Random
A Profound Sense of Absence
I recently read Best American Short Stories 2010, edited this year by Richard Russo who is one of my favorite writers. Straight Man? Amazing. Empire Falls? Amazing. My expectations were high. I generally enjoy reading BASS because it gives me a sense of what the literary establishment considers “the best” from year to year. I may not enjoy all the stories in a given year’s anthology but I am always impressed by the overall competence in each chosen story. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story in BASS and thought, “How did that get in there?” At the same time, I often find the BASS offerings to be shamefully predictable. The stories are often sedate and well-mannered even when they are supposedly not. I don’t see a lot of risk taking and more than anything else, I don’t see a lot of diversity in the stories being told. This year, though, BASS really outdid itself. Almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people to the point where, by the end of reading the book, I was downright offended. I know people will disagree with my thoughts here and that’s fine, but I really think shit is fucked up in literary publishing. That’s coarse but I cannot think of a better way to convey my frustration. Anytime I talk about this issue, that’s the best way I can encapsulate my feelings. This issue has been on my mind for a couple weeks (and years) and two things triggered my… current pre-occupation with whose stories are or are not being told.
I was reading Tayari Jones’s blog where she mentioned Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans. I had seen Jones mention the book a few times but in that moment, I thought, let me check this book out so I bought it and as I read the information on the Amazon page, I realized, “I don’t remember the last time I read a book by a black writer or any writer of color, really.” I was ashamed and pretty angry at myself because there’s just no excuse for that. That’s an indication that my reading habits are lazy. I don’t think about race when I decide what to read but I’m starting to worry I’m omitting an entire segment of books because I read so much indie lit where, frankly, there simply aren’t a lot of writers of color publishing. The same could be said for mainstream publishing. The tokens are out there, getting attention by the white reading public, but most black writers are writing for black readers and getting very little attention from mainstream outlets. Segregation is alive and well when it comes to what we read. Can you name five contemporary black writers? Or Latino/a writers? Or Asian writers? Can you do it if you omit writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Junot Diaz, Ha Jin, the writers who have achieved enough success to be the go to writers of color?
Thinking about these issues is forcing me to take a long hard look at my reading habits, where I get my reading recommendations, the kinds of writers being promoted at both the indie and mainstream level, and whether or not I actually practice what I preach.
I don’t, nor do I know how to.
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, by the way, is brilliant. Every story was smart and engaging and beautiful. There were so many subtle, fierce lines that I openly gasped more than once and sometimes found myself whispering, “Damn.” I immediately wanted to find everything Danielle Evans has ever written. One of the reasons I loved the book so much is because I could see myself in so many of the stories. These were stories about black people where the characters were simply allowed to be people. They weren’t stories with an agenda (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They weren’t stories of suffering in the ghetto or stories with any of the other race-based formulas that so often seem to get published. Instead, the stories were about people and their frailties and their flaws. Each story was perfectly crafted and the book was meticulously assembled. It was, by far, one of the best books I’ve read in years. Since reading it, I’ve basically wanted to drive around throwing this book at passersby. Go, buy it, tell me what you think.
I also recently read Publisher’s Lunch Weekly, a roundup of all the publishing deals in a given week and almost every fiction deal was about a rich white person finding him or herself or grappling with some kind of emotional challenge that is unique only to rich white people. One book was literally about a rich white guy from Connecticut finding himself by working odd jobs, by slumming it with the working class. That week’s deals read like a parody but it was no parody. These are books that are written over and over again and at a time when everyone is lamenting the death of publishing, you have to think, however ridiculous and overwrought those laments are, that publishing this one kind of story without accounting for the multitude of other experiences in the world, is not helping publishing stay alive.
What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don’t regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It’s not right that anyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the “major” journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It’s not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect. Things have certainly improved over the years but that’s not saying much.
This is a problem that is like a set of nesting dolls. It is one that does not start with Best American Short Stories. The origins can be traced much further back. Everyone is complicit. The demographic uniformity prevalent in so much contemporary writing is also reflected in theater, film and television, the arts. These creative ecosystems are only replicating the inequities that are present in society at large. It’s no wonder we don’t know what to do.
People like to say that this is a matter of supply and demand and often the discussion ends up with lots of talk about how there simply aren’t many writers of color. That is not true. There are fewer writers of color than white writers, certainly, but we have to stop acting like there are only six of us moving about the cabin.
There are many characteristics of great writing. While there’s no consensus, I believe great writing can and should transcend things like race and gender and class. Great writing should be writing that is so powerful it elevates us beyond the things that characterize us in our daily lives. And yet, I also believe that writing should tell us things we don’t already know and give us insights into the lives of people who are completely different from us or anyone we know. Great writing should challenge us and make us uncomfortable and push our boundaries. By such standards, the writing in BASS is not necessarily the best.
How do we talk about race, class, and gender and increasing the representation of the Other in the writing being published today, without alienating each other or being hysterical and reactionary? This is a question I struggle with. I understand why people are weary of these issues. They are overwhelming and oftentimes it seems as if they are insurmountable. I understand that some people don’t care, and that for some people it is only the writing that matters, not the writers. For me though, these things do matter. Sometimes I forget how much and then I read a book like BASS 10. I realize just how important it is to think and talk about who is or isn’t represented in literary publishing even if I don’t know which words to use.
Tags: best american short stories, Danielle Evans, richard russo
For awhile, I bought BASS every year, but gradually I learned that the selections indeed strongly reflect the tastes, attitudes, etc. of the guest editor. I only buy now when the editor is someone who I know to have eclectic tastes.
The Salman Rushdie edition was strong, as were the ones edited by Stephen King and Michael Chabon. I recall King not being entirely happy with the selections he was sent by the series editor, so he read a lot of other stuff on his own.
Come to think of it, the series editor–who picks a hundred or so stories which the guest editor winnows down to 20 — is probably the biggest influence on what you read year to year in BASS.
For awhile, I bought BASS every year, but gradually I learned that the selections indeed strongly reflect the tastes, attitudes, etc. of the guest editor. I only buy now when the editor is someone who I know to have eclectic tastes.
The Salman Rushdie edition was strong, as were the ones edited by Stephen King and Michael Chabon. I recall King not being entirely happy with the selections he was sent by the series editor, so he read a lot of other stuff on his own.
Come to think of it, the series editor–who picks a hundred or so stories which the guest editor winnows down to 20 — is probably the biggest influence on what you read year to year in BASS.
i like the answer. thats one of the more interesting things ive heard from lin actually. raw survival is a mind-consuming problem, and besting it can be satisfying in the same way art is satisfying. its why i can come home from work some days and feel good about what i did and feel relief that now my mortgage is paid for that month and not really need much else for the day. its only when work becomes secure and less creatively satisfying that i gravitate toward art. if you’re priviledged to not worry about survival at all, its your idle thoughts that become consuming, and that’s art’s business, to handle those idle thoughts. if you’re staring death in the face, you aren’t so much concerned with your years-later eventual death and the decades of anxiety it will bring at that moment, you are just concerned about surviving the moment.
what the fuck is wrong with all of the comments here. this shit is seriously starting to piss me off. really? this is just totally cool with everybody? it’s fine that the marginalized continue to get marginalized because, hey! that’s what they are to begin with! there aren’t that many of them! they’re a small group!
im not dismissing it. i just dont see it. explain to me how it is a grave injustice. i want to understand.
Oh, Roxanne, you talked about race on the internet. You have made the mistake that so many people who want to point out institutionalized prejudice have made. The internet, a medium that gives the illusion of open dialogue, is not a safe place to talk about race. That’s why every blog about race screens its comments. Because as soon as you mention race in a post the comments that will generate the most interest are the ones that come from the willfully ignorant (darby) or from people who are anti-pc because pc is institutional so it’s ok if they’re casually racist (jereme deme). Sane people call them out, and feed the trolls. If you don’t call them out, if you don’t say something, you lose. These are comments from people who are supposed to be your allies.
So why not be quiet about it. Because you lose. Same with a product like BASS. Start a Best African-American Short Stories series? That’s a red-lined neighborhood no one should be forced to live in.
Fuck this. Fuck jereme and fuck darby. Why do they feel like they can write shit like this in your post and not in the David Wojnarowicz post from yesterday? Because they feel like its okay to fuck with people of color. Because it’s okay to fuck with people of color here. The same reason why a lot of people laughed at and not with the Hennessy Youngman post, or when Blake posted about Pimp C.
Agree strongly. Am a straight white dude and benefit as such but I have often felt mainstream literary realism does not want to hear about how I was a poor kid. People tell me how gross it is and I’m like, “Dude, that’s my damn childhood, what are you getting at here?”
They want me to be ashamed of myself the way they are ashamed of me, I think.
I love Straight Man but his short stories are suckage
Look at the venues where the stories in BASS collections originally appeared. Invariably they are the cultural milieus that produce stories about well-heeled white people having white-people emotional crises and epiphanies: well-heeled universities and the New Yorker.
BASS represents one pole of good writing in the US. (Rarely, imo, do the stories therein rise to the status of great – in fact the only story that is great and leaps to mind is Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is about a homeless Native American and, embarrassingly to my theory, originally appeared in The New Yorker.) It is not, I hope, the only one.
race doesn’t actually exist.
I like his story “The Whore’s Child” quite a lot.
Don’t want to feed the Jereme, but:
No, it doesn’t, except to the extent that anything we imagine exists, and to the extent that our imagining has created material circumstances around the fantasy, which are real, and need telling.
A white man saying race does not exist is like a rich man saying money is just green paper. It’s not inaccurate. But it is retarded.
For awhile, I bought BASS every year, but gradually I learned that the selections indeed strongly reflect the tastes, attitudes, etc. of the guest editor. I only buy now when the editor is someone who I know to have eclectic tastes.
The Salman Rushdie edition was strong, as were the ones edited by Stephen King and Michael Chabon. I recall King not being entirely happy with the selections he was sent by the series editor, so he read a lot of other stuff on his own.
Come to think of it, the series editor–who picks a hundred or so stories which the guest editor winnows down to 20 — is probably the biggest influence on what you read year to year in BASS.
— Tao Lin, in an interview in Vice
I guess Tao Lin gets dragged into everything here eventually, but when I read this a few weeks ago, I thought it was a pretty ignorant thing for him to say. Poor people don’t have to deal with knowing they’re going to die? with the fact that the universe is arbitrary? knowing that you can never be fully connected with another person? Just so ignorant.
(Roxane, cheers for recommending the Danielle Evans book. I read ‘Bad Marie’ on your recommendation and loved it, so I put the Evans book on hold at the library.)
But this wasn’t the case in stories written in the 70’s through most of the 90s. There used to be a working-class hero presence in the arts. I don’t know exactly when the transition took place but I think it’s linked to the rise of globalization. Am I wrong to blame the rise of the cost prohibitive MFA programs too?
I’m not white.
Shit, Roxane is more “white” than me.
Predicted this comment so hard I nearly logged in under your name and made it for you.
INTERNET HIGH FIVE
You finally accomplished something in your life. Great job.
danielle evans is the shit. and i first came across her via BASS. i think her story Virgins (from Paris Review) was in there in 2008. been a huge fan since.
How Jereme Got Her Groove Back
She’s so so good. I loved Virgins.
Um. No.
I’ll say this one last time (which is lie, I’ll keep saying it) Jereme is right. We are all various shades of brown. Think scientifically. Quite literally, white is the absence of color and black ( to just give a quick example) is the absorption of all the color spectrum (that we can see). Jereme is not white, he is a lighter shade of brown than myself, even though the general population will call him white and me black.
Well, no, that isn’t true, that you can only occupy one space at a time. In terms of quantum mechanics, we all exist in multiple spaces at one. And usually deja vu is an awareness of this truth. Various other dimensional artefacts are proof of this, such as premonitions — those things are reverberations of our existence in various dimensional spaces, as we are biologically geared toward being aware of these things, but there is a problem — we can block or hinder these awareness’s on one of the four levels of consciousness (conscious and subconscious).
I think the concept of dualities is hard for the human brain to grasp (Conrad, the Power of myth), and the idea that we can be fully connected with another individual yet also be completely our own selves, is different to understand. How can I be at Point A and Point B through Z without being completely aware of my locations? If more people delved into “metaphysics” and then combined it with a deep study of quantum physics…. things would become a bit more clear….
um, don’t you have a PHD?
hahaha
Having a PHD doesn’t make me white.
Please see Mike Meginnis’s initial response to Jereme’s attempt to derail the conversation. Thanks.
i like the answer. thats one of the more interesting things ive heard from lin actually. raw survival is a mind-consuming problem, and besting it can be satisfying in the same way art is satisfying. its why i can come home from work some days and feel good about what i did and feel relief that now my mortgage is paid for that month and not really need much else for the day. its only when work becomes secure and less creatively satisfying that i gravitate toward art. if you’re priviledged to not worry about survival at all, its your idle thoughts that become consuming, and that’s art’s business, to handle those idle thoughts. if you’re staring death in the face, you aren’t so much concerned with your years-later eventual death and the decades of anxiety it will bring at that moment, you are just concerned about surviving the moment.
Right?
I didn’t say it made you white, I said it made you MORE WHITE THAN ME. I thought the nuance was patent, but guess not.
Genetic settlement isn’t the topic being discussed. I understand skin pigmentation is the easiest way to identify and declare differences in other human beings but truth is always a better tool.
Also, it is not 1652.
That implies that getting a PhD is a “white thing.” I just cannot do this. You know what I’m trying to say in this post. If you don’t want to discuss it fine, but the race/ethnicity blah blah discussion is just not something I’m going to engage in.
Yeah, it’s really bad. Everyone knows it, but nobody does anything because they’re afraid of doing the wrong thing. Being deliberately ‘inclusionary’ is tough because I don’t want to be patronizing or something, and I don’t want to play the game of getting more black faces in the crowd so my event looks better in pictures (like Leftist groups at political demonstrations). The point should always be to create desegregated spaces as an end in themselves, knowing that the spaces might be (probably will be) pretty awkward at first because they happen so rarely.
There is/was a poetry open mic where I live that is probably the only genuinely desegregated literary event I have ever attended (it’s also, pleasantly, at a gay bar, so it’s an amazing mix of white lesbian poets, black lesbian poets, local hip hop artists/poet dudes, white poet dudes, and the regular gay bar scene). Can’t think of another one. Even given that, the tables at the bar were moreorless segregated. I should go to it more often.
I’m glad I’m a sports fan because in a lot of ways pro and college sports are the only desegregated mass cultural events in America.
Creepy. I wrote a blog post about this very thing last night. My perspective is that of a very new writer which changes things a bit, but you know, still relevant. I think. Roxane is the only other woman of color I’ve found who’s writing in this Indie Lie sphere. I like what Roxane does, but I’d love to hear more voices of people of color who aren’t (seemingly) just writing for other people of color.
For people who edit literary mags, or at indie presses: Are people of color just not submitting?
Who says i’m unwilling to discuss shit? I’m saying let’s be honest.
Most aspects attributed to “race” have nothing to do with genetics. It’s about culture, education and affluence. You even spell it out in your post:
“One of the reasons I loved the book so much is because I could see myself in so many of the stories. These were stories about black people where the characters were simply allowed to be people. They weren’t stories with an agenda (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They weren’t stories of suffering in the ghetto or stories with any of the other race-based formulas that so often seem to get published.”
So you identified with the blacks who were “normal” but you didn’t identify with the blacks who were based on race formulaic writing?
Let’s talk about the oppression of GINGER writers too. Got my flag ready to fly.
“How do we talk about race, class, and gender and increasing the representation of the Other in the writing being published today, without alienating each other or being hysterical and reactionary?”
Honesty?
kind of hard to care i guess when 80% of the US population is white (or at least identified themselves as white in the 2010 census (79.6% white, 12.9% black)). US fiction is representative of what the US is, right? Is there an injustice? Is the concern that you want more black people to exist in the US? Should black fiction be prevalent beyond the population ratio?
That’s a shame, darby that it is hard to care but it makes sense. However, if you want to go the statistics route, the population ration isn’t even reflected in writing that is being published. That would be a start.
right, but its not like grossly far off, and i dont think far off enough to push the issue as though its like a grand injustice. i dont know, i just cant believe that anyone is being discriminated against or left out or that there is any injustice anywhere. in the end, we are just talking about what people like to do in their spare time, read and write and etc. We’re not talking about real things here, so yeah, i dont care.
It is a grave injustice as far as I’m concerned. This is a very real thing. You can dismiss it all you want because it doesn’t affect your life but that doesn’t make the very real problem go away.
