Note: SFWA did a Publishing Taught Me for BIPoC writers call a while back. This is what I wrote. They didn't go for it lol:
Since 2020, there has been a brand-new awakening across the world in since the murder of George Floyd and the protests that ensued after. White institutions and organizations finally found some new words to eventually recycle into oblivion in the form of DEIs, black squares on their social media and mentioning the same three figures of Black history, one of them almost always Dr. King. Standard White virtue signaling: tone-deaf as usual, self-serving as usual, White guilt laden as very usual.
This is no different in the world of publishing, from literary organizations to publishing houses. They all seemingly want to run away as much as they can from the glaring facts that they help uphold Whiteness the same way a carpenter builds and restores an old house. Bluster when called out, hijack all the right words from actual BIPoC & QBIPoC individuals they would never want to ever touch – or publish – with a thousand foot pole and repeat those words with no real substance but a lot of gusto until all the White people they're actually talking to pat them on the back or say wonderful things – oh, you thought they were talking to BIPoC writers? Yeah, no. It looks like that on the surface but that's just the surface.
These institutions do not bother making an honest effort to the very same groups they have shunned for decades via overt and subtle ways. Nah, no, just exhume Octavia Butler, wave her dead body around a bunch and pretend they treated her decent when they didn't. And then confuse living Black writers for Octavia Butler, too, (something that happened to N.K. Jemisin – who also gets the token treatment just like Butler). Don't forget to denigrate, backhand complement, and act as if BIPoC writers should be grateful about it all, too. These places like to acknowledge writers who are not White with the same adoration as a petulant teenager expresses about cleaning their junky room.
And both have been told to clean up their act for the umpteenth time over a very long time.
I'm new to publishing but not to its chicanery. I first tried to go into traditional publishing for several straight years. I learned all that I could, I wrote the best stories I could, I tightened up my query letters all I could. I made sure that anything anyone saw was as clean cut and professional as possible.
And still came the issues.
I got very few requests, which is pretty standard for the industry. But I already knew how prejudiced publishing was (and pretended not to be) before I even entered. Publishing is hard for everyone, especially those trying to break in, but add marginalizations and it gets even harder. It really did seem like the industry just wanted blatant race trauma stories from BIPoC writers and everything else – fun, boring, and in between – from White writers. "It's not your craft, it's the market." "Not a good fit."
Since I didn't want to delude myself with traditional publishing and I already knew they mainly published White, given the books that are already out, I reviewed articles about racism and publishing from places like Publisher's Weekly and Fiyah. Spoiler alert: It's been talked about since the 80s and 90s and even further back. Same situation, similar faces, not much has changed but the technology. But, oh wow, will the publishing industry pretend that all this is brand new news to them, to the point many of them probably should try their hand in film so they can collect their Oscars.
Actually, the only publications that have ever given me a shot were all Black publications, like Nightlight. I've submitted my works to way more than Black publications, including the longstanding publications, by the way. "Not a good fit," they would say. One even congratulated Nightlight for taking my story as if they never received a submission of it at all. That was PsuedoPod.
I went independent because when there's a traditional publishing structure that is 70% White, they're going to make sure that number only go down by a slice of a percent, if not less than that if they can help it. So now, I have published books where I can keep my all BIPoC characters, have their lovely, dark-skinned faces and bodies on the cover and work with an editor and narrators that actually look like the people and cultures I write. Everyone I work with are all Black and Latin, and a good chunk are queer. From my artist, to my editor, to my narrators. All talented and none of them were hard to find.
Which is a common refrain I hear from these traditionally White institutions and organizations: we can't find BIPoC writers and workers. We want to welcome them but we can't find them anywhere.
Try checking your slush piles. Try checking who you hire. Try checking Melanin Library. Try checking online groups like "PoC Writers of Color" or "Black Girls Read Books, Too". If I can find them – because people of color are indeed people and thus lack antennae to get over the air updates like smartphones – then so can they. BIPoC apply to these places, submit stories to these places, we do all that we're asked to, only to be ignored again and again. All because we don't tell our stories in traditional European style. Not everyone wants to sound like a Lovecraft or Tolkien knock-off – heck, not everyone even liked the original Lovecraft or Tolkien. Different writing isn't poor writing.
But someone of the National Front can get published. Several times in noteworthy lit journals. Even serve on award panels. For several years. He's the "good fit", I suppose.
This guy only got the boot when enough White people mentioned – BIPoC unfortunately get ignored as "rabblerousing nitpickers that will never be happy with anything and are easily offended by everything, especially the Black writers" – that this guy had a background in the National Front. And they still had to convince the other White folks about why having David Duke's British nephew around is a Bad Thing.
They are aware BIPoC writers can see this, right? That we don't live in another vortex or on a different planet?
