Angry Black Woman gets heated discussions going in her comments about diversity in fiction markets.
Nick Mamatas weighs in as well.
As for myself, online I keep seeing the same repetition. Someone says SF/F isn’t diverse, people respond by chanting “Hopkinson, Butler, Delany, Barnes” like it’s a magical phrase that dispels the +10 diversity attack spell.
Delany doesn’t write SF anymore. Butler passed away.
Hopkinson and Barnes.
People aren’t even considerate enough to add “Due” to that list, Barnes’s wonderful and incredibly talented wife. Also a person of color.
So out of 1500-2000 or so writers who’ve sold at least 3 professional stories by SFWA’s standards (let’s say there are 500 or so not in SFWA who might be eligible) people only can realistically name 2 working current writers of color in the comments section off the top of their head.
12% of the US is African American. By simple math you can take our figure of 2,000 writers who’ve sold 3 or more pro level short stories and we should expect to have 150-200 SF writers of color active in that grouping.
We don’t.
Even accounting for statistical variations, that ratio is wildly uneven.
Is the cadre of writers in the field diverse?
No.
Whatever conclusions or actions you wish to draw next, the mathematical fact remains that we don’t even have a healthy fraction of even 100 writers of color.
This could be a larger societal issue, an issue of fandom, the technical nature of SF/F, or that readers don’t see their faces in SF/F and don’t read it and therefore don’t write it, whatever your theory is (and I’m making no accusations or forwarding theories of my own here, that isn’t the point of this particular entry), it still doesn’t change the fundamental fact that is not a racially diverse field.
Seriously, do the math.
But please stop saying “Hopkinson, Butler, Delany, Barnes” as if it makes that problem go away. All it does is embarrass the field and further alienate potential writers and readers of color because by saying that as a defense, you’re demonstrating just how unbalanced the equation is, and how ignorant you are of it. They’re some of my favorite writers, and its troubling to see their names used as a tool to disprove the lack of diversity in this field when the issue is the math.
Seriously, and with all respect and friendliness, this being said in a friendly and neutral tone of voice: do the math and think about it.
Here’s a link to US Demographics.
To find currently published writers of color, keep up with the Carl Brandon society. The awards list mentions how hard it was to find works, and if you know the markets, you’ll see a lot of them were combed from *outside* our field.
“(Kilgore Trout’s) books are all bad. All the spacemen in the future are Americans. Hardly anybody in the world is American.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (Quoted from memory so I might be a bit off).
I guess it would be a matter of self-selection or discrimination. My guess would be more of the former with a spicing of the later. I also think it has a lot to do with whom the stories are about (which leads to the former). As I remember, that’s an issue close to your heart, Tobias.
Interestingly enough, I’m currently mentoring three teenaged writers here in Saskatchewan through a program of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. Two are focused on science fiction and fantasy. Of those two, one is a black Haitian adopted by a Canadian couple; he’s attempting to write a sprawling military space opera a la David Weber.
His writing has a long way to go, but he’s very focused and dedicated.
This says nothing about the present or future diversity of the field, of course, except, I guess, there’s always hope…
Funny but I usually site those same names as proof SF is not diverse in that only a few writers of colour write SF. We can add Canadian Minister Faust to the list now.
I’ve been meaning to speak to this topic. I’m the transparent case of the middle aged white, male, Anglo-Saxon, middle class, etc. etc., and the diversity issue bothers the hell out of me. Thank you for raising it intelligently in combination with Temp’s efforts, and I hope you guys will be ok with a 40something honky weighing in soon.
Serious question here, Toby, because I want to understand this.
Why isn’t the field more diverse, specifically in terms of people of color?
When I pick up a book off the shelf, or get a story/poem in slush, I have no idea what color the author’s skin is. It never even crosses my mind. And in the very best sense of the word, I don’t care, because a good story is a good story in my world and the ethnic background of the author doesn’t change that for me.
In other words, when it comes to reading and editing, I’m color blind.
I know back in the day that seeing a woman’s name on a submission was enough to keep it from being published, but this is a different time and a different dynamic.
So what is keeping people of color out of the field?
I’ve been reading SF/F (tolkien, clarke, asimov, weis & hickman) since I was about 10 and it never really bothered me much that practically none of them had people of colour in them.
Of course when a novel like CR comes along which is both a good read and has characters that I can relate to very well it’s great. Haven’t had the opportunity to check out some of the other writers that Tobias mentions in this post, but I mean to.
Jaime: If I read the posts/comments correctly I think what she’s saying is that because there aren’t any people of colour in the books, then coloured kids growing up can’t relate to and have no interest in the books, so none of them grow up aspiring to become F/SF writers.