Darby, it’s all relative; no one is saying our problems or inequality is as bad as that in many other places. But we still have the desire to move our country forward, continue to make it even better. There are larger implications for the fact that a certain representation of people is the predominant one in our culture, and others are thus invisible or less visible, because if people are exposed to a problem or situation, they tendto want to change it, improve it. Like how Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle and people were horrified at the food safety/worker safety and ended up passing the first food safety laws. And how muckrakers then exposed the terrible poverty and conditions in the slums and sparked a movement that made working conditions better, food laws, housing laws, exposed slum landlords, stopped exploitation of child labor. The privileged classes were in a position to do something, but first they had to be made aware that the problems existed, and to read something like How the Other Half Lives to really be moved to take action. The invisible has to be made visible. It doesn’t have to be overtly political, it has to be seen, to be part of the larger cultural conversation, not marginalized like it so often now. That’s why differing viewpoints and cultural backgrounds in fiction are important to me, anyway.
i mean at least w/r/t this BASS issue, you said there were three stories that were “black” or working class, etc. That’s 15% of the anthology, right? What percentage of the anthology ought it to’ve been “black” to make you happy?
why is it a grave injustice? I want to understand.
“Desegregation” on your library’s shelves would lead to what?
Eliminating the African-American fiction section as a “section” by shelving all of its books in the main fiction stacks – who would resist this move the most aggressively, employing the most explosive, impossible-to-converse-with rhetoric? European-American identity-politicians, panicking because they’re losing their numerical majority – or ‘think’ they are? Or black grievance-mongers, stubbornly insisting that black people in America are worse off now than ever?
Legal desegregation, in which I would include unofficial affirmative action (like an editor or teacher holding herself/himself responsible for trying ‘to include’), – at least legally – has, I think, been much more easily accomplished than persuading people not to self-segregate. Laws against discrimination exist, and are used to pry open ‘closed’ spaces, but the pattern of ‘sticking to your own’ is going to take evolving into a different species to dissolve, except in unmeasurably granular increments, is my pessimistic-mood view.
So, let me repeat my question: would it be a Good Idea for your library ‘to include’ African-American fiction, and those of Latino/Chicano, Asian-American, indigenous American, and all non-European-American sections, in the main fiction stacks?
No, I said one story involved black characters. Another story represented working class people. I want enough stories such that this issue doesn’t cross my mind. That’s what i want, “darby”.
what the fuck is wrong with all of the comments here. this shit is seriously starting to piss me off. really? this is just totally cool with everybody? it’s fine that the marginalized continue to get marginalized because, hey! that’s what they are to begin with! there aren’t that many of them! they’re a small group!
im not dismissing it. i just dont see it. explain to me how it is a grave injustice. i want to understand.
I didn’t say I didn’t identify with black characters in the more formulaic race writing but I very much identified with the characters in Evans’s book. Indeed, that likely does have more to do with culture, education and affluence but it’s not that all the characters in Evans’s book were affluent, but they were dealing with the same problems everyone deals with—complex relationships with lovers, families, selves. Normally, these stories are written about white people. This is a book that did not. That’s the part that is most interesting to me.
Honesty is a good start.
Darby, if you require an explanation there’s simply nothing I can say that will reach you. I say that without rancor. I honestly would not know where to start.
Oh, Roxanne, you talked about race on the internet. You have made the mistake that so many people who want to point out institutionalized prejudice have made. The internet, a medium that gives the illusion of open dialogue, is not a safe place to talk about race. That’s why every blog about race screens its comments. Because as soon as you mention race in a post the comments that will generate the most interest are the ones that come from the willfully ignorant (darby) or from people who are anti-pc because pc is institutional so it’s ok if they’re casually racist (jereme deme). Sane people call them out, and feed the trolls. If you don’t call them out, if you don’t say something, you lose. These are comments from people who are supposed to be your allies.
So why not be quiet about it. Because you lose. Same with a product like BASS. Start a Best African-American Short Stories series? That’s a red-lined neighborhood no one should be forced to live in.
Fuck this. Fuck jereme and fuck darby. Why do they feel like they can write shit like this in your post and not in the David Wojnarowicz post from yesterday? Because they feel like its okay to fuck with people of color. Because it’s okay to fuck with people of color here. The same reason why a lot of people laughed at and not with the Hennessy Youngman post, or when Blake posted about Pimp C.
sorry
I’m doing/have done both those jobs. Most submissions I’ve seen either come in blind or I don’t bother to read the names anyway. People don’t send their pictures or announce their ethnicity in their cover letters, which I don’t generally read until afterward anyway. I’ve never asked anyone their ethnicity. Since I never actually meet most of the people I work with, I don’t really know what they look like unless I google them and they happen to have a website or have pictures of a reading or something.
But that just means that any prejudice I might have must be coming from me, or from the writing meaning a particular thing to me. And that does weird things. Couple times I’ve actually been surprised to find out gender/ethnicity of writers after I start conversing with them. So obviously I’m creating some kind of identity for them, though I couldn’t put it into words. I don’t really visualize them, so to speak, but their work. I don’t find myself thinking, “The writer of this is probably 6’3″, white, with short hair and nice glasses.” Instead I think, “This writer’s got shit figured out.” Or similar.
I don’t know. Am I racist? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t even know how I’d be able to tell. But I had a similar experience to Roxane’s a couple of years ago.
And fuck Richard Russo for building a career on exploiting people of color and not giving anything back.
i sincerely apologize if ive offended anyone. my tendency is always to want to see evidence in all situations. lacking that, i just have a hard time believing. its how im wired. i keep proding for someone to show me evidence and it never happens, so i continue to not believe. i prod because i want to care though. am i coming off as willfully ignorant and dismissive? i would just like to see evidence. i dont take people at their word. sorry
In slightly less rancor:
People always ask, when something like this comes up, as a sort of open question, to editors, if there are “just not as many black or [insert race here] people submitting to journals.” I think that’s sort of a moot point.
The idea of reading without looking at names, blindly, whatever, or pointing out that “people don’t point out their race in cover letters” seems to be missing the point. Roxane clearly read BASS and became very aware of the fact that all of the stories but two were about rich straight white men and their problems. You’ll notice that Roxane did not need to read a cover letter or even look an author’s name to realize this. I’m guessing, since Roxane seemed to figure it out after a single reading, that the editors did not need these things pointed out to them either.
BASS is not publishing experimental stories, as far as I am aware. The stories are generally narrative, and about something. Mostly, I expect, about experiences. The experiences are clearly very rich white male. That is the problem. The problem is that the experience of the rich white male is the only experience that is overtly represented.
Darby, you are an intelligent man. There is evidence all around you about the systemized racism in this country. That’s why people find you willfully ignorant. How much more evidence do you need than everything going on in this country every single day?
The lack of diversity in short fiction seems more pronounced than in the novel. Anyone else noticed this? This seems especially true amongst af-american women writers, who are represented a lot more in novel publishing than in the small lit journals (not to suggest that they couldn’t be represented more in novels).
*working-class people
I do notice this. It may be, perhaps, that more writers of color are interested in the long form, I’m not sure though I also agree that there could be more representation where novels are concerned, across genres. I also want to be clear that this problem of diversity is not just about white and black. There’s a whole spectrum of Other voices that I feel are underrepresented.
These are difficult questions and concerns. As a white guy, I’ve mostly learned to keep my mouth shut about them. I would, however, go so far as to say (without attempting to put out anything radically new) that ‘racial’ (cultural) disparities in writing are rooted much further back than ‘the literary establishment’. By this I do not mean, as you point out, that there are ‘fewer’ ‘ethnic’ ‘writers’. I mean that ethnic writing is a fractured entity, and most of the pie chart doesn’t divvy out into the type of writing which, for instance, gets published in BASS. By this I do not mean they are not writing ‘good’ or ‘best’ work. I mean that there is a culture machine which fuels an aspect of literary culture which BASS and its related projects culls most of its produce from. I mean that most of those people are white, well off, and that saying this isn’t some kind of revelation. The fact is, most white people don’t get phds, and aren’t well off, and don’t even like writing.
However, assuming you qualify for at least two of those three criteria as a white person (or an ethnic person with ties to the culture), there is a system or engine in place to move you into intellectual or literary circles. There is no such engine for poor ethnic individuals, however–at least not one with a proven efficiency, one that has been up and running long enough to compete with the one which is centuries old and (despite setbacks) still churns out literary intellectuals quite regularly. When ethnic individuals get the writing bug (which is not only a smaller number of people than white folk, but a smaller -ratio- as well, due to cultural stigmas, anti-intellectual tendencies among the poor, anti-establishment tendencies among the oppressed, you name it) there are at least a dozen different writerly trends which can swallow them up, more than a few of which are less writerly than political. Some of it comes down to cultural propaganda or pamphleteering, some of it to cultural self-obsession (the ethnic equivalent of the rich-white-folk stories you speak of), some of it is actually good writing, some of it is actually great. Most of it, though, is mediocre, same as any writing. The problem is that all the other various cultural nuances which tax the supply of so-called ‘ethnic’ writers away from a standard of quality, rather than more superficial terms, are much more effective at recruiting people than the writing itself. People like being political – it’s a headrush and an ego-boost. People like talking about themselves, for similar reasons. While both these things are true for white folk as well, there’s more of a chance that you’ll hit on something, if you’re white, which you enjoy first for reasons of quality.
As used to be industry-standard terminology, most great literature was written by Dead White Guys. It’s a sad fact of the world that men hoarded culture for themselves, and European men possessed most of what we mean by culture. So you can have all these detracting influences for white people just the same, and they’ve still got a much higher chance of seeing something of themselves in the great literature, at a quick glance, that they’ll bother digging deeper. Even white women have it very well off on this front, comparatively speaking, because, and especially in English literature, there is a very remarkable tradition of great work being done by females, all the more remarkable for the way it runs counter their oppression. They’re almost all white, though, yet again.
I think it’s a simple problem of precedent. Why has black literature produced relatively few great works, in comparison with other aspects of the culture? Most everything that has been so remarkable and awe-inspiring to come out of black culture has been something black people invented. The major musical artforms, in all their variety, are probably the strongest American contribution to the arts at large, period, and they were done almost wholly in isolation and seclusion from the country around them, and that’s the rub with literature. It was a white man’s game, so black people did something else, and until there is a bona fide repertoire of great works by black people, black people will probably want to do something else. It’s in the nature of mimicry, and it essentially spells out a waiting game, as impotent as that sounds.
Up until very recently, a lot of literary culture, in its most institutional manifestations, was predicated on rage. Rage at the old culture, mostly, and what it seemed to stand for. Then there were those of the old culture who were enraged at having the non-partisan standards of quality torn down with the partisan ones. It basically amounted to a pissing-match between angry, unthinking individuals over intellectual property that, as is the way with war-stricken lands, soon nobody wanted but them. I think a lot of the degradation of literature in the current world is a product of not mass media, not one camp of this war, or the other, but the war in general. How could you walk into that environment and say -this- is where I want to be? How in the world could that be attractive to young minds searching for a purpose? These were not wise individuals, not great teachers, not people who cherished the opportunity to endow a new generation with a dearth of meaning, but instead a bunch of over-intellectual crusaders against a fictional hegemony of racists, and the people being called racists calling them worse back, and on and on. Real damage was done.
I don’t know if they’re any good to you, or anything you hadn’t already considered (though I was following cues in your post to make sure I didn’t blatantly restate anything you’d just said), but these are some of my views on the matter. They were deliberately very broadview, but as a white guy, when you do speak up, you tend to be very (perhaps overly) thorough in order to ensure you’re not misunderstood. I think the only answer, at the end of the day, basically, is for great writing to be read, and great writing to be written. That’s the only standard which has universal currency, and can actually shift the way people see things, or (more deeply) the way things are done.
“The stories are generally narrative, and about something.”
I dont know if I would agree with that from the bass anthologies ive read. the strongest short stories ive ever read have come from bass, but its never because of what something is about. in fact, i dont read any fiction that way. bass stories usually work because of the hows and the weavings and the ambiguities and the workings and the layerings. The content should not be seen as representative of anything.
Once again, Roxane Gay dropping truth bomb on everyone. Well said and agreed.
i dont need evidence that racism exists in this country. just in this case, for whether there is a disparate amount of black or working-class fiction in publishing compared to the population its written for.
OK, cool, then tell me how Roxane managed to discern that all of the stories except two were either by or about rich white men.
It might also have to do with the lack of diversity in MFA programs–the editors and readers are often MFA students.
I agree with you on other forms of diversity. There’s also a lack of class diversity in many small lit journals. Many people on this site like to pay lip service to stylistic diversity, while ignoring the diversity of vision and experience–both of which inform style.
For example, the argument that everything begins and ends with style is put forth quite a bit here, and many of those people are the ones making editorial decisions. Sometimes I under how someone who can have such a narrow view of style can be trusted to truly seek stylistic diversity?
‘There is evidence all around you about the systemized racism in this country.’
show me it. give me a link.
I’m simply going to choose to believe you’re being funny.
well, stories are about things, yes. i guess what i mean is that what stories are about does not matter in bass anthologies. i dont think the worth of fiction is determined by what it is about, rather by how well/interesting it came at you.
im simply going to choose to believe you are not able to show me a link.
So, for instance, you get people on here who denigrate “domestic realism.” Domestic realism is supposedly boring, dull, and dry, and not as interesting as experimental or maximalist writing. People strip this aesthetic from its actual historical context and use it as shorthand to avoid really thinking about its social and cultural implications. It must be easy to live in a world where you can reduce everything to style and aesthetic and get away with it without someone calling you on the carpet.
Anyway, these people like to pat themselves on the back for being “edgy” and “avant garde,” while dismissing an aesthetic of writing that’s been historically associated with women. “Domestic realism” has allowed many women writers to navigate sexism and develop agency in an otherwise constrained world. I find it really disturbing how people on this site often champion experimental writing while dismissing “domestic realism,” which, again–historically–has been one of the most socially-liberating genres of literary fiction, especially for women and lower-class characters (and/or characters of particular regions that are often looked down upon by those in more cosmopolitan areas).
This is just one example of how someone who seems to mean well when advocating a particular style or aesthetic can reveal him or herself in other interesting ways without even knowing it…
You don’t really lose if you stop talking to it. That was a metaphor.
You can debate all you want about the degree to which race is–genetically–actually a category. That doesn’t change the fact that people are perceived in different ways and treated accordingly based on the color of their skin. “Race” as a scientific, genetic classification might well be a myth. Racial privilege, however, is not a myth. This whole colorblind, “but look, we’re all the same” line of thinking totally denies the fact that it is still profoundly different to live in this world as a black person vs. as a white person.
This is how these conversations always go with some people. You need ME to prove to YOU that racism is systemized? Honestly, the only thing I can think of to say is “fuck you.” I am trying not to let this discussion with you decompensate in such a manner but honestly darby you cannot be serious. You can. not. The history of racism in the United States has always been documented. Let’s start with SLAVE PAPERS (you know, documents white people had that allowed them to OWN other people) and just work our way to present day from there. There’s no point in whipping out the whole 200 years ago stuff but if you want to go there, we can certainly go there. The reason I’m not giving you links, darby, is because I don’t have enough time to collate the exhaustive evidence you can find yourself. If you want to remain ignorant, that’s fine. It is not my job to help you see reality. You can go on living in your happy little bubble where you just don’t give a fuck. Simply opt out of the conversation.
I will also point you here: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/
i mean honestly, im aware of things that go on outside the US, and those are the real grave injustices that i see like in Mauritania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania), but in the US, evidence of systematized racism is fuzzier. give me a link, im curious, if the evidence is so ample. i want you to tell me why what you are complaining about matters relative to real racism going on in the world.
I don’t have anything like substantive to say but holy comment Batman and yes, you make a lot of great points here.
i should amend this to say im looking for evidence that it exists presently, not historically. im aware racism has been systematized in the US, but we are talking about a current problem.
Yes, yes, yes. Ever since I was an undergraduate first read BASS and MFA journals, I felt shut out because as someone who grew up not-wealthy in the Midwest, these stories all felt so alien, so foreign. They were beautiful, but when story after story was about some white family in their Cape Cod vacation home–I did not identify. I mean, I am white, but these white people were not the white people I knew. Nor certainly the black people I knew. And I didn’t understand why their stories mattered. It seemed so…petty.
I think there’s a place for this kind of writing, obviously–but why is is all like this? I actually was so disturbed by the lack of working class people in this world that I wrote my graduate thesis about it. Thank god there are a lot of indie writers that address this I’m still so disturbed.
I work at a public library and run into this a lot. The African American fiction section takes up as much shelf space as the Large Print Western section. This is partly due to so much of the AfAm fiction section being checked out, but it’s still embarrassing. I find myself apologizing to people all the time about our limited selection and so on (no public library in America should ever be out of Eric Jerome Dickey and Wahida Clark books, to name two writers I was asked about today but didn’t have anything by).
Another frustrating thing is how the library system I work for has a de facto “black branch” that gets most of the titles by black writers. This is partially due to higher demand there, but it ultimately results in segregation. It’s hard to fight against because it’s so entrenched.
