Let’s unpack this destructive racist nonsense from the perspective of a publishing professional. I probably look at 50 books for every book I buy, if I’m lucky. As a result, I don’t give feedback for most rejections. So why write these things? Why take the time to be racist?
When I give feedback, it’s usually because I see some potential in the author, and want to help them improve. There’s no way for an author to improve based on this feedback, though.
Very occasionally, I give a rejection that tries to correct something I found offensive in a submission. For example, I’ve sent rejections trying to explain how a work struck me as appropriative. Try to fix the problem habit.
The editors who wrote these responses were trying to fix the problem of black authors writing well.
Let’s go statement by statement. 1. is a weapon against the financial success of all black authors. 2. is a weapon against the individual authors’ spirits. I’m going to start with 2. Because it’s also so fucking obviously racist that I think it’ll be easier.
“I’m not convinced that Africans would use such complicated English terms” is just fucking racist, y’all. You know we’ve forcefully exported English to every country in the world? You know, all throughout Africa, English is being taught in schools, to thinking people?
This comes from an editor who wishes the grinding boot of colonialism had successfully driven the spirit out of colonized people all over the world. How dare this author use the colonizer’s language better than all the drab white authors the editor loves?
The fix is to try to convince the author that they do not deserve to use the riches of the language. And I’m worried that sometimes it works, and shuts the door to an author who could have set the world on fire.
To deprogram this attitude, read THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS by Kai Ashante Wilson. I’ve never read a white author who makes better use of a five-dollar word than Kai does. (Shilling my own books to justify writing this using company time.)
Now, let's talk about 1. "I like the writing, but we already have a black author." Welcome to systemic racism.
The inverse of this statement is something I think to myself often. "I like this writing okay, but we already have SO MANY WHITE PEOPLE."
Consider this statement instead: "I like the writing, but we already have an author."
"We have one author, we don't need another," is the opposite of how publishing works. The market's interest is lightning. One bestseller can feed a company and transform an editor's career. But you don't know when or where lightning will strike.
HOWEVER, you can make conditions favorable for lightning to strike. Books are your lightning rods. Without them, you can’t catch lightning. So you buy a bunch of them, and you try to put them up on hills.
Buying books by one black author, and then never any more, is building one bent lightning rod at the bottom of a valley. It’s doing it to say you’ve done it, without the risk of black authors succeeding, communally OR individually.
Because the chance of one author succeeding is low! That’s the hard truth of the industry: most books don’t get read by very many people. And when you put out 50 books a year, and one of them is by your one black author...
It’s easy to say, “yeah, we tried it, but no one buys books by black people.”
If the push for diversity was ACTUALLY about ticking off boxes, one for each kind of marginalized person, its function would be to placate marginalized authors and insure that those groups will not succeed. That would be, ahem, "v*rtue signalling".
When instead, you look at YA where there’s a push for LOTS of books by authors of color, and they’re all over the bestseller lists. BECAUSE PEOPLE OF COLOR WRITE INCREDIBLE FICTION! THAT PEOPLE WANT TO BUY!
I guess white people do too, if you put a gun to my head, but I’m so bored of all the same stories, and plenty of the market is too. And that’s just my WHITE opinion. The hunger for representative fiction from our marginalized readers is overwhelming.
(if you're one of my white authors, i promise i still love you, you're perfect you're incredible, please take a seat on this bench for a bit)
"We already have one black author" is an opinion that hates black people AND money. And when you're convincing capitalists to think something, you sadly have to point to profit. You can't change company minds by telling them it's unjust not to publish black people.
Because if you do that, you'll buy one book by a black author, it probably won't hit #1 on the NYT bestseller's list, and then you'll be done buying from black people for the rest of your career.
And you'll die poor and unloved and unremembered, because that's also the odds-on favorite for publishing folks and racists.
Throw out your garbage racist assumptions and start making money, you idiots. CHANGE YOUR HEARTS OR DIE.
Correcting this attitude is why we didn't stop after we published THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS. We published Binti three weeks later, and we kept going. We publish @Nnedi, @tadethompson, @clpolk, Kai Ashante Wilson, @pdjeliclark, @TochiTrueStory, @MauriceBroaddus.
And guess what, that still isn't NEARLY ENOUGH. The only fix is to keep buying more and more incredible work from more and more incredible authors of color, and not to stop for the rest of your life.
So that's my advice for editors who don't want to be racist scumbags. Keep trying hard for the rest of your life. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
GOD DAMN I KNEW I WOULD FORGET SOMEONE, we also get to publish @victorlavalle! I'm sorry Victor! You're unbelievable!
