop, too, where people often trace the decline to the heyday of Gangster/Hardcore rap in the mid-90’s, but—sorry— don’t tell me that brutally honest, hardcore groups like Mobb Deep and Onyx aren’t subversive and socially conscious, even if one can extrapolate stereotypes from their work.
Q: do people keep a “Deadgod” file to paste their best-of’s into? Cuz I need to start mine!
phonily methodical cavils,
chesty self-implication,
comical self-confidence of those rapid-fire hammerstrikes
damp hyperbole.
botched hypocrisy
I do wish we could be nice, but at least the hilt of DG’s sword glints its assiduously-designed ornament as he’s flailing and flaying with it.
what flavor are your lollipops, by the way? i hope they’re not turpentine, not even lemonrind!
as i understood it, on simple terms, such soothing refers to the way many people can’t walk away, they rage when they do not have the final say.
to confess “i don’t know what to make of this” is nice, the (what’s-a-good-PC-word-for-replacing-gentlemanly?) opposite of this. While most people will argue until you cry mercy, the mature thing to do, instead of repeat-until-rankled, is to take a deep breath and turn the page, click next. It’s a little tougher to do, since it’s really the quelling of impulsivity, but in the long run it pays off.
Yeah, I think we should always be challenging both ourselves, while leaving room that our poor mysterious how-did-you-get-there readers will also be challenged.
I think it’s useful to dream up what the challenging thing would be. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t, and that’s how we grow, we won’t know unless we try.
There are also both overt and passive/subtle ways of making a character express-or-imply the frustrations you yourself have with society.
I don’t believe that a book about a minority woman blogger-editor-author-doctor submitting a manuscript over and over and suspecting rampant fear-of-otherness among her rejecting publishers would make a very compelling plotline; but honestly, ANY plotline can become a good story if you’ve got clever fingers.
And let’s face it, there is a lot of good material for challenging characters sitting right here in HTMLDRAMA’s comment-icicles.
RG: “When I say, “God, I’ve had a submission out at The Eternity Review for 434 days,” I am complaining.”
MM: I just realized “Eternity Review”. Hah!
It’s like watching certain movies twice, you miss all the good stuff the first time!
MM, the point of modification is specificity – to pick out, from a group, the sub-group, perhaps the individual, that is more precisely what one is talking about. Modifiers that work are not “ornament”, but rather, are attempts (anyway) to get closer in language to some particular Real Thing. (Yes, attempts doomed to fictivity – but not doomed to being false, exactly.)
Here are some new examples to consider for your scrapbook:
“Cuz I need to start mine!” – jauntily heavy-footed sarcasm
“I do wish we could be nice” – prissily self-canceling moral instruction
“assiduously-designed” – chortling reflexivity
Have a lolli’ that doesn’t have sand in it.
took Ashley’s question literally; answered seriously and pacifically
take your own advice, much?
I think MM was trying to be nice to you, dg.
Do you laugh ‘incredulously?’ My. As opposed to other forms of mockery and scorn, always the province of the unlearned and foolish. And here, I thought you just presented as foppish and absurd. Racial hostility is “surely richly, though bitterly, comical”? What world do you live in, dg? That’s not how ‘racial hostility’ is experienced by those on the receiving end of it.
Just a thought: this is the most painfully overwritten sentence you’ve written in five or six of these posts, all of which suffer from diction so high and inappropriate as to impede clarity: “I laugh incredulously when the “life-experience” of a white supremacist is metabolized ‘critically’ into the grounds for perception of a shared reality, Michael. I laugh mirthlessly at the deformations of political progress by identity politics.”
A claim of ‘experience’ is metabolized ‘critically’ into ‘grounds for perception of a shared reality’ takes a claim, misuses a verb concerning the way organic lifeforms convert fuel into energy, modifies that process somehow with the word ‘critically’ to unclear import, mixes in ‘grounds’, ie, a reference to foundation or property, a metaphor for underlying evidence, shifts that ‘grounds’ to the realm of the visual, and then references the abstract, ie, the world we all live in. And that doesn’t even get to the repetition of laugh with the modifier ‘mirthlessly’ and the part where progress is being ‘deformed’, apparently in myriad ways, by identity politics.
dg, when considering a claim of experience and then the particulars of that experience, as with any piece of evidence, you have to evaluate the venue, source, credentials, and particular import of that evidence. We are not on a white supremacist website, which is in the first place a fringe, extremist view repudiated by most people. I am not an anonymous Klansman– I am not even an anon here, so that if you were to research my name, you’d find my credentials quickly, as well as my work, my job, and even arguments I make in other places that make the same case I’ve made here in greater detail.
Also: are you really comparing what I’ve said to the beliefs of white supremacists?
I’m done here. Thanks again, Roxane, for the post.
I can’t think of a better way to receive racial hostility than with comedy.
And aye, often bitterly, at that.
actually i’d agreed with you: self-placation-by-prolonging-arguments is a very important phenomenon to consider, a rampant psychology I see all the time, and I just wanted to explicate it another way.
i won’t placate myself by answering your provocation, (though some of it is indeed astute, some not), but thanks, this is quite funny at the same time as interesting at the same time as sobering.