I don’t think most people realize how deeply segregated this culture is, especially outside of bigger cities (but in them too). Think of the friends who you hang out with regularly, who you keep in touch with from high school, whose homes you’ve been to for dinner, who you have over for dinner, etcetera. It’s hard to start doing taking this shit on because breaking down segregation is hard and uncomfortable and forces everyone involved to dwell on things that usually get swept under the rug.
Sort of unrelated: I was disappointed that nobody here talked about ‘Losing My Cool’ by Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Another thing: why don’t white writers write about black characters (and so on)? Think about how long it has taken for good male writers to write women (Pynchon still can’t do it). This shit will take a long time, but it better get started now.
Also a question: who is the Kafka in the history of black literature in America?
ok so i browsed the wikipedia page on institutional racism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism and all i can see as far evidence that it occurs currently in the US are allegations and theories. an interesting thing on psychiatry actually. and a police force. but it still seems scarce whats there. i’d appreciate more direction in this regard. i dont know why everyone keeps saying theres all this evidence you must be retarded if you cant see it. ill conceded im retarded, now please show me something. the US has made so many strides over the last century compared to other countries. and there are grand injustices w/r/t racism going on in the US, ive never not said that. all im trying to get at is why should i care about this thing that some stories in a fiction anthology are barely not representative of working-class or black realism? compared to real shit going on in the world, this is what we’re fretting over?
do you live in a fucking bubble? do you really need wikipedia to tell you something that would be apparently if you looked around?
There are popular short story collections featuring black writers, but they are almost entirely in the urban fiction genre. For example, the Girls From Around the Way series.
But it’s just like our politics. Let’s hide our rapidly growing underclass and income gap and pretend they don’t exist. Let’s pretend jobs aren’t disappearing overseas by the minute and that we’re not turning into a banana republic and that Republicans aren’t desperately trying to cut taxes for millionaires while voting down extending unemployment benefits. Let’s tell laid off auto workers who made a middle class wage to go get a job at Walmart for minimum wage and if they complain let’s tell them they were making too much before and they should just be lucky to have a job. Not to mention those lucky duckies who don’t even have to pay taxes–they don’t make enough!
Meanwhile, publishing houses, BASS, etc, let’s mourn all that dreadful stuff from afar while we inspect our Dresden china and debate whether or not to take a stroll on our private beach after our dinner fete.
By the way, this is not to trash rich people, or rich white people. Not at all. I am white and would like to be rich. But why should their lives be the only ones on display, even in literature? It’s not just sad, it’s boring. I find stories about rich people contemplating quiet bits of life boring. Boring bring boring. Can’t we have more. Again, glad this is not the case in the indie world, where a lot of writers are writing about gay people, black people, rich, poor, middle class, red people, brown people, all kinds of people everywhere and objects and not people too. The world is so diverse. Why isn’t the mainstream writing that gets recognized?
I probably should not get into this here. Justice for working people is my whole life and it gets farther and farther away with every new year. It makes me rage and rage and not be coherent at all. I should take a deep breath and step away.
(Roxane, cheers for recommending the Danielle Evans book. I read ‘Bad Marie’ on your recommendation and loved it, so I put the Evans book on hold at the library.)
This segregation issue is one that is always on my mind. I notice it profoundly at readings. I am generally the only person of color and when I see pictures of other readings, it’s just a bunch of white writers hanging out. At AWP, the black writers all seem to band together. It’s just inexplicable to me how deeply divided everything is, even in groups of people who aren’t being deliberately exclusionary.
I’ve felt this way too. In the Stephen King BASS, I remember looking forward to the John Barth story and being surprised at how bougie it was. Same with a Mary Gaitskill story a couple of years ago in the New Yorker. Both are writers whose older work never really struck me that way. I wonder if this has something to do with successful writers aging and working their way into the middle and upper-middle classes. I mean, I have no idea of the class status of either Gaitskill or Barth, but I’d never even thought about it before I read those two (newer) stories.
the barth story wasnt bourg, you’re talking about toga party, it was satirical. it was more-or-less anti-bourg.
you know what dude, i have no problem conceding im an idiot/ignorant/live-in-a-bubble/priviledged/white-male/elitist. what i wont concede is that i dont just honestly want to know more about something. i havent researched this a lot, sorry, though ive been kind of looking around online but i cant find much yet. when i look around i see comfort and priviledge and mostly white and indian people in this city, and everyone gets along more-or-less fine. i mean, what should i be looking at/for? why is everyone just angry at me for asking without showing me anything. make look like an idiot, i dont care, i dont have any self-esteem wrapped up in how smart i am or what i know. im ignorant, sorry. maybe help me be less ignorant?
But he wasn’t talking about writing itself. He was talking about subject matter. Certainly writing is an activity of an at least somewhat privileged class; I don’t expect someone who is working two jobs in order to get by to be interested in writing novels or even reading them and the same goes for someone in the middle of a war and such. People who write from those perspectives probably are not writing while in the midst of such, except in instances where they choose those circumstances (starving artist, war correspondent, etc.), but rather are writing after they no longer have to work two jobs, are fighting in a war, whatever. Lin confuses the perspective and setting of a story with what the story is about. “Blue Velvet” isn’t about small-town life, just as “Apocalypse Now” isn’t about the Vietnam War. What I suspect Lin is really saying is that he prefers one way of talking about the issues he spoke of, as opposed to other ways of talking about them.
I wonder if there are any writers out there that can be considered genuinely not-‘middle-class’ (or higher). Who are really ‘blue-collar’. After all, class is more than just income.
this is a really thoughtful comment. i am always suspicious of ideas like ‘great’ness and ‘universal currency,’ and i don’t know that they are really useful in a discussion on the so-called ‘best’ (according to someone) american short stories.
this is an excellent comment. this sums up mostly my thinkings about it.
you’re right. i agree with the more global sentiment, but yeah, if you’re staring death in the face, you are also not worrying about writing or reading something either.
it might be also that there is an assumption being made that a writer’s history/experience bleeds into their writings. so one who’s spent time in primal survival will later write about things from that perspective.
Yeah, it’s really bad. Everyone knows it, but nobody does anything because they’re afraid of doing the wrong thing. Being deliberately ‘inclusionary’ is tough because I don’t want to be patronizing or something, and I don’t want to play the game of getting more black faces in the crowd so my event looks better in pictures (like Leftist groups at political demonstrations). The point should always be to create desegregated spaces as an end in themselves, knowing that the spaces might be (probably will be) pretty awkward at first because they happen so rarely.
There is/was a poetry open mic where I live that is probably the only genuinely desegregated literary event I have ever attended (it’s also, pleasantly, at a gay bar, so it’s an amazing mix of white lesbian poets, black lesbian poets, local hip hop artists/poet dudes, white poet dudes, and the regular gay bar scene). Can’t think of another one. Even given that, the tables at the bar were moreorless segregated. I should go to it more often.
I’m glad I’m a sports fan because in a lot of ways pro and college sports are the only desegregated mass cultural events in America.
I could be wrong, and correct me if I am, but I think sm meant bougie as in: http://bit.ly/a5rK0
Being suspicious of it is fine, I think. I think a lot of the suspicion comes from a lot of the upheaval which has occurred in the establishment over the past hundred or so years, and the upheaval was both needed and healthy. Where I draw the line, however, is at the idea of greatness not existing, or genius, for that matter. They are practical terms, and describe reality, and cannot, so far as I can see, be dismissed, anymore than egg cartons or lint or feet can. And it’s because of this, them being practical and apt, rather than idealistic and vague (which is the common feeling), that I see them as very relevant in most discussions about writing in general, and especially in discussions which cover subjects such as these. I don’t really care about the BASS volume in question, so I don’t really care whether or not it contains the ‘best’ stories, but if something is aiming to comprehend the ‘best’ of anything then greatness will be, at least contextually, very relevant to it.
Also, just to clarify, by ‘universal currency’ I do not mean something which is -guaranteed- universal currency, but something which, given the right conditions, is potentially palpable to anyone. If that still sounds suspicious to you, imagine chopsticks and a spoon. Imagine you are born in America, and know how to use chopsticks. Imagine you are born in Japan, and find function or utility in a spoon. That is what I mean by universal currency–not a necessity, but a possibility.
Chester Himes?
oh youre right, he said boug. i think its the same though, no? bourg is in the urban too. i guess i just meant that barth wasn’t writing a pro-bourgeois story, he was conscious of it and exploiting it.
Who is the Hurston in German-language Jewish Czech literature?
Who is the Toomer in Japanese-language Ainu literature?
Who is the Edward P. Jones in Spanish-language Quechuan literature?
Who is the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in English-language Igbo-Nigerian literature? Oh, wait . . .
I’m glad to hear you enjoyed Bad Marie. I’ve read it again since talking about it here. So good. You won’t be disappointed by BYSYDFS.
Darby, it’s all relative; no one is saying our problems or inequality is as bad as that in many other places. But we still have the desire to move our country forward, continue to make it even better. There are larger implications for the fact that a certain representation of people is the predominant one in our culture, and others are thus invisible or less visible, because if people are exposed to a problem or situation, they tendto want to change it, improve it. Like how Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle and people were horrified at the food safety/worker safety and ended up passing the first food safety laws. And how muckrakers then exposed the terrible poverty and conditions in the slums and sparked a movement that made working conditions better, food laws, housing laws, exposed slum landlords, stopped exploitation of child labor. The privileged classes were in a position to do something, but first they had to be made aware that the problems existed, and to read something like How the Other Half Lives to really be moved to take action. The invisible has to be made visible. It doesn’t have to be overtly political, it has to be seen, to be part of the larger cultural conversation, not marginalized like it so often now. That’s why differing viewpoints and cultural backgrounds in fiction are important to me, anyway.
“Desegregation” on your library’s shelves would lead to what?
Eliminating the African-American fiction section as a “section” by shelving all of its books in the main fiction stacks – who would resist this move the most aggressively, employing the most explosive, impossible-to-converse-with rhetoric? European-American identity-politicians, panicking because they’re losing their numerical majority – or ‘think’ they are? Or black grievance-mongers, stubbornly insisting that black people in America are worse off now than ever?
Legal desegregation, in which I would include unofficial affirmative action (like an editor or teacher holding herself/himself responsible for trying ‘to include’), – at least legally – has, I think, been much more easily accomplished than persuading people not to self-segregate. Laws against discrimination exist, and are used to pry open ‘closed’ spaces, but the pattern of ‘sticking to your own’ is going to take evolving into a different species to dissolve, except in unmeasurably granular increments, is my pessimistic-mood view.
So, let me repeat my question: would it be a Good Idea for your library ‘to include’ African-American fiction, and those of Latino/Chicano, Asian-American, indigenous American, and all non-European-American sections, in the main fiction stacks?
*wonder
When African-American/Latino-Chicano/Asian-American/indigenous American texts are put in their own section, does that make it more likely that white people/people who are not a member such group will browse the works of such writers? I can only speak for myself, and maybe it speaks to a sort of racism on my part, but I would probably be less likely to read fiction put in the [insert race here] section than in the ‘regular fiction’ section. Simple reason being: I have to make a special effort to look in the [insert race here] section as opposed to the ‘regular’ fiction section.
But then, my library doesn’t have a section devoted toward any one race or another. That’s what you get in a town of only 425 people.
But then, I’m white, so my privilege is a ‘burden’ in that I can go into a library and the general fiction section will be filled with white people, plus black people who have “stood the test of time” while also being aware that other black people who have not “stood the test of time” are not represented.
That’s fair about comparing this problem to elsewhere, that’s cheap on my part, i shouldnt do that.
But okay, so what should I read/experience, fiction or non, that will help me see and sympathize with this particular problem more? im just not sure there’s anything out there that puts current events under these kinds of lights. I’ve been browsing books for the last hour or so looking for some kind of conclusive writings on current cases of institutional racism and it seems like there is hardly anything happening.
i still think, in a broader sense, there are too many factors that play into art and entertainment to realistically suss out racial biases, and is why it seems like only one human in the world (roxane) is shouting about it. art is wrapped up in culture, and culture has a tendency to pro-segregation, or rather pro-cultural-individuality. See NLY’s comment below says it really well, when black art is awe-inspiring, it tends to be when blacks themselves invented it, hence separating it. i dont even think this is bad necessarily, just the way art moves through societies. venues form based on demand, it all kind of happens organically. thats just the mindframe im coming from. i want to sympathize with roxane’s concerns but i need to see that its there, because if its there, it runs counter to the way i understand the way art moves.
I do believe white people avoid those sections, not because they’re racist but because they think those books are “not for them.” I personally believe in desegregating bookstores but I understand the many reasons why these sections are important and should remain. It would be great if books from these groups, could, however, also be included in the general fiction sections, otherwise, it is so hard to get those books in front of mainstream readers. Here is some great commentary on the subject of book shelving: http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=5710. Others have also spoken on this topic.
I own, at tops, 150 books. (If I had more money, I’d own way more.) It’s almost embarrassing how many I own that are written by black people or other minorities. (Two novels by women, one of which is black, one short story collection by a women who is white.) In some degree, I don’t even know where to start. I’m going to put “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self” on my to-read list.
The shelving sometimes seems to treat African-American as a genre distinct from literature, with some black writers in the literature section and some in the African-American section. When stores and libraries are set up this way, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and Percival Everett and ZZ Packer, let’s say, are in the literature section, and the mass market romance/thuglife/inspirational fiction titles are in the African-American section. I’ve also noticed that even under the terms of this scheme, shelvers get things wrong, so Edwidge Danticat (a Haitian-American writer — is this the same as an “African-American” writer in the colloquial usage — I don’t know, because these seem culturally distinct groups, one Francophone, the other dominantly English-speaking) ends up in the section with the shoot-em-ups and wish-fulfillment romance books sometimes.
There are other categories (science fiction, crime fiction, etc.) which are treated similarly, but none of them are shelved based upon the ethnicity of their writer or perceived audience, which makes them less problematic shelving choices in my opinion, but still problematic. (Where do you shelve Richard Price, Kurt Vonnegut, Dennis Lehane, Margaret Atwood, Pat Frank, Ray Bradbury? I see them in both sections.)
I don’t have any real insights or well-considered value judgments to offer — just a report from the stores and libraries I’ve frequented. I will say that my reading and writing life would be significantly impoverished if not for several black writers I frequently revisit, among them Danticat, James Baldwin, Edward P. Jones, and James Alan McPherson. I also want to recommend a bunch of Haitian writers, but I sense this is the wrong thread for being enthusiastic about literature in translation — it’ll get lost in the shuffle here. So: more later on Haitian writers.
I would love to learn more about Haitian writers. Do a post Kyle!
I agree with what you say about the shelving, this idea that it’s somehow separate (but equal?). God, this whole thing exhausts me.
so, obviously you are misunderstanding what i was asking for here, or rather i didnt ask correctly. im aware that racism exists/has existed. that’s not what your post is about. i’m trying to find a particular injustice having to do with recent institutionalized racism in the US, because that would be more closer to evidence for me, and thats what i cant find much of, though a little, and that’s not even what im trying to get at utimately, because i believe systematized racism exists in the US, though i dont think there can be any evidence of it because its not as prevelent as it used to be, and its probably more sutbly ingrained in things now. but more particularly, what im interested in is anything that even claims there to be racial injustice amongst artists and their ability to get recognized. this i find absolutely nothing on, and since its your primary claim, im questioning it.
i dont understand why there is all this anger toward me and conjecture that i must not believe racism has ever existed or doesnt exist now. everyone knows racism is a thing. but that’s not what we’re talking about. we’re talking about this strange little niche of artist recognition.
art functions differently than other systems that have, in the past, housed racial problems. i’m trying to hone in on that difference and will probably write an essay maybe once i get it figured out. but art exists, almost as part of its definition, to be politically subversive. it functions as a vehicle for social change. it seems counter-intuitive for that vehicle to turn around and discriminate those who want to participate in the very social change its vehicling. there’s a logic problem here im trying to root out, and is why the claim has never sat well with me. i think that if there is not enough black representation in a given art venue, it is more a carry-over of something else, not inherently a systematized racial issue with the venue, ie. publishing. its broader issue of blacks not sitting in enough priviledge yet, but that problem is huge and has, along with the publishing industry, so many other tangents. coupled with the way art is used as a tool to express cultural individuality, which by nature separates cultures from each other, i can’t see it as an injustice, merely art feeding who it feeds. i dont know. anyway, sorry about all this anger and misunderstandings.
‘what im interested in is anything that even claims there to be racial injustice amongst artists and their ability to get recognized. this i find absolutely nothing on, and since its your primary claim, im questioning it.’
i shouldnt say that that is your primary claim. that is what i have been somehow arguing against though.
I have always had black Latino and Asian writers in my undergraduate fiction workshop. Some have been my best writers. When I was in workshops in grad school ten and fifteen years ago, this wasn’t always true. I get a sense that the change is a reflection of the growing black and latino middle class. It feels like it’s more a class thing than anything else. I’m guessing writers who are working class, working poor, living in poverty or under the thumb of the criminal justice system aren’t as attracted to the wkshop approach, or they may have more keeping them out. It’s maybe a bit more uphill for them, possibly contrary to their image of themselves and so there are fewer. I see more women of color than men, and this fits with higher Ed trends.
