An industry conversation that also needs to happen - overlapping with if less urgent than the whiteness issue - is the class issue. I could talk for hours with the obsessed and good-faith among you about the as yet unanalyzed class nuances involved in the topic at hand.
To be clear: the race issue is WAY more urgent, as narrative injustice there results in disenfranchisement and danger beyond “mere” shame and shaming. But we need to do some accounting within whiteness as well. Specifically:
The agent/editor side of the industry is concentrated w/people who hear “7 figure advance” and immediately amortize it down to “entry level white shoe lawyer $ for 4 years or so, plus whatever years of spec time spent writing. Hm yes, nothing to sniff at!” Which is...not...yeah.
That is not how the vast, vast majority of the country hears it. (Including rich people who just don’t know that “7 figures” in publishing most often equals a squeaker round-up $1 mil in 4-5 widely-spaces installments, but I digress.) It sounds like mogul or celebrity money.
It’s a v. temporary income easily below “two-JD/MD/MBA household in major city” money. And so when there’s an outcry against 7 figures, you see a classist industry’s disgust w/ critics’ “greed” and “resentment” over what upper-income ppl perceive as “reasonable” money.
Worse: upper classes are way disproportionate across the board in publishing, but IMO the author pool tends to be *slightly* more class-diverse than the agent and editor one. (This is not a scientific observation, could be wrong.) Which brings me to a real concern of mine:
The number of working-class or even middle-middle white women who get book deals and enter a “$250k a year is not THAT much money” world that they are then expected to move through with total fluency. And oh God, there are so many terrifying shibboleths.
In this world, hypothetically, an imperfect choice of hair dye vs skin tone might be part of a larger ambition toward appropriation, OR it could be evidence that someone’s not going to Hair Cuttery rather than Immortal Beloved (DC reference, sorry NYC).
Sorry, the “not” in there was extraneous.
The worst thing is when whiteness cuts certain people off altogether from real money. Yes, and: it’s also bad that certain others *do* get real money, but it comes with a side of shame so personal and intense that any non-sociopath would emerge w/debilitating psychological injury