I wonder what you’re like in person.
(lack of internet vocal inflection necessitates me to say, postscript: by that “I wonder“, I mean it with childlike openminded curiosity, not that I have some presupposition nor am asking you rhetorically.)
i know you were chemically provoked to exuberance, but i wonder if “start embracing … GRUNGE” was an earnesty, or just improv.
Like, seriously, what do you mean by grunge? I never knew there to be an adjoining philosophy, and if there is one are you encouraging it, can you elaborate what it is that you are a proponent of?
I can’t think of a better way to receive racial hostility than with comedy.
And aye, often bitterly, at that.
I agree with much of this and many good points here. The fine line is the original rap form was more positive and tried to influence and solve things (Stay in school, walkin’ round like you’re Pretty Boy Floyd) then morphed into a form of narcissistic nihilism, not that there is anything wrong with that from an aesthetic perspective. Even NWA was more positive and constructive than some of this chasin pussy pop rubbish we’re getting now.
[in reply to Michael]
I laugh in disbelief frequently. ?
I live on Earth; welcome.
Those are two sentences that’ve escaped your grip. Here, I’ll translate:
‘I laugh in disbelief at: European-Americans whose experience of non-European and non-European-American people is transformed – in their view: ‘critically’ [those’re called ‘scare quotes’ – used to indicate authorial skepticism of some kind] – into a phenomenological foundation for the views shared by a community [the view called “white supremacy”].
I laugh without pleasure [repetition with a difference: it’s two different kinds of laughter] at: the way identity politics has hijacked progressive politics.’
The metaphor of ‘metabolism’ is so indigestible? “the abstract, ie, the world we all live in”?? etc.
Michael, when it comes to passionate political commitment (as opposed, say, to medical treatment), I don’t care what your credentials are. Nor my own. What matters is that tautness of reason be the standard of assay, along with a basic hypocrisy axiom (‘follow your own rules’, which I violate too often).
White supremacists are absolutely convinced that their concrete “experiences” of the modern world, considered ‘critically’, are granite on which to found their racial anthropology. Setting aside the immorality of their views, what of the rationality – methodical consistency, comparability of data to those from other perspectives, and so on – of their arguments? That interrogation of reasonableness was what John, in his modest number-crunching, was aiming at the claim that ‘by publishers, women are more resisted, as authors, than men’.
screwed up the emboldening function, which should have been limited to “rationality”
I blame other people
[…] wrote this post about Best American Short Stories 2010 then followed it up with another, and then a million people talked about it and linked to it which was surprising. Someone said I […]
What about Tiphanie Yanique’s debut collection How to Escape From A Leper Colony that came out from Graywolf Press?
Or Vida by Patricia Engel which has recently been published.
Or How to Live Safely in A Science Fiction Universe by Charles Yu, who I absolutely love. I am surprised more people on this blog have not heard or talk about him.
Or Gary Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis which was also by Graywolf Press.
And as for contemporary African-American authors–yes there’s ZZ Packer (and Colson Whitehead and Edward P. Jones and Victor Lavalle) but there’s Carolyn Ferrell with her collection of stories Don’t Erase Me, Asali Solomon with her collection Get Down, and William Henry Lewis with I Got Somebody in Staunton. I am patiently waiting for follow-ups from all three of these authors which may/may not happen.
As Roxane mentions below me–“The whole point of this is that we should all make the effort to stretch ourselves and learn more about writers of color.” I know Roxane has gotten criticism for not offering up any sort of solution to the problem of the absence of writers of color in publishing, but I think this is as close to any sort of solution one can come up with.
I probably should have made this a more general post instead of a direct response, and my apologies for that.
[…] A BIt of a Follow Up […]
“Do you understand how reasoning impressionistically that a person’s own grievance lays bare social injustice is simply Not Reasonable? ”
I wouldn’t say I’ve been reasoning ‘impressionistically.’ But beyond that characterization of my reasoning, or anybody else’s here, the answer is no, I do not understand. Or at least, I don’t agree that direct experience has no weight or import as evidence, or that ‘credentials’, which have to do with ‘degree and quality of experience’, don’t matter.
If it takes you two paragraphs to translate two sentences, you did not write good sentences.
NLY, there’s a big difference between comedy being a response to racial hostility, and whatever incoherent thing that sentence supposedly said after exegesis.
‘same old, same old, why don’t you tell me how to start solving this problem instead of anatomizing the problem I’m sick of hearing about,’
I get the same response every time I talk about gay or women’s issues and I am so sick of it I could choke. Why is it not immediately apparent that to respond this way is in itself an expression of incredible privilege and arrogance?
This is a good piece, Roxanne. (I got to it via Drollerie Press authors site.)
In reference to the Latino side of the issue, you might check LaBloga.blogspot where I and other Chicano writers deal with literary questions and review probably most of the Latino-authored YA and children’s lit mentioned above, as well as many other works by Chicanos et al.
I’ll be citing your article and linking our readers to your fine exposition.
Gracias,
RudyG
La Bloga contributor
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