I’m not trying to endorse any stereotypes, only saying what I see. I honestly believe that the women of color who are good, if they stick with it, their chances of mainstream publication may be slightly better than that of whites, with white females fairing slightly better than white males (first time authors, novels, on large presses, with journals probably giving no advantage to any group).
So I don’t believe there are biases in publishing, except the market is perceived to be female, also with more female eds and agents. With indie publishers there’s more direct nepotism, and so the networking aspect may, though not necessarily, work against writers of color.
In my general Ed. Classes it s true that there are far fewer black males with more of them having difficulty passing. Again, no stereotypes intended, just reporting what I see, but a fair percentage of the black males in college have a lot farther to go to get to publishable writing and there’s more passion for playing sports or making music.
In this atmosphere the vast majority of the professors are encouraging and supportive of any black men who.want to pursue academics or the arts
Roxane: the black women will be fine, there will be more of them writing in the coming years. It’s the black male writer who is more rare. It’s the black men who are in crisis.
It’s not that no one else besides Roxane is shouting about it, barby.
It’s just that you are just broken, and no one here wants to fix you.
I think Virgins, and really most of the stories that were actually published first, are really good. But I don’t know about the others. I feel like there were numerous times while reading the collection that there was just something missing, like the stories hadn’t yet found themselves or something? That’s really vague, and if no one else felt that at all, then I’ll try to go back and pull something more concrete out. But, yeah, that was my initial reaction. Woah, this is good, but I wish she’d waited one more year, because it could have been great.
I’m not sure what you’re after, letters. There’s Shakespeare, Behn, Defoe – but, in terms of identity politics, arguing about their representations is a quagmire of grievance-trench warfare.
Melville? That’s just sailors. Stowe? Sentimental condescension. Faulkner? Welty? Malamud? – among, as you probably know, many.
I think Amy’s point is a difficult one: ‘we’re all really the same underneath’ platitudes – and the truths they both indicate and conceal – aside, how patient are you when people talk from observation and imagination and compassion, but not from first-hand experience? – not about, say, ancient Greece (about which scholarly methods provide quasi-objective standards of evaluation and debate), but about some grueling circumstance you’ve directly experienced, whatever your “identity”?
I don’t think it’s a dumb question. To put it crudely – Jewish experiences with anti-Semitism in Europe (understood through the prism of Jewish theology and culture) produced a particular and amazing literary tradition, with Kafka being the very best of it (followed by Imre Kertesz, I think).
I am curious if there is a similar figure to Kafka in the black American literary tradition. The differences between the history of slavery and racism in America and anti-Semitism in Europe (along with the ‘optimism’ of Christianity) probably make a ‘black Kafka’ impossible. Actually, a Protestant Kafka is probably impossible. I don’t know. Probably the only other social body in America capable of producing a Kafkaish literary figure is gay men after the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
That’s crude, but it’s the reasoning behind my question. When I think of Kafka, I’m not thinking of form/content as much as theology…
I totally endorse the idea of seeking out writers who are in a position to say something about what makes us outsiders, and would just like to add ‘nonheterosexual’ to the list, since you only seem to hint at it. (E.g., can you name five gay writers?) Yes I’m gay so it’s my ‘ish’ but I can’t really think of another group of people in our society at this moment (except for maybe the overweight/fat) who are as openly vilified and thus most in need of the compassion that having our stories told can bring about.
Rebecca Godwin wrote Keeper of the House, which was lauded by the African American literary community until they found out she was white, which is a shame because it’s a beautiful book.
It’s a difficult line. When are you writing something genuine and graceful and from the heart and when are you writing something fetishizing or patronizing or marginalizing?
There’s often the argument that people who are white or rich or straight or male aren’t supposed to write about another race or class or sexuality or gender because what about the people who actually are those things? Why can’t they write for themselves? Why is their market being taken away by rich, white, straight men who are really just colonizing the Other?
I’m going to blog about this shortly because it’s been something that I’ve been mulling over for a long time, but what does art *owe* us? (My slant, actually, is what does entertainment owe us, but it’s equally interesting how there seems to be a drastic change in what is owed between art and entertainment.)
the “openly vilified” is a good thing to point out here. while race based exclusion always has to be masked under the guise of something else to the general public, queer exclusion is really, really blatant and visible.
(not to imply that one is worse than the other, or that they are equal in any regard other than exclusion and invisibility is straight-up BAD across the board)
no time to read other comments so sorry if duplicating stuff….
great post Roxane, you are a Roxstar
disagree about Russo’s writing tho…. Russo’s own story in BASS a few years back was pretty much the one that killed the last threads of impulse to buy the thing…. Reading it was like listening to Nickelback play over tinny restroom speakers while you’re taking a leak….
and on the rich white man thing: i see it too and i think in one sense it’s pretty simple: writers are distinguished from other writers, and seek to distinguish themselves from other writers, via displays of what might be taken as greater authorness–greater authority….. and for just about ever in lit fiction, what’s authoritative has carried depressing similarities w/ what’s authoritative in the culture…..
Great post, Roxane. A few thoughts – none fully formed, but here they are nonetheless –
I wonder if the content of BASS is a reflection of the dwindling audience (and relevance) of the short story, that the rich white characters are a perceived reflection on the part of the editors of the readership, and a nostalgia for Cheever-like domestic fiction that just isn’t relevant to anybody other than the white middle class — that’s not to defend the collection, but to wonder aloud if part of the problem is that the short story (in the form we see in BASS) just isn’t that relevant anymore, except perhaps as a reflection of upper middle class white “problems.” That the existence of BASS just serves to reinforce an outmoded idea of the “Best” short stories that continues to exclude anything interesting, innovative, or other. That’s not a defense, and maybe is just restating the problem in another way, but that the BASS really doesn’t represent anything relevant anymore, that the exclusion of anything other in the collection is part of holding onto a nostalgia for a time when the short story ‘mattered’ and so instead of continuing a tradition, just reinforces its deadness.
I wonder, too, about the younger generation of African American innovative writers – this could simply be because I don’t know about them (my knowledge of contemporary writers is pretty abysmal), but I wonder who are the next Delany, Reed, Baraka, Mackey, Butler, Atkins – several of those writers are still writing amazing books, but wondering where to look for what’s happening now.
A few notes on some earlier comments – somebody earlier suggesting that black musical forms tend to be created in a vacuum, which maybe was an abbreviated way of saying that black american music has tended to be about ‘newness’ versus the perception that the novel and/or short story are borrowed, (largely, in America) European forms. I’d argue that while the blues is certainly an African American art form, but it’s not as simple as suggesting that the blues came from black artists excluded from the culture around them – first, the blues roots comes from the experience of being black in white America, and was influenced by Appalachian music (and influenced Appalachian music), the guitar came to America via Europe, etc – so, it’s not really about inventing in a vacuum, but creating a voice from an experience (not a vacuum). If you look at a few of the great experimental novels by African Americans – thinking Mumbo Jumbo or Dhalgren – I think those novels are as much about appropriation (or influence of many writers, African American and not) that results in a new form, that communicates the unique experience of being black in America.
Another thought – one of the problems is that there are many, many great African American novels, but they have, as yet, not entered many canons. I think this stems in part from the continued treatment of the writing of the other as exceptions, rather than a part of a continuum.
Wow. NLY kinda ethered the comment game.
I can actually name a lot of published writers of color, but what impressed me about Danielle Evans and her collection is how young she is, and I wondered why there isn’t more literary fiction being published by young, black women. Do publishers think the marketing demographics aren’t there? If so, that’s a shame. These are voices that need to be heard by everyone, especially their peers.
Good answer to a dumb question.
Roxane, some more context on this issue, via the great SF writer Samuel Delany. Kinda long but well worth a read.
http://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html
Roxanne: I’m a secret lurker of your blog and your critical writing online just in general. I admire your forthright willingness to give names to the demons and angels that currently haunt us in the world of writing ( race and gender exclusion, for example, and certain narcissistic tendencies). I get great pleasure watching you carry the torch for true critical thinking. A generation apart from you, like my daughters, you force me to reexamine my assumptions. Keep going.
Darby, I spent two years teaching fourth grade in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta. The Delta is nearly 80% black, but In the Delta, where the legacy of King Cotton is evident everywhere, whites own 95% percent of the businesses, and most of the land; the plantations still grow cotton, but are mechanized and run by whites. When the Supreme Court ruled that the Southern states actually had to enforce Brown vs. Board and desegregate in 1971, private ‘academies’ sprung up overnight, usually associated with white churches, to ensure black children did not have to go to school with white children. Scholarships were established to make sure poor white children did not have to attend public schools. In the elementary school I taught in, of some 550 students, there was one apparently ‘white’ student– an albino black child. I made the mistake of trying to join the country club (white) so I could use the gym– until I walked into the lobby/restaurant and saw the black maids and black servers and black bartender, and one of my kid’s mothers saw me, started to greet me, and was ordered elsewhere by the manager. Regularly, white people would come up to me and inquire ‘what I was’, as I’m ethnically ambiguous; others would assure me that they saw orientals as being ‘practically’ white, and ‘nothing like them blacks.’ In a restaurant in Greenville, where I tried to go with my black roommate and two white (female) teachers, we were nearly not served, seated in a side hall out of sight, and our waittress, when she found out we were teaching in the public schools, shook her head and said she didn’t understand how anyone could teach ‘those animals’. Another fellow at a bar in Clarksdale tried to explain it to me: it was just that the blacks they had in Mississippi were deficient, the ‘good’ ones having all left for the cities. As for the black community, nobody can be more racist than blacks– if I walked the streets of the black side of town (divided by tracks), I was heckled and mocked as a ‘chinaman’ (there are few japanese in the Delta, but the Delta chinese did build the railroad). I visited the schools in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans before Katrina leveled the neighborhood– the black public schools– and found conditions identical to the Delta, except with an added edge of gang violence. If you really have no idea how this country’s history informs the structure of our society today, if you think we’re really post-racial in 2010, I’m with Keedee: you’re just an idiot.
And as to the actual conversation that Roxane was attempting to have, well, I’ve written a novel-in-stories about teaching in the Delta and children there. All the chapters but one have been published, most in good magazines– indie/online/traditional/commercial-national distribution– you name it. It was hard because of subject and formal choices to place the work… I heard some really stupid things, usually from editors and readers like yourself, who had no idea in the world what they were talking about. But that wasn’t half as bad as the last year, when I’ve been trying to agent the book. So far, there is no criticism of the work, the prose, my vision or craft, or even the books merit. The response is either, I love this and cannot sell it to a major trade publisher because people will not read about a difficult literary book about a Japanese-American and poor black people, or as one editor put it, “nobody cares about Mississippi, and nobody wants to read about poor black people or Japanese people who don’t particularly Japanese.” Roxane has it right: literary publishing is fucked up when it comes to race. On the evidence of this string, so is indie publishing. Keedee is right about the internet, trolls, and idiots, but it’s too bad that the incarnation of the literary internet that perhaps best reflects the ways the internet is affecting literary culture has been unable to sustain a real conversation about race and literature. A step forward, htmlgiant is not, on this subject.
Guess I should have read to the end. Some good things said here.
I am unconvinced any black writer has it ‘better’.
Why can’t we accept that representation must be allowed to be particular? Why is phenotype our first criteria in establishing authorial authority? How can we walk the line– being leery of colonization and stereotypical depiction, and simultaneously, avoiding making our criteria for art ideological or functional (what is its ‘effect’ on equality), and still letting what one reader calls ‘greatness’ (I’d prefer merit, or substance) be the first criteria for successful fiction?
Carefully and calmly.
You misunderstand me. I want to desegregate the library branches and order more books by black writers at my branch, not just the implicitly designated “black branch”. I am totally okay with an African American Fiction section. I want it to be 4x bigger than it is because it is way too small relative to the number of people asking about it, browsing it, checking out books from it, etcetera. Any method of organizing and sorting books is inherently biased and problematic in some way, but… I am comfortable showcasing black writers at the library.
Sorry for my confusion.
And a not-retarded person of any gender or color labeling something he doesn’t like as “retarded” is offensive.
Margaret DeAngelis, affluent (not rich) white woman fiction writer (unpublished) who has at least one manuscript with working class characters, although I thought of them mostly as “people” and not as members of a “class.” (And they are white.)
Markings: Days of Her Life
http://www.silkentent.com/Trees
Hi Matthew,
I’m always a fan of what Roxane has to say, so I was just reading along here, but given your comment, I thought that I would post. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I will point out that there was a gay story in this year’s BASS, my story “All Boy.” Of course, it is about more than just being gay–it is about a child whose parents are divorcing–but I hope that it offers one view from outside.
There are other women of color in the “indie lit sphere,” two others in fact who write for this site. And I don’t think my audience is other people of color. Nor is my audience strictly “white.”
Well, I don’t think that’s fair – more like an easy joke at the expense of, perhaps, an interesting question.
When Bellow asked ‘where is the Polynesian Tolstoy?’, he was being irascibly ignorant – it was a remark I think he came to regret, partly because of the equally irascibly ignorant blowback, but also because (I hope) he came to realize what an unfair question it would be to ask, ‘where is the Mitteleuropeanisch-Jewish Shakespeare of 1600?’
It’s a tough question: according to at least some German speakers, Kafka’s writing transformed how German speakers understand the possibilities for beauty and expression in ‘their’ language, more so than any German writer since Luther (this in spite of claims agreed to for the greatness of German poetry, especially). – and this with absolutely no allowance made, no expiation offered, for the Holocaust.
Has a single American of (recent) African ancestry done such a thing in the case of the American English language? Is it reasonable to hold this catalysis or fertilization or lensing up as an ambition – I don’t think Kafka, who had a sense of how strange the things he was making were, knew that he was “Kafka”.
Good article. Thanks for linking it here.
I was actually going to take up the issue of queer visibility too but then I realized my thoughts would get too unfocused. It’s just as critical an issue.
I’m asking this out of curiosity as to what your response would be, mostly because I agree with many of the things you’ve said besides: do you think it’s possible you’re conflating your experiences as a teacher with evidence as to the state of the publishing world? I think your experiences as a teacher are probably very pertinent, in many ways, but I’m unsure if they accurately reflect the -present- state of things in the business, as it were, especially if we’re using the word ‘mainstream’ in its widest definition.
John, the condescension in your response is staggering. Black women (and black men and all writers of color, working class writers, and queer writers) will not be fine unless there are monumental shifts in the publishing industry. That you would assert that people of color and women have better chances than white men makes me feel like the only thing I can say is please set down the crack pipe.
I’m not sure what you’re after, letters. There’s Shakespeare, Behn, Defoe – but, in terms of identity politics, arguing about their representations is a quagmire of grievance-trench warfare.
Melville? That’s just sailors. Stowe? Sentimental condescension. Faulkner? Welty? Malamud? – among, as you probably know, many.
I think Amy’s point is a difficult one: ‘we’re all really the same underneath’ platitudes – and the truths they both indicate and conceal – aside, how patient are you when people talk from observation and imagination and compassion, but not from first-hand experience? – not about, say, ancient Greece (about which scholarly methods provide quasi-objective standards of evaluation and debate), but about some grueling circumstance you’ve directly experienced, whatever your “identity”?
I don’t think it’s a dumb question. To put it crudely – Jewish experiences with anti-Semitism in Europe (understood through the prism of Jewish theology and culture) produced a particular and amazing literary tradition, with Kafka being the very best of it (followed by Imre Kertesz, I think).
I am curious if there is a similar figure to Kafka in the black American literary tradition. The differences between the history of slavery and racism in America and anti-Semitism in Europe (along with the ‘optimism’ of Christianity) probably make a ‘black Kafka’ impossible. Actually, a Protestant Kafka is probably impossible. I don’t know. Probably the only other social body in America capable of producing a Kafkaish literary figure is gay men after the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
That’s crude, but it’s the reasoning behind my question. When I think of Kafka, I’m not thinking of form/content as much as theology…
I agree, Michael. The notion that any black writer (or any writer of color, queer, etc) has it better is just… annoying and absurd.
I think of you often, of your writing about the Mississippi Delta, the difficulties you have had in placing that work, getting an agent, etc. This is all connected, and as I noted in my post, we’re all complicit. We all have these biases, no matter who we are and it’s quite difficult to overcome them.
You ask a good question for which I don’t have an answer but wanted to just mention that when I think about race and publishing, I think about your work.
I thought about this question all night, letters. I think mostly its that people worry that they won’t get it right. I do believe it can be done but I also believe that there’s not only resistance, among writers, to cross boundaries like this, there’s also resistance among readers. I think some people believe you should only write what you are and hold a sense of distrust when they see white people writing about people of other ethnicities and vice versa.