Jaime, The Angry Black Woman addresses why “we’re colorblind in our [editing/reading]” isn’t a reasonable answer: you’re assuming that what comes in the slush or what gets submitted to publishing houses is truly representative. It isn’t. And I agree with her that saying “Oh, well, people of color can submit if they want to” isn’t really enough.
There are at least two ways the “Delany, Butler, etc.” list gets used. On the sfwa lj, one writer was wishing that SFWA did more to promote diversity. Anyone who has read Dogland knows that diversity has always been a concern of mine, but that doesn’t mean I think every organization should be devoted to diversity. I don’t see it as part of sfwa’s mandate, and I think the “Delany, Butler, etc.” list is evidence that sfwa itself is not a racist organization. Specifically, if it was, it seems to me that Delany or Butler or any of the very fine et ceteras would’ve spoken up. To suggest that they were afraid to speak up or too blind to see the racism around them seems awfully insulting.
Secondly, too often, race is used as a way to avoid talking about class. Factor in class, and you’ll find that most writers are middle-class and upper-class, regardless of race. Delany certainly came from a background of privilege. But just as there’s a shortage of poor innercity writers, there’s a shorter of poor rural writers, too. Poverty cuts across race; there are twice as many whites living below the poverty line as blacks or Hispanics. By focusing on race, the problem seems much smaller than it actually is.
Do we know the percentage or African American authors in other genres and/or literature? If sf has a significantly lower percentage then it’s an sf problem and issue. If not, it’s not an sf problem but a societal problem.
(I think your numbers for SFWA might be high, Toby. If you throw out Delaney for not writing sf [as you should] then you should throw out SFWA members who haven’t published in the recent past. This is neither here nor there, just a nitpick. I’m sure the numbers are still skewed.)
Tobias: I agree with you that dropping the four names is a weak effort to show diversity. With all of the published authors we can find on the bookshelf we can only come up with four in our genre? And two of them aren’t publishing anymore? And throwing David Durham’s Acacia into the mix does not replace Butler.
I do use Octavia Butler as an example of a black SFF writer, but not as proof of diversity.
And if you really want to mess this up:
We have one working black WOMAN working in the genre? Really? That’s sad.
I had never heard of the wife of Steven Barnes and I imagine there are many others who have not as well, and this might explain why there are only 4 on the list.
Joe Sherry, Octavia passed from us last year, so at this point, to carry your metaphore mess-up farther, we have one dead black woman who wrote in the genre.
Look around, though. It’s not an issue of not having diversified authors in fiction. There are plenty of fiction writers of all kinds in the bookstores. I think sometimes the genres tend to be self-selecting. The readers of SF are predominantly white males, that’s what the readers will buy, and that’s who will end up writing most of the material because it all comes down to what sells. it isn’t fair and it isn’t right, but it’s the way the world works.
And SF isn’t the only genre with unbalanced participation. Some subgenres construct fences specifically to keep people out. There is a slew of minority fiction subgenres of popular and literary fiction. Imagine the lack of diversity in Latino fiction.
In SF, I don’t believe there are artificial exclusionary constructs. As far as I know, there aren’t any SF writers or editors actively trying to be racially selective or exclusive. I think it’s just market forces that formed the white male majority. It is changing, but just like in other parts of life, it takes time to overcome the past. We’ll all be better off when we finally do.
Well, I’m not sure you’re going to get much diversity as long as marketing departments have power. You don’t make money playing to 12% of the market, and in the SF readership, that’s even less. Notice how much trouble LeGuin has had trying to get Ged from Earthsea to be portrayed as brown on the book covers. (To my knowledge, on the SFBC edition did this right, over all the years.)
Also, it’s not like authors decide who gets published. What’s the diversity range of editors? It makes a difference. “We buy on merit” is utter crap.
Rick Novy, self-selection is the “soft” discrimination. It’s the one we do to ourselves instead of having over-arching constructs and plays to our “kin and other” brains.
While some of these terms have become politically charged, ABW really is arguing for afirmative action (community outreach, etc, although because of conservative wordsmithing connotatively “afirmative action” has come to equate to “quotas”). She is also asking for white-male writers (of which I am a card carrying member, being just this shy of bunt cake) to realize that the whole world isn’t white males and maybe consider that when writing. I embrace that theory very much.