But, hey, BIPoC writers are supposed to be happy with three and four year old DEIs that sound brilliant but most likely won't be applied except as shields from accountability. It may sound pessimistic but here's the thing: as a writer over 30 years old, I've seen it all before. If this was a one-and-done, it would have long time happened by now.
Take literary awards for example. Just about every big literary spec fic award I have learned about is very traditionally White, from the deciding panel to the hosting organization to the people who get awarded. Thus, I searched for the very first Black person to ever receive the award and then I look for when the organization first started.
To keep this list short for length, let's go with the Nebulas, Hugos and Stokers:
Nebula: Presented by SFWA, which was founded in 1965. First Nebula presented: 1966. First Black person to get an award: 1984, Octavia Butler for Bloodchild – So, for 18 years SFWA thought no Black person was creative enough to pen award-worthy work, and it has been spotty since.
Hugos: Presented by the World Science Fiction Society, which was founded in 1939. First Hugo presented: 1953. First Black person to get an award: 2016, N.K. Jemison for "The Fifth Season" – So, for 63 years, the World Science Fiction Society thought no Black person was creative enough to pen award-worthy work, and it has been spotty – and a mess - since.
Stoker: Presented by Horror Writers Association, which was founded in 1985. First Stoker presented: 1988. First Black person to get an award: 2001, Linda D. Addison for "Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes" - So, for 16 years the Horror Writers Association thought no Black person was creative enough to pen award-worthy work, and it has been spotty since…. which is quite flooring, given how terrified White people, White writers included, get when they hear about Black lives in general. Even when we're just musing about a boring trip to the supermarket for groceries, they're genuinely terrified to be around us, interact with us like regular people, or to even listen to us. And we don't even have to be terrifying – we just have to exist. Ask Lovecraft. Or Stoker.
I'm focusing on Black writers here because I am a Black writer and anti-Blackness is unfortunately a terrific ruler of how much diversity they're allowing in. (So is colorism, which is getting really rampant today, it's like darker skinned people shouldn't exist.) We're already used as a canary in the mine by just about everyone else for just about everything else - which is very dehumanizing, by the way.
Back to the awards. Embarrassing, right? Almost every winner happened when I was alive, except for Octavia Butler's win, that was only three years before I was born. Otherwise, it was as White as a Klan meeting jamboree prior. I treat these extremely long stretches as something poignant because something poignant is indeed being said through these awards: "No Black person has ever written anything we thought was good enough up until [year of win]. And no Black person since then has ever written anything we thought good enough until [year of another win]". Not like it gets better for other writers of color. Actually, it gets worse.
It's not just spec fic. Even the Nobel has only given four Black people (three men, one woman) an award in literature. The most recent being 2021 – and the one before that was in 1988 to the only Black woman to ever get a Nobel Prize in literature since the existence of the Nobel Prize itself, Toni Morrison.
Nice to know I'll never get a Nobel. Not because I can't write but because apparently Nobel believes the same thing that the Nebula, Hugos, Stokers and other awards believe: Good writers are White writers, White writers are Good writers, Anything Else Better Be Rare (and Better Be Grateful).
Even though there are countless Black writers and other writers of color both before and after these award-winning Black writers I named that are just as amazing in their works.
However, the awards are just a reflection of the organizations that present them. For example, I have my own experiences with SFWA as a teenager growing up in Baltimore, where the Baltimore Book Festival would be held yearly. SFWA always had a table that always had an All-White or All-White-And-Octavia-Butler showcase, and they always staffed it with smiling White people were pleasant jerks to just about anyone that couldn't pass the paper bag test. That was my experience for years. As a teen, I wanted to learn how to be better involved in speculative fiction genres and become a better writer. But by the time I was a young adult, I started to figure out that Some Things Always Stays the Same at SFWA. They weren't Baltimore Sci-Fi Society bad, but was the attitude necessary?
After 2020, when these institutions started scrambling to write DEIs, saying all the right things they most likely don't mean, having deals and free entry they barely told BIPoC writers about for a single year or two (because that somehow undoes decades of being obtuse), all this commotion probably looked amazing if you were a White person saying to yourself "wow, they're pulling out all the stops for these ingrates", but, honestly, it wasn't. These institutions should have cleaned house at any time after the 1960s, when race issues were massively at the forefront then. And kept that house clean thereafter. No Black writer wants to join an organization filled with people who cry blood at the first sign of diversity or have to be convinced over and over again that structural prejudice exists. No writer of color wants that, either. BIPoC writers just want to simply be writers and to be properly recognized for their works. Not get death threats for existing.
All publishing has taught me is that things stay the same. Not because there is no change, publishing just wants to never change until they can't. Then they learn new words & tricks so they can try to stay the same again. And that needs to immediately change.
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