Well, Roxane, I have to say: ditto. You know, it’s interesting, because though I got heated in that long ago email exchange (let’s be honest, I was unhappy my work was being rejected first and mostly), you made me think through the issues involved for the first time and try to construct a defensible position regarding race, authority, and culpability. I wouldn’t have done so if it wasn’t for your piece at Luna Park and our exchange– and your post, and the nature of the comment thread it set off, demonstrates how important a conversation this is (and how thorny, complex, and heated a subject race still is in America, whether we’re talking politics or publishing).
I owe you. Thanks for this post, too– among other things, it will allow me to save my money buying BASS (perhaps I’ll go with the new Pushcart instead– congrats, by the way, on your nomination for one).
Cool, but I hadn’t thought that you meant ‘desegregating the fiction collection’.
You’re pretty clearly talking about ethnic mixtures in public spaces (bars, sports events), but I think the arguments for compulsory desegregation (anywhere) are drastically complicated by, as I say, self-segregation.
I’d wanted to highlight such complexity by inviting an argument like the one you’ve made – namely, that voluntary segregation, in a place like a bookstore or library, could be, temporarily (?), a means to achieve the end of ‘equal opportunity’.
My view is that, in this case, the chemotherapy of separate sections for black writers and European/European-American writers – African writers, like Mahfouz, Achebe, Gordimer, Coetzee, Adichie, are . . . where? – in school and public libraries is no longer more constructive than it is destructive. A “black” section says ‘keep out’ to European-Americans every bit as much as the “main” section says it to black readers – and further, the “black” section says ‘don’t go anywhere else’ to those black readers, by the same identity logic.
We can disagree, but only if I get to be right.
Great post, Roxane. A few thoughts – none fully formed, but here they are nonetheless –
I wonder if the content of BASS is a reflection of the dwindling audience (and relevance) of the short story, that the rich white characters are a perceived reflection on the part of the editors of the readership, and a nostalgia for Cheever-like domestic fiction that just isn’t relevant to anybody other than the white middle class — that’s not to defend the collection, but to wonder aloud if part of the problem is that the short story (in the form we see in BASS) just isn’t that relevant anymore, except perhaps as a reflection of upper middle class white “problems.” That the existence of BASS just serves to reinforce an outmoded idea of the “Best” short stories that continues to exclude anything interesting, innovative, or other. That’s not a defense, and maybe is just restating the problem in another way, but that the BASS really doesn’t represent anything relevant anymore, that the exclusion of anything other in the collection is part of holding onto a nostalgia for a time when the short story ‘mattered’ and so instead of continuing a tradition, just reinforces its deadness.
I wonder, too, about the younger generation of African American innovative writers – this could simply be because I don’t know about them (my knowledge of contemporary writers is pretty abysmal), but I wonder who are the next Delany, Reed, Baraka, Mackey, Butler, Atkins – several of those writers are still writing amazing books, but wondering where to look for what’s happening now.
A few notes on some earlier comments – somebody earlier suggesting that black musical forms tend to be created in a vacuum, which maybe was an abbreviated way of saying that black american music has tended to be about ‘newness’ versus the perception that the novel and/or short story are borrowed, (largely, in America) European forms. I’d argue that while the blues is certainly an African American art form, but it’s not as simple as suggesting that the blues came from black artists excluded from the culture around them – first, the blues roots comes from the experience of being black in white America, and was influenced by Appalachian music (and influenced Appalachian music), the guitar came to America via Europe, etc – so, it’s not really about inventing in a vacuum, but creating a voice from an experience (not a vacuum). If you look at a few of the great experimental novels by African Americans – thinking Mumbo Jumbo or Dhalgren – I think those novels are as much about appropriation (or influence of many writers, African American and not) that results in a new form, that communicates the unique experience of being black in America.
Another thought – one of the problems is that there are many, many great African American novels, but they have, as yet, not entered many canons. I think this stems in part from the continued treatment of the writing of the other as exceptions, rather than a part of a continuum.
Thank you for this post, Roxane. And thank you Michael Copperman, NLY, and M. Kitchell, Amber Sparks, and Matthew Gallaway for your insightful comments that really added to the conversation. After so much good has been said I don’t feel up to adding much substance, except: ditto/fuck yeah/amen. As a young queer working class light-skinned black woman, I’m personally invested in conversations like this happening more often. But really, we all should be personally invested in all the fucked up ways oppressions perpetuate themselves in our society. We all have our own different privileges/disadvantages and we’ve all been socially conditioned somehow and we’re all willfully complicit in some way. It makes me fucking sick when people say shit like this doesn’t matter and/or shit like this doesn’t happen because they’ve “never noticed.” You fucking live in it. You just don’t want to see.
Yeah, I am very torn about this. There are good arguments for both sides. At the library where I work, African writers are spread between general adult fiction, sci fi, or mysteries. The African American section is only Af/Am writers, but it is a mix of genres. So Delany and Walter Mosley, for example, are in the Af/Am section but with sci fi and mystery genre stickers, respectively. We have an Urban Fiction subject heading in our catalogue but currently do not mark Urban Fiction books with a genre sticker. In the next decade, I would not be surprised if libraries started making specific Urban Fiction collections. It should be treated like all other genres.
Self-segregation is a difficult thing to talk about. The Thomas Chatterton Williams book I mentioned elsewhere in this comment thread talks about it a lot. Shelby Steele’s ‘The age of white guilt: and the disappearance of the black individual’, which I learned about via the Chatterton Williams memoir, is also pretty interesting: http://www.cir-usa.org/articles/156.html (yes, I know that Steele is a conservative, but if you have a sub to Harper’s and can read all of his articles from the 80’s and 90’s, a lot of what he wrote re: race is very compelling).
The Delany article linked elsewhere in this thread has compelling things to say re: self-segregation too, though he does not use that term.
What I meant in the comment, by bringing up male writers writing about women, is that sometimes black characters are present in fiction by white writers… but usually only present like women are present in work by male writers. That is, not really present.
(There are exceptions of course.)
But let’s think about the current crop of Young Writers of Promise, both popular popular, indie popular, and obscure. How many contemporary young white writers are writing black characters? (…) Maybe I’m not reading the right people?
As for your question – as a man (who loves men!) I have read books by women that I think ‘got’ the maleness of their male characters. And the characters really worked and resonated with me, even though I know the writer didn’t have first-hand experience with what they were writing about. At the same time I know that sex/gender != race.
The other thing is that fiction allows one to write as an observer. One can write about a character without ‘getting in the character’s head’. And yet, white writers rarely even have black characters in the background.
So there should be monumental shifts in the publishing industry to soften the ingrained separatism? All the shifts in the world would only be an “allowance of” and not a dissolution. As purveyors of words, we should know the power of words and the connotations they drive deep into our consciousness, alllll the way down to our preconscious. It seems you (not only you, but others as well) are suggesting we fight from the top down, but bottom up. We should be attacking the issue and not the byproduct of the issue. While racism, yes, is a factor, so is class, so is the structure developed which entangles and conflates both these things. It begins with the government’s lack of interest in investing in their school systems to provide a wider breadth of available global outlooks in their books. This is important. Let’s cut the comments in this excellent post in half, and say 75 of those people took their knowledge out of the digital realm and began attempting to affect things, not just by publishing more under-represented writers, but by getting those books into schools, but by pushing to their local government, and then pushing to their federal government, all the while recruiting others to help… wait, this is occurring right now (catch), so why isn’t it working on a much wider and discernible level? That is a question to ask and research. And the answer you find won’t be because parents don’t care, or the kids don’t care.
“If you really have no idea how this country’s history informs the structure of our society today, if you think we’re really post-racial in 2010”
?!?!?! where. did. i. ever. say. that. how did i become the strawman for this kind of thinking?
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i dont think that. i just think art is a different kind of system where racism isnt as apparent, and doesnt really make sense to exist. even in your case, is it racist to not want to experience art about a thing? your gripe is not against publishing, its about there not being an audience, right, as per your editor said, or do you think your editor is lieing and is racist? i agree with there not being an audience, but i dont necessarly think anyone has an obligation to like fiction or art or any particular niche. reading fiction is just what we do in our spare time, its not the core of people’s lives. if i choose not to read a piece of fiction that depicts black realism, am i racist? am i allowed to just not be interested? there’s less chance that black realism gets published because there’s less black realism in the US compared to white realism. the argument boils down to being discouraged about the size of the audience, and i feel like you cant blame anyone for that.
Hi Michael. As I note in my post. This is not an issue that starts with BASS. Ultimately it goes much further back and I absolutely agree that the educational system is the proverbial “ground zero” where we can begin to affect real change. However, I don’t think we need to only approach this problem from the bottom up. I think we need to approach it from both the top and the bottom.
actually the real boug story in the anthology was the louis achincloss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Auchincloss piece. i dont there is another writer who embodies rich white fiction more than him.
[…] From HTML Giant: What I felt most while reading [Best American Short Stories] was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. This entry was posted in Words. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Advent-tube: Go Tell It on the Mountain […]
i feel the need to clear up some things. the amount of insults ive taken in this thread is kind of ridiculous. i feel like based on my comments, people are making the assumption that i am not sympathetic to the general problem of racism in this country, or that my thinking is symptomatic of race denial. looking over some of my comments, i can see how that came about, though i dont think the insults against me are deserving. every comment i have made in this thread was intended to be particular only to racism in publishing, which is what i thought this post was about, not to the grand issues of racism in general, currently or historically.
i see two problems with the claim that there is racism in publishing. The first is the openness of the system of art being counter-intuitive to discriminate, as opposed to other institutions that are more greed-driven where discrimination is more beneficial for those in power.
The second is that art is not important. its a tangential part of people’s lives that people should be allowed to control however they want, because there is no consequence. there is nothing at stake. its freedom at its core. its tangentiality makes it hard to care about injustices relative to it, if there are any. (Again, I mean injustices only w/r/t this tiny niche of potential racism, not all forms of racism everywhere).
I threw out the numbers as my intro to this discussion because that’s where the debate leads me in my head, to a numbers game. Because publishing is a numbers game. Its wanting money and its wanting an audience, the more the better. can one say that the absence of an audience for an art is an injustice? i see that as a pretty bold claim and difficult to justify for the reasons above. i dont think it says anything about a person’s race or gender what particular kind of art one is expected to enjoy. To me it seemed like the make-up of bass 2010 is almost on par with the make-up of white/black in the country. what would bass 2010 have to look like to not bring up issues of racism in one’s mind?
so, yeah, these things go around in my head and is why i keep asking for discussion about it, so i can get to a point of believing that there is a real concern (relative only to publishing, not the grand concern of racism everywhere)
The problem here is that you can not separate the history of racism in this country from the effects of racism in our institutions and industries. It is because of “historical” racism we (even in the arts) deal with the passive racism.
I don’t think that any editor/publisher/reader/lover of literature decides they don’t want to be exposed to the voices of minorities, I think some assume that they can not relate (or their readers can not relate) to a story that makes reference to a marginalized perspective. Not all, maybe not even most, but some.
If art is tangential, which I don’t believe it is, and people should be in control of how and what they consume, isn’t it the responsibility of artists to tell and share the stories of other’s so that there are numerous views represented? I think it would be an injustice if the literary world were to pretend that certain groups of people didn’t have stories worth sharing.
It’s so hard to talk about these things on the internet. I wish were all just in the same room with no place to be, and lowered voices.
So you’re saying that the context for that comment in response to me at a very particular moment in a particular stage of a conversation was ‘this is how I feel about all of it so far, here, you have it’?
Good night, dear. I look forward to having other conversations with you in other threads.
I don’t agree with most of what I said, but those are the most frequent arguments I hear. I think if you can write it and write it well, it’s yours.
keedee, that thread currently has 49 comments from – unless there’s sock-puppetry – 24 posters. By my count, one commenter ridiculed Hennessy.
Now, I’m inclined to agree with you that 1/24 is “a lot of people”, because that ‘one’ was me, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.
Where else than my remarks, on that thread, is there a scrap of an iota of a jot of a scintilla of a speck of a trace of a smidge of hostility towards Hennessy? – indeed, keedee, of the remarks that are concerned with the clip, from whom else is there anything other than jocose support for Hennessy’s discussion?
As far as me mocking the ‘street’ argot Hennessy employs, I think pompously inaccurate ‘street’ is as risible as carelessly inexact ‘academy’. I do not think “it’s okay to fuck with people of color” anywhere on the grounds of their ‘color’. I do think it’s ok to hold explanations responsible for explaining – though, as marshall (and others) point out, literalism in the case of Hennessy might be so beside-the-point as to be silly.
I also think that protecting “people of color” from being laughed at when they take the chance of laughing at, say, Perfessers and Criticks, is way more condescending than darby, jereme, or John M. have been on this thread.
darby asks (I think), ‘what’s the evidence that black people are so underrepresented in publishing? what is institutional racism?’, gets sidetracked on what she or he “should” be aware of, and, instead of being pointed towards 100 Senators, or America’s penal population, she or he gets you’re such a fucking moron I can’t even talk the fuck to you.
jereme points out, perhaps distractingly, that “race”, from the perspective of physical anthropology, is scientifically worthless, and he gets you’re a fucking “troll”, ya fucking moron.
There is a place for condescension in discourse:
Bah.
–
[marshall, I will tell u y I am mad
nothing, no fucking thing, on foxgoebbels or in the wall street pravda, none of the ‘conservative’ cruelty or lies or hatred for life, has done or will do as much damage to political progress than grievance fanaticism in identity politics
no?]
‘The problem here is that you can not separate the history of racism in this country from the effects of racism in our institutions and industries. It is because of “historical” racism we (even in the arts) deal with the passive racism.’
I’m not separating the history of racism from how it affects our institutions and industries today. what im saying is that art is a different kind of institution.
‘I don’t think that any editor/publisher/reader/lover of literature decides they don’t want to be exposed to the voices of minorities, I think some assume that they can not relate (or their readers can not relate) to a story that makes reference to a marginalized perspective. Not all, maybe not even most, but some.’
i agree, but i just dont care enough. i dont think its racist to think a that privledged reader wont relate to a marginalized perspective. to an extent they probably wont, and i think roxane mentioned this in her post, that there needs to be a desire for a person to read something outside of what they can relate to. but i just dont think anyone should be obligated to like something, i guess.
‘If art is tangential, which I don’t believe it is, and people should be in control of how and what they consume, isn’t it the responsibility of artists to tell and share the stories of other’s so that there are numerous views represented?’
No. Artists have no responsibility.
‘I think it would be an injustice if the literary world were to pretend that certain groups of people didn’t have stories worth sharing.’
i dont think the literary world pretends they dont. its just that they see less of an audience for it. the real stories worth sharing always find a spotlight anyway, regardless of the culture it came from/represents.
Darby, a couple things… the first is that there is a difference between ‘Racism’ with a capital ‘R’, which still exists many places, and inequalities in society that persist due to historical racism/injustice, leaving race and class inextricably entertwined. In other words, just because no single ‘racist’ or act of overt ‘racism’ caused the immediate status quo doesn’t make that status quo just: a child from a low-income community is much, much more likely to be minority, and they are some 8 times less likely to graduate college than a student from a middle-income or upper-income community. It’s true that (as others here have pointed out) this situation surely influences the number of writers of color. It’s also true that the taste of editors and publishers surely influences the number of published writers of color, and that most aren’t sure how to deal with work that exceeds or refuses to engage the typical, shallow, politically correct take on race so popular in Hollywood, where racists can be condemned and people of color all act heroically and laudably. You seem to think the status quo is all right– the status quo in society, and in publishing and art, the absence of voices and representation of minorities with a range of experiences. Of course an individual has a right to their taste– if someone wants to narrow, provincial, and stay thoroughly in their comfort zone, that is surely their taste. I wouldn’t commend that taste, or suggest it’s a good thing in a country that will be more than half minority in another twenty years, though. And I also think it’s absurd to suggest that ‘art’ doesn’t matter. Friend, if you believe art is entertainment necessarily disconnected from reality, if you think artists aren’t culpable for what they say and how they say it, if you genuinely believe the subject of art, and the sort of art that we consume and enjoy as a culture is not central to our identity as a nation, you’re in the wrong business, for the wrong reasons. In a sense, in fact, you’ve abdicated the mandate of the writer: to say something that matters. No-one can compel you to be less wrong-headed, or to read a book that takes you beyond work that meets the taste of (that is, concernst he lives of) wealthy white men. That doesn’t mean you’re making a good choice, or that that choice doesn’t, in the aggregate, have repercussions.
Since my direct response to you is probably buried, Darby, let me also post it here:
Darby, a couple things… the first is that there is a difference between ‘Racism’ with a capital ‘R’, which still exists many places, and inequalities in society that persist due to historical racism/injustice, leaving race and class inextricably entertwined. In other words, just because no single ‘racist’ or act of overt ‘racism’ caused the immediate status quo doesn’t make that status quo just: a child from a low-income community is much, much more likely to be minority, and they are some 8 times less likely to graduate college than a student from a middle-income or upper-income community. It’s true that (as others here have pointed out) this situation surely influences the number of writers of color. It’s also true that the taste of editors and publishers surely influences the number of published writers of color, and that most aren’t sure how to deal with work that exceeds or refuses to engage the typical, shallow, politically correct take on race so popular in Hollywood, where racists can be condemned and people of color all act heroically and laudably. You seem to think the status quo is all right– the status quo in society, and in publishing and art, the absence of voices and representation of minorities with a range of experiences. Of course an individual has a right to their taste– if someone wants to narrow, provincial, and stay thoroughly in their comfort zone, that is surely their taste. I wouldn’t commend that taste, or suggest it’s a good thing in a country that will be more than half minority in another twenty years, though. And I also think it’s absurd to suggest that ‘art’ is something wholly separate and disconnected from our culture and society. Friend, if you believe art is entertainment necessarily disconnected from reality, if you think artists aren’t culpable for what they say and how they say it, if you genuinely believe the subject of art, and the sort of art that we consume and enjoy as a culture is not central to our identity as a nation, you’re in the wrong business, for the wrong reasons. In a sense, in fact, you’ve abdicated the mandate of the writer: to say something that matters. No-one can compel you to be less wrong-headed, or to read a book that takes you beyond work that meets the taste of (that is, concernst he lives of) wealthy white men. That doesn’t mean you’re making a good choice, or that that choice doesn’t, in the aggregate, have repercussions.
The orienting figure of the -trauma- of black literature is still Ralph Ellison, and trauma being one of Kafka’s defining characteristics, especially in the sense you are using him, it would probably be him. There are few novels of any kind in the 20th century which are as powerful as his (nevermind the posthumous one–it wasn’t published for a reason), but also few novels which are as perfectly suited to their task–comprehending and playing out the rage, confusion, pain, hurt of existence, modern existence, and modern existence as a black man in America (it is this triple-dimension of pain which ultimately gives its treatment of what has been called the ‘black psyche’ a more potent depth than anything, say, Maya Angelou or Langston Hughes have risked). It also has a quality of inventiveness which Kafka, I suppose, would have admired immensely, and is perhaps in his vein, in its own way, though it is very acutely rooted in more American traditions. Most importantly of these, he wrote the only novel, black or otherwise, that capably confronts and harnesses the energies of jazz.
Among the poets, the ones which have done the most and I return to most profitably are Robert Hayden and Jay Wright. While I think Jay Wright achieves more as a poet than Hayden, Hayden, in this case, is much the more interested in confronting that same trauma, and conveys it painfully in his poetic sequences
He can read like a bruise.
Crucially, both of those poets (Jay Wright was an accomplished jazz musician) are deeply interested in the energies of jazz, and manage to transmute them into literature beyond the more shallow ‘rhythmic’ and cool-obsessed attempts of other poets.
I think that comments like this deliberately miss darby’s point, though. Having read through all of the thread, and having seen most everyone who talks to him get righteous (how many questions did darby ask, and how many got answered? how many people actually responded to points he had raised in a clear way? If you think there’s something wrong with what he’s saying, why is your first reaction to -shame- him?), I’m really unsure whether anyone has actually bothered to -read- what he is saying. His presentation of the ideas, and some of the ideas themselves, may seem questionable to me at times, but the recurring theme in almost all of his comments is actually a very earnest question that is at the center of the whole issue, and no one seems to want to acknowledge that, because he’s just ‘wrong-headed’, which is one of the nicer things to be implied about him, so far. If darby himself reads this and disagrees with it, I encourage him to correct me, but to my knowledge he’s breaching a point which nobody else in this thread has talked about: writing is a voluntary act. Beyond changing the world which fosters people, there is not ‘fix’ or ‘right-headed’ answer to this. He’s not saying he ‘loves’ the status quo, he’s saying he doesn’t know what the hell there is to do about it, beyond the major social issues that everybody already knows need deep, deep addressing and evolving. It’s all very fine and well for Roxane to write this, after all, very intelligent post, and to spark what has been, so far, a rather intelligent (if sporadic) discussion. It’s one thing to address this disparity in one particular aspect of life in America, ie publishing. But that’s what these posts are, when they happen–acknowledgments and ventings. This is not the first time the question has been raised, nor will it be the last, and no more specific, practical answers will come out of this post than any other, and the problems -will remain- ones which we are evolving out of, into solutions whose hands cannot be forced. There are currently a great plethora of ways minorities -are- being heard, like never before, and the fact that the system has, for various reasons that have been discussed, pushed them away from writing, is not something we can change for today. And what was that smug dig you put at him about only wanting to read works which meets the tastes of wealthy white men?
I’m not here trying to be darby’s white knight, and I’m not vouching for everything he’s ever said or thought. I’m just saying I don’t really like this rather vapid condescension which has been running through this thread toward people who express doubts about whether or not this is actually something we can -force- to be different. I don’t think (and if I’m wrong, please correct me) that darby has ever suggested that what we can do, we shouldn’t do–he’s not saying ‘leave it as is’, and to willfully misinterpret him as such is simply petty. And if, at the end of the day, you are genuinely convinced that darby believes bad things, or at least counterproductive ones, and that I’m the one who’s got him wrong, this thread was not a good example of how to have that kind of conversation.
That being said, I’m now bowing out of the darby issue as fast as I slipped into it. Good luck to him, and I apologize in advance if you feel this is unwarranted, Michael, as you have said many fine things that I respect.
I’ll only say this: just because minorities are being heard like never before doesn’t mean everything’s okay or that everything is good. So what if more minorities are being heard? That is not good enough. We shouldn’t have to be grateful that some progress has been made when there’s so much work left to be done. Until everyone is heard, this remains an issue and frankly, we’re talking about far more than simply “wanting to be heard.” Writing is a voluntary act. So is breathing. That doesn’t make it irrelevant or unimportant and some of us, myself included, make our living, in one way or another, from writing so there is quite a lot at stake when we talk about equality and access in publishing.
Nothing I just said contradicts any of that, and nothing I’ve said in the course of this thread has either. If you actually look at what points I was making, here and earlier, you’ll probably conclude I might well agree with all of those things already.
Thank you for forcing me into that box, though. I guess to defend a darby is to become a darby.
I’m not forcing you into any box at all. As I said below, I have very much appreciated your comments.
Publishing is DOMINATED by women. Mostly women agents who lunch with mostly women editors and who are publishing more first-time women novelists than men. You tell me I’m on crack for believing that, but here it is in PW:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/44510-where-the-boys-are-not.html
80% of the students in the publishing course at Columbia (there’s your class bias – stories about rich people – it’s Columbia) are women, and Columbia is where a large percentage of the editors and agents are coming from.
85% of the editors with less than three years experience are women (you see how these numbers match Columbia) – and these are the people who are going to be selecting first-time novelists.
Roxane, I see from your blog that you are working on a novel. If you don’t understand how unusual, how almost unheard of it is for a writer to get an agent when they don’t have a novel already written… When they don’t have an F-ing kick butt novel, usually their third or fourth serious shot at a novel… If you don’t think gender and color had more than a little to do with your getting an agent (when you don’t even have a finished novel???) then you are the one on crack.
And now that that’s out there, I’m really confused what you’re complaining about (I thought I knew, but now I’m puzzled). You are kind of living proof of what I’ve been saying, yet you tell me I’m on crack? How do you not see that as a writer with an agent but no novel you’ve got it better than 99.99% of the writers out there regardless of gender or color?
You don’t want to count the writers of color in BASS because they’re well-established, but just about everyone in BASS is well-established. There are generally very few writers in BASS who are new, and, likewise, very few writers who get published at the big houses who are first-time. Of these, more are women. Statistically, there are fewer women of color represented at the big houses. However, statistically, the chances of getting a first novel at a big house are better for women of color.
It’s the black men who are absent. If you subtract African and Caribbean men, there aren’t all that many black men writing today.
It’s the black men I’m not seeing. It’s the black men who are absent. Are there ANY agents or editors who are black men?
Coincidentally, my novel is about race. Of course it’s about more than that, but race is at the center of the book.
Then why did you say those things to me, at this time, and in this conversation? What about me, and this time, and that moment felt like a good idea? What were you actually responding to, and was it anything I actually said? Were you expressing the way you feel in a place where it has no context, and no power to effect anything? If you weren’t, what was its immediate concern, and what was it designed to effect?
You see, perhaps, why I wouldn’t like getting that in a reply which was, more than anything, addressing hyperbole in response to people who are thinking very hard about these things? Less tactful men than myself might conclude you thought I don’t like it when minorities breathe.
I was actually responding to the entire thread that started with darby who said, ” art is not important. its a tangential part of people’s lives that people should be allowed to control however they want, because there is no consequence. there is nothing at stake.” That feels like context to me.
So you’re saying that the context for that comment in response to me at a very particular moment in a particular stage of a conversation was ‘this is how I feel about all of it so far, here, you have it’?
Good night, dear. I look forward to having other conversations with you in other threads.
maybe this was at me then. first, breathing is not a voluntary act. its maybe the most involuntary act people do. second, i do think that the voluntary creation of art, and the voluntary act of reading, becomes problematic when claiming there are racial forces at work surrounding it. what drives a venue is the presence of an audience, or what an audience wants, and to say that an audience needs to want in a different or particular way is where i start to get antsy.
if there are racial issues keeping black writers out of publishing, who benefits? i dont see what the point would be. writing is voluntary, reading is voluntary, its all just trying to find an audience, if theres no audience there, its no one’s fault because you can expect anyone to want something. even if the wanters are racist and thats informing their decision, than that’s their racism, but the act of wanting a particular art is not the issue, and you cant start saying you’re supposed to want a certain kind of art. i dont think the issue resides in publishing is all im getting at, its a deeper, more global issue.
anyway, i dont think you want to have this conversation anymore. im trying to argue something rationally that you are arguing emotionally.
OK… Still trying to work this out.
You have said repeatedly that there’s discrimination in publishing. It’s your basic question here. And the tone of your post is…well…you are complaining.
You think I’m being insulting because I talked about you as a black woman…but that’s what your post was about? You made assertions that just aren’t true, and my pointing that out makes me rude? You don’t think your own experiences are relative to what you are talking about, and I’m rude?
Do you seriously honestly believe your agent didn’t know who you were when your mugshot is pasted all over the Internet? You write about women, and you write about black women and that had nothing to do with it? And I’m just out of line for suggesting it actually helped?
Yes, writers do get agents with short story collections as long as they promise to write a novel.
More of them are women.
‘So what if more minorities are being heard? That is not good enough. We shouldn’t have to be grateful that some progress has been made when there’s so much work left to be done.’
See, this is fundamentally at odds with my thinking too. you are treating the world of art and literature as if it were a political platform. i dont think of it as that at all. art is not a political field where everyone gets their say and things are only right if there is diversity. there is no right or wrong. there is no mandate for what it ought to be. its an open thing with no walls that lets everyone in and out as they please, and the only thing keeping anyone there is what people like to read/watch, for whatever reasons. you can look at it and say what is happening there may be a reflection of something, and you might be right, but the art and literature and the mechanisms that bring them to light, i dont feel, are to blame.
If you start by looking at gender imbalances, that’ll make you sensitive to this kind of thing. They’re massive. Or look at awards, grants, etc…. “best of” lists…. It’s easy to not care, to think that it’s “not like grossly far off” until you start looking, then you notice it is, because the status quo is what you’ve been conditioned to, and seems normal until you question it. And it’s very easy to not care when it doesn’t affect you directly (or seems to not, until you realise it affects us all)
NLY, I’m done being prickly. I wasn’t trying to make a ‘dig’ on Darby, though in fact, I think his position is wrong, period. The reference to ‘wealthy white men’ was meant to reference the place this whole claim started: Roxane suggested the new BASS was pretty whitebread, and Darby said, well, that’s fine, that’s demographics (or something similar). I don’t mean that Darby doesn’t have broad tastes and love fiction that concerns marginalized people– clearly, on the evidence of the thread, and his position and its implications, it’s clear he spends a great deal of time seeking out and considering minority voices and their perspectives. You’re being a bit too generous when you try to create an intellectually defensible position here for him, but you’re right that your question is valid. Well, that is to say, it’s valid if you imagine you can isolate writing, a means of cultural production, expression, and definition, from culture itself. The problem is that art being ‘voluntary’, and reading being ‘voluntary’, does not diminish arts importance or its role. From my perspective, at least, to try to isolate writers, readers, and literary publishing in general, and say, ‘oh, it’s just this distinct thing that has to do with the imagination and what an audience wants, and people can want whatever they want,’ is a cop out. These activites and their effects are not discrete; they both reflect and influence one another; writers, and readers too for that matter, are culpable for their voluntary actions and the consequences of those actions. It is a free country, but that doesn’t mean all my options are equal. Along those lines, I don’t accept that nothing can be done to affect the status quo, and most especially, that literature is the wrong place to pay attention to representation (and the substance of that representation). Nobody is arguing that the concensus of an htmlgiant comment string is prescriptive– we should not in fact publicly burn Darby at the stake (I mean this tongue-in-cheek, of course:-), nor can readers (and writers, and editors) here go out and change the supposed taste of the public. More, the question of whether there’s a problem or not, the diagramming and consideration of the problem and the discourse that surrounds it, these things can be constructive– can even suggest approaches, actions, the beginnings of, if not remedy, at least reaction.
I’m talking first-time novelists, mainstream presses. More women than men. Better chance for women to get an agent, get the book in a book club selection, on a table at the bookstore. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not condescending. It happens to be the truth. It’s really hard for ANYONE to be a first-time author (again, i mean the big presses here – indie presses don’t count as far as that goes because of all the nepotism – so I’ve said it again, but seriously, networking is pretty much the way to get on them) look around. It’s been true for a while now.
Women of color: not as many out there right now- again, because there are so few first time novelists. but a better chance of getting that first time novel taken.
There were monumental changes. It happened fifteen or twenty years ago. Big media bought the publishers
Basically BASS is a ridiculous measure of writers of color. It’s 80% writers who’ve had major pubs for 20 years or more. It’s 50% NYer.
Roxane: the only reason you don’t already have an agent and a major deal, is that You don’t do dialogue. You won’t learn it overnight, but there you go.
In publishing, the discrimination is against anyone whose writing doesn’t sell. For first-time writers it’s against anyone whose writing they think won’t sell.
Of course the discrimination and racism in society is widespread and pervasive. That’s a bigger problem. Publishing doesn’t even really matter when ou look at the acism just about everywhere else.
Roxane: seriously. Publishers went lokk
Seriously, publishers actively sought out writers of color in the 1920s and they haven’t stopped looking.
I do have an agent John. I wasn’t writing this post because I’m not doing well. I have a diary for that sort of thing.
My only objection is to making of darby something more pernicious than he is, and my only assertion is that we probably shouldn’t. All the rest you spoke about aren’t things I’m sure either of us said, but am confident, at least, that I didn’t. In particular, the severance of culture and its products is not something I would attest to–and again I’m afraid I find it to be a simplification of what darby is saying. I’m afraid his position is defensible all without my help because it hinges on where the damage is being done, and how best to address that damage, not whether or not there is damage, and whether or not we should do anything. Somebody who is more skeptical or dubious in his personal response to those latter two points is well within reason, and doesn’t need my help.
Indeed not. Nor is anybody on this thread pro-cruelty, pro-mistreatment, pro-censorship, or, that I can see, knowingly pro-silence.
Nor is it ok for progress in addressing forced inequality to be smothered in the cant of grievance.
I think darby’s numbers, or sense of proportion, are wrong; particularly in questions of accumulation, black people – to take just one “minority” – in America are nowhere near ‘represented’ accurately with respect to numbers. One of the Founding-Father Unquestionable Verities is that ‘taxation without representation’ is unfair – to the point of violent redress. Well: 100 Senators – how many are black? [similar argument: women? (openly) gay? Latina/o? one of the multitude of ‘Asian’ categories? ( – surely, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, (now) increasingly Indian, and so on justifiably resent being clumped together – )] Is the meritlessocracy of the Senate not symptomatic of anything?
At the level or plane of celebrity, sure, there’s lots of black people giving entertainment jobs to other blacks; and on reading lists in high schools, there’s plenty of lip service to attending the points of view of black writers, characters, and students – and plenty of teachers who want fairness. But I don’t think, or see, that Their Eyes Were Watching God and Cane are quite, yet, canonically American. – and that’s, to me, not “fair”. – and each decade of book-buying (and therefore: publishing) reflects the previous three or four or six or eight decades of high-school reading lists, right??
But the arguments from fury – that jereme’s qualification of “race” is irrelevant and abusive of the opportunity for conversation; that darby’s refusal to agree (that publishing might be an institution, dollar-driven though it be, shaped by attitudes shot through political-economic society) is fucking moronic — these arguments are, to me, self-regardful expressions of smug, and self-defeating, triumph.
I agree with you Darby: art should be whatever art is. I don’t like when people get excessively quantitative about this stuff — if we were sitting around making sure the representation of various demographics matched up with the numbers of those demographics in the population as a whole, which some cultural critics seem to think might be a not-unreasonable approach, that would be a mistake. And to some extent it’s not even fair to pick on an individual book or collection — for instance I thought the stuff about We Are Champion was blown way out of proportion — although when you’re BASS and you claim to be representing the best and you are all about the white middle class, you’re opening yourself to that.
I would argue two points: 1) Writing explicitly about the white middle class and upper class all the time isn’t morally wrong, just boring.
2) The absence of anything but white middle class or upper class straight people in the majority of critically lauded publications is a heuristic. In other words, it’s not that it would be morally unacceptable to have art that only dealt with one race, class, etc. — morality doesn’t come into it for me at that level, mostly. What we know however is that there is interest in becoming a critically lauded writer from people who are not represented in those ranks as it stands. What we also know is that the structures surrounding art, which ARE political, are preventing this from happening at the rate it would likely happen absent any racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc.. The issue isn’t the numbers, it isn’t the politics of the art itself, so much as it’s what that indicates about what’s happening outside of or previous to the art. This is probably not how other posters feel here exactly but it is how I feel, and maybe it makes some sense to you? I used to have an outlook somewhat like yours before I worked this out.
‘where the damage is being done, and how best to address that damage, not whether or not there is damage, and whether or not we should do anything.’
exactly. my whole point in even entering this conversation has nothing to do with a belief that a problem doesnt exist. i dont not believe that a problem exists, im not thinking that way, im not accepting the status-quo, etc. im trying to figure out what the status is first. im still trying to pinpoint where it is, if its there, by asking questions.
that darby’s refusal to agree (that publishing might be an institution, dollar-driven though it be, shaped by attitudes shot through political-economic society) is fucking moronic
why?
i never refused to agree that it might be. im perfectly capable of agreeing that it is. im more or less saying here are some questions and let’s talk about it without dismissing what im saying and calling me a fucking moron. why is it so offensive that i ask these questions, that i play devils advocate? why is it not a fair argument to suggest that the institution of art is not like other institutions? and if its not a fair argument, argue it with me, but im getting tired of just getting handed insult after insult for even asking.
yes, okay. #1 I agree, and i dont think i’ve stated the opposite here. ‘Boring’ is a subjective claim and anyone can find anything boring. I’m not arguing that the best is the “best.”
#2.. What we also know is that the structures surrounding art, which ARE political, are preventing this from happening at the rate it would likely happen absent any racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc..
How do we know this? Do you mean educational institutions here, or like the media? I’ll agree with those. I guess I have been approaching this discussion from the point of view of like literary fiction, not mass-market. the entities that are determining what literary fiction (and I would say the visual artworld also) comes to light, i have a harder time believing there is discriminatory corruption going on there, because it doesnt make enough money for anyone to care. I see BASS in this light, no writers are getting paid heavily for this stuff, there is no greed factor. I dont see enough reason for racism.
(kind of surreal, i know, talking here and your abjective piece went live today, awesome work. i’ll plug it here now… http://www.abjective.net/108.html
The issue isn’t the numbers, it isn’t the politics of the art itself, so much as it’s what that indicates about what’s happening outside of or previous to the art.
This I don’t not agree it. ;) i dont feel like pressure should be on art, or even on what put art somewhere, it should be elsewhere, and we can look to art as being representative of whats happening in the broader culture, but art itself can’t be blamed. and mostly, i dont even think it should be used as like an indicator, i feel like it should remain as apolitical as possible.
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I’ll agree with those. I guess I have been approaching this discussion from the point of view of like literary fiction, not mass-market. the entities that are determining what literary fiction (and I would say the visual artworld also) comes to light, i have a harder time believing there is discriminatory corruption going on there, because it doesnt make enough money for anyone to care.
thinking more about this, this may be an element of potential corruption, if we are saying educational institutions have a tendency to let in upper class white students over minorities, and they are the ones primarily reading for journals that are tied to colleges, and then they all have tendencies to take non-minority fiction/poetry, then okay, there’s some skewage. that seems like a stretch though. do we think that kind of thing is happening? regardless, the problem still lies outside the art and the venue itself and has more to do with why the school population is skewed against minorities.
Okay, I haven’t agreed with everything you’ve said in this thread but that’s fine, of course, and I find what you’re saying here, very reasonable. (And thanks for the plug!) You know I love you because I tell you slightly to moderately too often.
The racism I’m suggesting is at play here isn’t, like, Richard Russo not liking black people or whatever. I’ve actually met Richard Russo and talked with him a little while and he seemed like a genuinely nice, charming, intelligent person. The racism that I think leads to this situation is the racism that keeps black students out of college, that keeps them from graduating, that alienates them from reading and writing literary fiction. I’ve got a lot of fairly specific ideas about this but for now I’d like to just generally state that clearly their are inequities in our education system, which also disfavor white students of the lower classes, and etc.
In my experience, editors aren’t publishing writers of color mainly because they aren’t getting submissions from those writers. They aren’t getting submissions because they aren’t publishing these writers. This was previously a result of overt racism and now it’s more a result of subtler things, which I still would call racism, and which you may think of by another name. But it’s not a good thing.
So for instance I try to solicit diverse writers not because I think I am morally required to achieve certain ratios or numbers but to attempt to counteract these structural things and so maybe dissolve them. Ultimately I publish who I want to publish given the submissions I get. And this is a blunt instrument, and the real solution is to reform our political institutions such that material inequities, which are far more important than literary ones, will be solved, and then the art can be what the art wants to be.
Anyway I don’t want to grind you down or get the last word or anything, I just want to offer you some genuine conversation in place of what I think has been outrage disproportionate to your comments.
And now I see that you predicted part of my response while I was writing it, so, yes: that’s something like what I would say about how it happens. Nobody in lit mags that I know of is intentionally excluding anybody, but white people tend to like to read white literature, and so teach it, and publish it, and this leads white people to believe they like reading, and other people to believe that they don’t, and so the reading and writing and publishing are whiter, and so on. And we have to remember that the major institutions that command power in the academy and in mainstream publishing were, very VERY recently, actually overtly racist, in a real way.
okay, right. do you mean “until” very VERY recently? The academy and mainstream publishing, sure. i can agree with all this. ive not spent any time in academia so im ignorant of all this, but what you say makes sense here. i think thats interesting, that its almost the teachers you’re pinpointing as the root.
but teachers and students and everyone, so they are white, are they supposed to change what they like? you cant blame them for liking what they like, for being who they know to be. you sort of need more minority teachers, i guess.
Publishing is DOMINATED by women. Mostly women agents who lunch with mostly women editors and who are publishing more first-time women novelists than men. You tell me I’m on crack for believing that, but here it is in PW:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/44510-where-the-boys-are-not.html
80% of the students in the publishing course at Columbia (there’s your class bias – stories about rich people – it’s Columbia) are women, and Columbia is where a large percentage of the editors and agents are coming from.
85% of the editors with less than three years experience are women (you see how these numbers match Columbia) – and these are the people who are going to be selecting first-time novelists.
Roxane, I see from your blog that you are working on a novel. If you don’t understand how unusual, how almost unheard of it is for a writer to get an agent when they don’t have a novel already written… When they don’t have an F-ing kick butt novel, usually their third or fourth serious shot at a novel… If you don’t think gender and color had more than a little to do with your getting an agent (when you don’t even have a finished novel???) then you are the one on crack.
And now that that’s out there, I’m really confused what you’re complaining about (I thought I knew, but now I’m puzzled). You are kind of living proof of what I’ve been saying, yet you tell me I’m on crack? How do you not see that as a writer with an agent but no novel you’ve got it better than 99.99% of the writers out there regardless of gender or color?
You don’t want to count the writers of color in BASS because they’re well-established, but just about everyone in BASS is well-established. There are generally very few writers in BASS who are new, and, likewise, very few writers who get published at the big houses who are first-time. Of these, more are women. Statistically, there are fewer women of color represented at the big houses. However, statistically, the chances of getting a first novel at a big house are better for women of color.
It’s the black men who are absent. If you subtract African and Caribbean men, there aren’t all that many black men writing today.
It’s the black men I’m not seeing. It’s the black men who are absent. Are there ANY agents or editors who are black men?
Coincidentally, my novel is about race. Of course it’s about more than that, but race is at the center of the book.
John, my gender and race had nothing to do with my getting an agent. My agent had no idea I was black. I got an agent with a short story collection. It happens. If you would like to be so insulting as to suggest something so… [insert whatever here], that’s fine. I stand by what I wrote. I believe what I believe. I’m going to bow out now because I just want to say angry things and that’s pointless. We disagree, that’s fine, too. I appreciate your participating in the conversation. I’d also like to add that I am not complaining. I am raising a concern and furthermore I don’t talk about my writing career in this post once nor do I allude to feeling discriminated against. You are the one making those unfounded conclusions.
OK… Still trying to work this out.
You have said repeatedly that there’s discrimination in publishing. It’s your basic question here. And the tone of your post is…well…you are complaining.
You think I’m being insulting because I talked about you as a black woman…but that’s what your post was about? You made assertions that just aren’t true, and my pointing that out makes me rude? You don’t think your own experiences are relative to what you are talking about, and I’m rude?
Do you seriously honestly believe your agent didn’t know who you were when your mugshot is pasted all over the Internet? You write about women, and you write about black women and that had nothing to do with it? And I’m just out of line for suggesting it actually helped?
Yes, writers do get agents with short story collections as long as they promise to write a novel.
More of them are women.
Oh fellows let it go and watch the Barry Hannah webcast already.
This is interesting and sort of related to this discussion: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129324346&sc=tw
The bulk of my comment was about race on the internet, I wasn’t trying to smear HTMLgiant. I don’t think race is easily discussed here or anywhere else online unless it’s hard-fought. Posts on race too often go the way of the trolls. It’s endemic.
The comment system here makes it impossible to tell how the comments were playing out in real time at the moment I posted. I can say that at the time Roxane was being derailed, and to me it felt like an attack. M.Kitchell posted about how he felt the conversation was skewered almost simultaneously with me. After we spoke up it moderated, but I think that was only because we were so noisy.
I try to be as subjective as possible, which is hubristic. I said fuck jereme, but I like jereme and I know he can handle it. I said fuck darby, and I mostly stand by it, partly because I don’t believe darby. Let’s not talk about darby because I don’t want one person’s fascination with their ignorance to be the center of the debate. I shouldn’t have come at Russo, and I looked stupid doing it. In my defense, it was three in the morning where I was, and I was about six beers and two glasses of wine into it.
About the Hennessy thing, I wasn’t blaming you. I tend to see windmills and tilt accordingly. Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Your parody was pretty lame: you missed the cadence of his speech and relegated him to a stereotype. I don’t think it was coming from a bad place, I think you missed the point that he was being silly, and mostly that he was being himself. The Pimp C comments, though?
No mea culpa for fighting dirty. If there is no moral center to art, than there should be no moral center to debate either. Debate is the rehearsal for action, I just hope my side fights dirtiest when that happens.
Roxane, I’m Irish. A couple of weeks ago, I visited the States and bought BASS 2010 in a West Village bookshop in New York. I was really looking forward to reading it and to seeing the editor’s choices. I wanted to be introduced to the ‘best’ American short story writers and I was hoping to fall in love with some of the pieces.
American creative writing culture is very different to the culture in Ireland and is not something I fully understand and is definitely not something I feel I can comment on with any authority. I can only give my own reaction to BASS 2010, now that I’ve finished it, and my reaction is profound disappointment. I found the writing in BASS excellent and the stories were uniformly great. But that was my problem. The uniformity.
Russo, in his introduction, writes of the stories, ‘I am pleased to report that there are no triumphs of style over substance, and the language, while often beautiful and absolutely electric, is always in the service of narrative.’ Maybe it’s just me showing my Modernist loyalties, but what is so wrong with prose that’s full-on adorned? Why no fragmentation, why no clamour, no heat, no noise, no inconsistencies of written thought in these stories? Why not style over substance? Why is that necessarily a bad thing?
Please don’t get me wrong: I was totally impressed by the skill of the featured writers. But overall, the BASS 2010 selection, for me, didn’t seem to question enough or churn things up enough. None of the stories made me fall head over heels in love the way I wanted to (though some, including Evans’s, came close), and I think the fault lies with the editor. I mean, I’m never going to find a writer like Jennifer Egan boring. It’s just that beside the Jennifer Egan story I want to read a completely different story: different style, different voice, different preoccupations.
No, for me, this selection was too mannered, too well-behaved, too, dare I say it, prissy. I’m not saying I want to see more experimentalism just for the sake of it. I just want to see some range. A little more range would have meant that each story in an anthology could stand out, be taken on its own terms. I know there is amazing, interesting, diverse American short fiction out there. And I know I will not find it in a ‘best of’ like this.
The editor of a large commercial publishing house once told me that readers like to read about characters like themselves, so a commercial novel generally has a middle class protagonist. I never quite bought it, but anyway, most readers are not rich white males. Maybe with literary fiction, as opposed to commercial fiction, editors choose to suit themselves more than to please readers.
If you’re playing devil’s advocate, Darby, you can’t whine about being treated like a devil!
Let me just add, that when you’ve written about this at other times and other ways, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Underrepresented in lit journals: absolutely.
Underrepresented in MFA programs: maybe but probably in numbers similar to elsewhere in higher ed. but not as bad as some disciplines, and numbers are probably better at top-tier writing programs.
Underrepresented in BASS: just doesn’t seem the right way to approach the issue. Series editor selects from a very small number of well-established mags. “Best” is a marketing strategy. A trademark.
Underrepresented in indie publishing: yes.
Underrepresented at big houses: overall, yes, but not new authors.
Do editors agents and educators at all levels actively seek out writers of color: absolutely.
Not adding anything substantial here, but…
“darby asks (I think), ‘what’s the evidence that black people are so underrepresented in publishing? what is institutional racism?’, gets sidetracked on what she or he “should” be aware of, and, instead of being pointed towards 100 Senators, or America’s penal population, she or he gets you’re such a fucking moron I can’t even talk the fuck to you.”
This right here.
“[…] nothing, no fucking thing, on foxgoebbels or in the wall street pravda, none of the ‘conservative’ cruelty or lies or hatred for life, has done or will do as much damage to political progress than grievance fanaticism in identity politics
no?]”
This too.
He wasn’t calling you “fucking moronic,” he was pointing out that that has been the attitude toward you because you raised questions instead of joining the choir.
I believe deadgod “has your back” so to speak.
Indeed, he does.
Given NLY and deadgod’s objections, I went back and read all the way through all the strings of comments. And I think that the real problem here is exemplified by the heat and rancor of reaction– and yes, I’m guilty as charged. It’s hard to have a meaningful discussion about race and ___________– you name it, this is America in 2010, and if there’s one thing that’s true, it’s that we still don’t know how to talk about race. And if you’re having such a discussion with writers of color who are directly affected by the situation, well, you can expect temperatures to rise because, well, this situation affects us, it concerns us, and while I won’t go so far as to say it ‘afflicts’ us, it’s probably also necessary to understand that there are stakes. Given that situation, I’d tend to say this: Darby, you didn’t exactly respond clearly or state clearly what it was you were trying to say, or what you meant, or in what spirit you meant your ‘questions.’ I think you were misconstrued at points here– but given that a moment ago you failed to understand that deadgod was defending you, you’ll have to forgive that some of your more ambiguous statements and ‘questions’ were pretty easy to misunderstand. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for being part of piling it on you. Here’s my calmer take on race and literary publishing in 2010: http://lunaparkreview.com/questions-of-authenticity/
oh you’re right, i misread deadgod’s thing. sorry.
Your comments off an interesting perspective that I hadn’t previously considered. My problems with this year’s anthology are that we have 4 stories from Tin House (which I subscribe to) and 2 from McSweeney’s 42 (which I bought cause a friend had a story in there) so I’d already read 6 of them by the time the amazon package containing the book arrived in my mailbox. Then you have 2 from the New Yorker and 3 from the Atlantic? Do you mean to tell me that all the stories out there in all the other literary magazines didn’t measure up? In addition to other gender or racial perspectives, I’d like to see them branch out and give some other journals a shot. I’ve always thought BASS was kind of like the Academy Awards in the sense that it’s not really celebrating the best of what’s out there, but recognizing the best of already established name brands.
The short story, I find, is also a difficult American medium to assess. There are probably more short stories written in America than in any other country. Whether or not this is merely a quantity, or a quantity of quality, I cannot pretend to know, but I think this quantity functions with the fact the the medium never really developed an effective way of claiming visibility to ensure that, even more than American poetry, it is scattered and difficult to comprehend. The ultimate charge I have for BASS, more so than their Poetry series, is laziness. I think, in many ways, the appropriate for describing the way it fails to due justice to a wide variety of peoples is just that–laziness. I think that’s probably one of the most important themes running through this discussion, that the status quo perpetuates itself most disturbingly through the laziness of good people, these days, rather than the maliciousness of ‘bad’ ones, and that the most important thing editors and writers can do is -work harder-.
Just to be clear, I meant “so many examples of where that’s NOT true” and in my last sentence I’m suggesting that canonization (in its many forms) has excluded a lot of novels that just aren’t read anymore, so you and I, in finding examples to demonstrate a bias toward “upper class” or “not upper class” novels pre-1950 are restricted to what has survived, when we know that many genres (like the passing novel, or detective novels) aren’t about the upper class aren’t as well read, that the process of canonization may be responsible for giving the impression that “most novels written before 1950 were about upper class life and problems.”
Just to be clear, I meant “so many examples of where that’s NOT true” and in my last sentence I’m suggesting that canonization (in its many forms) has excluded a lot of novels that just aren’t read anymore, so you and I, in finding examples to demonstrate a bias toward “upper class” or “not upper class” novels pre-1950 are restricted to what has survived, when we know that many genres (like the passing novel, or detective novels) aren’t about the upper class aren’t as well read, that the process of canonization may be responsible for giving the impression that “most novels written before 1950 were about upper class life and problems.”
And that story is, I believe, a repurposed outtake from Straight Man.
I was thinking about this too, and how it’s possible to answer without dealing with the idea of “inauthenticity” or whatever, and then I started to consider my own work: when there are characters I never describe them (at least as I generally write in the first person position, I almost never reveal anything about who is “speaking”). however, because i am writing people i have to assume that my characters are, of course, an abstracted consideration of myself; being, of course, a lower-middle class fag. i think the fact that i don’t make it a point to establish the character as anything that specific (i mean, i often even try to keep my first person narrator mostly absent), there’s no persona for the “character” to fill other than my own.
& i think, specifically, at least in most of what i read, there are similarities. characters are rarely depicted as black or white or _______, but the fact that these are ostensibly empty characters is subconsciously filled in by the fact that the author is generally white, often at least somewhat privileged.
so, i wonder if it’s more an active resistance to trying than an active consideration that they won’t get it right? i don’t know, i thought i had something here but i think i lost it.
This is certainly not a uniquely modern conundrum. La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Madame Bovary, Emma, most novels written before 1950 were about upper class life and problems (okay, that’s a bold claim, but perhaps not unwarranted). Dickens aside, of course.
Writing is an innately elite endeavor.
I’m not sure it’s warranted – you can clearly see that some novels pre 1950 were about upper class life and problems, but there are so many examples of where that’s true, I’m not sure you could safely say “most” (Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Melville, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein, Camus, Genet, just off the top of my head, all writing before 1950.) Also, we’re both restricted, somewhat, by pre 1950 novels that survive, meaning those that have been canonized, which excludes all but a few examples of entire genres – passing novels, for example, or detective novels, but many others as well.
Just to be clear, I meant “so many examples of where that’s NOT true” and in my last sentence I’m suggesting that canonization (in its many forms) has excluded a lot of novels that just aren’t read anymore, so you and I, in finding examples to demonstrate a bias toward “upper class” or “not upper class” novels pre-1950 are restricted to what has survived, when we know that many genres (like the passing novel, or detective novels) aren’t about the upper class aren’t as well read, that the process of canonization may be responsible for giving the impression that “most novels written before 1950 were about upper class life and problems.”
I was thinking about this too, and how it’s possible to answer without dealing with the idea of “inauthenticity” or whatever, and then I started to consider my own work: when there are characters I never describe them (at least as I generally write in the first person position, I almost never reveal anything about who is “speaking”). however, because i am writing people i have to assume that my characters are, of course, an abstracted consideration of myself; being, of course, a lower-middle class fag. i think the fact that i don’t make it a point to establish the character as anything that specific (i mean, i often even try to keep my first person narrator mostly absent), there’s no persona for the “character” to fill other than my own.
& i think, specifically, at least in most of what i read, there are similarities. characters are rarely depicted as black or white or _______, but the fact that these are ostensibly empty characters is subconsciously filled in by the fact that the author is generally white, often at least somewhat privileged.
so, i wonder if it’s more an active resistance to trying than an active consideration that they won’t get it right? i don’t know, i thought i had something here but i think i lost it.
Thank you so much Roxane, this is a great post and a really interesting read for aspiring black writers like me. You inspired me to continue the conversation on my blog, too… I love stories by black writers like ZZ Packer and Edward P. Jones, whose characters, as you said about Evans’, are simply allowed to be people. I believe they can speak to readers universally, but as you’ve pointed out, stories focused on people of color don’t seem to be often counted in lists among those that are universally “best.” Thanks for the recommendation on Danielle Evans — she sounds right up my alley, and I’ll have to check her out. I’d hate to add to her being overlooked.
I struggle with how to identify myself as a writer — as a young black queer writer I’d love to appeal to others like me, but my words are for everyone, not meant to be dismissed as intended for young folks or people of color only. I’d love to propel this conversation to try to break down the myths that put us in boxes and try to keep us there.
I would love to read a story about rich white people written by a black writer.
sherman alexie writes ‘white people’ especially viciously. vaguely related: http://www.albany.edu/history/HIS530/HarlemProject/Images/Hughes/Ways_of_white_folks_cover.jpg
Thank you so much Roxane, this is a great post and a really interesting read for aspiring black writers like me. You inspired me to continue the conversation on my blog, too… I love stories by black writers like ZZ Packer and Edward P. Jones, whose characters, as you said about Evans’, are simply allowed to be people. I believe they can speak to readers universally, but as you’ve pointed out, stories focused on people of color don’t seem to be often counted in lists among those that are universally “best.” Thanks for the recommendation on Danielle Evans — she sounds right up my alley, and I’ll have to check her out. I’d hate to add to her being overlooked.
I struggle with how to identify myself as a writer — as a young black queer writer I’d love to appeal to others like me, but my words are for everyone, not meant to be dismissed as intended for young folks or people of color only. I’d love to propel this conversation to try to break down the myths that put us in boxes and try to keep us there.
Maybe what you mean is that publishing has historically been for the elite, but writing is certainly not limited to the upper class. That’s the problem that’s happening here — there are plenty more voices than those telling stories, they’re just not being heard. Like C. Mittens pointed out, it’s the process of canonization and the bias toward certain work that would make it seem as if other folks aren’t writing, but that’s simply not true at all. It’s just that not everybody has the same opportunities for publishing, clearly, and once published, work is distributed and preserved differently, too.
You’re right in the fact that there’s been a drop off of working class stories over the last decade (or at least it seems so from my reading habits which may be the problem here), but you can’t blame everything on the MFA (which seems to be the impulse most of the time here on the internets). Most MFA programs are funded. There are working class students getting an MFA. Trust me.
Yes, I’m with you that it’s missing the point in regard to Roxane’s original post. But I was responding to that particular comment asking whether there are not as many people of color submitting. I was just throwing out my own experience, basically saying that I don’t know the answer but suggesting that maybe the screening of submissions is not where the racism (if we’re agreed that there is racism; I’m not going to jump into that particular argument in this comment) is occurring, that it is, in fact, exactly where you suggest, which is in the reading of the content and it having some effect on editors/reviewers/me either because it deals with rich white people issues or whatever. So I’m totally with you on the points you make right here, and I want to make sure that we’re not misunderstood. Sorry if this sounds defensive, I just feel like you were calling out my comment but what I was trying to say in my comment is pretty much what I understand you to mean here, right? I just didn’t elaborate as far as you did and point it out as directly. Right job. So we’re cool?
re: white writers writing about black characters and black writers writing about white characters – http://welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/2010/03/guest-blog-post-by-trisha-r-thomas.html
[…] in my desires for WorldView Booksellers store and blog, was Roxanne Gay’s December 3rd essay, A Profound Sense of Absence posted at HTMLGIANT. While it will receive more commentary here at a later date, below is a sense […]
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what ‘should’ the breakdown of my reading be?
if 12% of americans are black, then should my reading list reflect that 12%?
(not counting my other reading list for books by authors from other countries both in english and in translation)
Why 5? “Can you name 5 authors who are black, asian, latino, etc”?
If I play video games should I make sure that they are not all designed by (Asian) men? (that was based on a stereotype. i have no idea who designs video games…)
If I am a vegetarian and try to eat locally, but my all canvas shoes were made with local materials in China then what am I?
Segregation and racism are bad for people’s lives, but is published literature (indie and mainstream) the best place to wage that battle? And best for whom? for the consumer? for the minority/class/gender/etc groups excluded?
Drawing racial lines in a literary culture that seems aware of its disproportionate whiteness and class privilege seems unnecessary for the purposes of enjoying or learning from literature and of ‘the Movement. ‘
what is indie literature and why is it so white?
Danielle Evans was in my (very diverse) MFA class at Iowa. So was Nam Le. Yiyun Li and V.V. Ganeshananthan were in the year ahead of me. Those are just a few of the amazing writers of color in the group that I was lucky enough to work with. The director of the program, Lan Samantha Chang, is of course a female writer of color. And my thesis adviser was James Alan McPherson, one of the first African-American Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. Among the white members of my Iowa class were two Iraq War veterans and one refugee who had served as a soldier in, of all things, the North Korean Army.
I myself come from a lower-middle-class background, and from the south. Like all Iowa MFA students, I had full tuition support and a teaching stipend the whole time I was there.
I get sick of the lazy cheap-shots at MFA programs. The best of these programs, like Iowa and Irvine and Michener, don’t deny access to writers from various walks of life; they CREATE access for talented writers who don’t happen to be rich or from New York. Some programs, like NYU’s and Columbia’s, are indeed limited to the very rich (along with a few scholarship students), but that hardly means the whole MFA enterprise is geared towards celebrating and creating blandly white New Yorker stories.
And you guys are right: Danielle’s book is amazing.
Danielle Evans was in my (very diverse) MFA class at Iowa. So was Nam Le. Yiyun Li and V.V. Ganeshananthan were in the year ahead of me. Those are just a few of the amazing writers of color in the group that I was lucky enough to work with. The director of the program, Lan Samantha Chang, is of course a female writer of color. And my thesis adviser was James Alan McPherson, one of the first African-American Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. Among the white members of my Iowa class were two Iraq War veterans and one refugee who had served as a soldier in, of all things, the North Korean Army.
I myself come from a lower-middle-class background, and from the south. Like all Iowa MFA students, I had full tuition support and a teaching stipend the whole time I was there.
I get sick of the lazy cheap-shots at MFA programs. The best of these programs, like Iowa and Irvine and Michener, don’t deny access to writers from various walks of life; they CREATE access for talented writers who don’t happen to be rich or from New York. Some programs, like NYU’s and Columbia’s, are indeed limited to the very rich (along with a few scholarship students), but that hardly means the whole MFA enterprise is geared towards celebrating and creating blandly white New Yorker stories.
And you guys are right: Danielle’s book is amazing.
Result of writing in haste: the North Korean vet was/is (obviously!) not white. (Nervous laugh.)
You may be right about Iowa’s diversity in the student class, but I find it interesting that, in your complaint against MFA cheapshots, you then turn around and cheapshot programs like NYU’s and Columbia’s?
Also, is that New Yorker, as in people who live in New York, or New Yorker, as in “The New Yorker, yes, The New Yorker?”
[…] a Roxane Gay groupie. So speaking of excellent work I read recently, check out Roxane’s essay on inequalities in publishing here and her ever-fine follow-up here. Thank you for raising your […]
Yeah, just try getting poetry or fiction published by an independent literary press into an institutional org database or reviewed. They’re all pontificating about nicely-dead (safe now) Walt Whitman and the like while kicking potential new Whitmans to the curb. I’m an editor at Fearless Books in Berkeley and have been writing for twenty-five years. Won awards. Been published, but not the way I could have been –poverty has held me down. I feel silenced. It doesn’t help to be Jewish or a woman when you’re poor, as this doesn’t fit the nasty stereotype. How about judging writing on merit?
[…] wrote this post about Best American Short Stories 2010 then followed it up with another, and then a million people […]
[…] Roxane Gay writes about the lack of diversity in the new Best American Short Stories collection. 207 comments as of this post. I’m a very […]
thanks for this, a very necessary reminder
thanks for this post Roxane, a very necessary reminder. Don’t even waste time replying to people that say race doesn’t exist, it’s like the holocaust never happened
Thanks Roxane, for pointing me in the direction of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans and Tayari Jones’s blog. As a once-upon-a-time American lit major from the Netherlands I recognize your point and was wondering where to begin an exciting discovery of compelling writers dealing with subjects other than the once you describe. If you have any other recommendations, I’d love to hear about them!
Why don’t you do your own fucking research? Nobody owes you shit.
Mike, it’s not just the South.
Won’t let me paste the link. Check out Jonathan Kozol’s 2005 Harper’s article, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid.”. It’s on the web at Mindfully.org. Google will find it.
I often teach this article in first-year composition classes. Generally, only one student will know what apartheid is. No one else will bother to look it up.
I also taught in MS, not the Delta. My frustration was with the ways the administration and many of the teachers accepted the situation seemingly without question.
Part of what you speak to is a rural problem. White rural America is in trouble too.
I had a whole response to Whitey Pretend O’Pression, but I’ve decided to refuse to be derailed except to say: I am sorry my people are so frenzied in their rejection of reality. I wanted to list a few truly wonderful Indy writers of color you might want to look up:
Alice Solas Kim
Bryan Thao Worra
Craig Gidney
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Ted Chiang
Diane Glancy
Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay
Many of these folks publish speculative fiction and are often overlooked by the literary establishment, and many of them are just starting out/with very small publishers.
[…] A Profound Sense of Absence […]
Well, it’s hard to explain why published literature is the best place to wage that battle if you can’t step outside of your particular experience and imagine what it would be like to grow up with the majority of stories, movies, myths, and heroes being someone other than YOU. If you can’t imagine what it’s like to NOT see your face or culture represented in the “classics” or “canon” then you lack empathy. Roxane’s argument is straightforward and logical. And if the literary culture seems aware of its whiteness and class privilege why does it continue to flourish?
[…] Gay muses on The Best American Stories 2010 and reflects on the lack of diversity in its […]
[…] just one very tiny, but very telling example: as Roxane Gay says in her now very widely circulated screed about this very topic in HTMLGiant, What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about […]
[…] just one very tiny, but very telling example: as Roxane Gay says in her now very widely circulated screed about this very topic in HTMLGiant, What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about […]
Jereme I LOVED your comments. Very on point
[…] I have anything really intelligent to add to what Roxane Gay is talking about over at HTMLGiant, here and here. Which is: the scales of literary publishing are weighted against people of color, […]
[…] year’s Best American Short Stories is a compilation of rich, white people and their problems http://htmlgiant.com/random/a-profound-sense-of-absence. Her comments have caused quite a stir and her responses are hilarious (Roxane […]
Lots to think about here. Thanks for opening a discussion, Roxane. The fact that it has become heated simply shows that this is an issue worth caring about.
As a YA author, I’m trying to think through how these issues play out in my market. My post on the topic (inspired by “A Profound Sense of Absence” will be on my blog page Wednesday.
http://www.ashleyperez.com/blog
All thoughtful, respectful readers are welcome!
[…] important dead white guys that I haven’t read yet?’ (see Roxane Gay’s rexcellent privileged white male post as well as Alan Stewart Carl’s response as a privileged white male for some tangential […]
[…] reading Roxane Gay’s recent posts this week on HTML Giant about race and the publishing industry. The first describes the “profound sense of absence” she felt when reading this year’s Best American […]
[…] few months ago, partly inspired by Roxane Gay’s excellent post in HTMLGIANT, I wrote about class and race and writing […]
[…] important dead white guys that I haven’t read yet?’ (see Roxane Gay’s rexcellent privileged white male post as well as Alan Stewart Carl’s response as a privileged white male for some tangential […]
[…] I don’t delve into with enough complexity, but it’s still important to say that—it was called “A Profound Sense of Absence”—I think it’s important to acknowledge that there was, especially in that year’s issue, a […]
[…] first piece of writing I read by Roxane was her essay “A Profound Sense of Absence” in which she offers a thoughtful critique of the 2010 Best American Short Stories for its lack of […]
[…] on talented writers, mused on writing a novel, accepted writing as a political act, considered diversity in the Best American series, and on and on. I have so many opinions and I will forever be grateful […]
[…] Roxane Gay writes about the lack of diversity in the new Best American Short Stories collection. 207 comments as of this post. I’m a very […]
[…] look into publishing practices and their effects on literary representation, via Arifa Akbar and Roxane Gay, examining the ways they influence how and what students read, which in turn also influences how […]