Market forces can also be read as “club.” As the SF genre keeps to it borders of a “majority,” like musk-oxen on the tundra, circling to preotect their young, we can fend off all that which is “not one of us.” And just like those musk-ox, we will die off and have to be imported from Siberia, or something like that. So, yes, market forces drive acceptance, drive what we write, drive whose interested in writing in the genre, drive the sales, drive what’s accepted, until it drives us into a hole.
There’s a big world out there, we should be inclusive of it. At first that means forcing issues, which is what she’s doing.
Tony: That was certainly true in the past, but I think it is changing, slowly but surely, just as the inclusion of women as characters got better over time. More and more genre books are being written with people of color as the main characters. It’s not perfect, but it is getting better. Pick up the SF books written by Elizabeth Bear and Karin Lowachee as examples of what I mean. I’m sure there are other books out there, but these are two authors I can be certain of and have on my shelf right now.
And I do have to wonder a bit about the argument that because kids don’t see Black, Hispanic, Asian or other ethnic characters in genre books they won’t want to be a genre writer when they grow up. I’m a lot older than Toby and Tempest. When I was growing up there were almost no girls or women in the SF&F books I was reading. The few that were there were either helpless and needing to be rescued, or consigned to the role of sidekick. They certainly weren’t main characters or heroes.
This didn’t turn me off of ever wanting to write SF&F. It made me determined to grow-up and write books with the kind of characters I couldn’t find. Not saying this idea is totally wrong, but that this is why I wonder about this.
Stephan G.: No, I’m not assuming anything. I really wanted to know, which is why I asked. If you go back and look, I never said “Oh they can submit if they want.” What I said is that when I read and edit, I don’t know what ethnic background the author comes from. It doesn’t factor into my decision to buy a book or buy a poem/story.
And I still don’t have an answer to my question, which is Why?
I was a dirt poor white girl who grew up in a predominately Black area in South Central L.A. I can think of a dozen answers on my own, all related to poverty, lack of education, literacy levels and the culture of despair that hangs like a cloud over those neighborhoods. All of which are societal issues and a much bigger problem than just a lack of diversity in SF&F.
But those would be my answers. I’d like to hear a few reasons from other people.
Then I’d like to hear a few ideas for how to change this.
Rick Novy:There is a slew of minority fiction subgenres of popular and literary fiction. Imagine the lack of diversity in Latino fiction.
With all due respect, that’s like saying there’s a lack of diversity in African American Science Fiction.
Of course our genre is self selecting, that’s why there is no diversity. I’m a bit croggled that your response to ‘we don’t have a diverse field’ is basically ‘a) we have a self selecting field and b) it’s okay.’
All I did was point out that the field is not diverse, I’m not making a value judgement (in this post) or a call for action (in this post) but asking people to reflect on the lack of diversity. You also then point out another genre that doesn’t have diversity to make it okay that SF/F doesn’t. That doesn’t really work for me anymore than saying it’s okay there are no black people in X town, but hey, there are no white people in X town in Ghana, so there. It’s a non-pertinent defensive mechanism.
Please separate out these reactions, they’re no pertinent to the fact that we’re not a diverse field.
The fact that people start to get defensive when someone just points it out, not asks for anything, or accuses of anything, is interesting.
Jaime, for discussions on why, follow the Angry Black Woman link.
Then I’d like to hear a few ideas for how to change this.
Step one, acknowledge there’s a lack of diversity in the field. This is something that people still aren’t doing. Anytime the discussion begins defensive people go out of their way to justify why this is so or why it isn’t bad or why SF isn’t anti-inclusive. Yet the issue remains. To first fix a problem the fact that a problem exists has to be acknowledged. SF/F doesn’t think there is a problem as a whole, a lot of intelligent and nice people in the field think that if we just do nothing the problem will fix itself, and are also prone to getting edgy and think they’re being accused of being racist if the question persists.
Until we can get past acknowledging the math and have a problem, the other questions aren’t ready for me to put on the table because they cloud the atmosphere and in many cases poison it due to the fact that people involved in the discussion haven’t gotten past agreeing on point number one: that the field suffers from a drastic lack of diversity.
All you have to do is post a single comment saying “SF suffers from a lack of diversity” and people will try and argue you out of that simple statement.
Until we tackle that forward momentum on ‘why’ and ‘what to do’ is something as individuals you can discuss amongst yourselves, or as an author/editor try and fix with indivudual resolve and action, but as a group, will fall into heated arguments because the parties involved haven’t gotten past an initial reality consensus: which is that many people in SF don’t think there is a problem at all.
Hence my statement that the magic phrase of “Hopkinson, Butler, Delany, Barnes” needs to become widely known as the wrong answer to “is our field diverse?”
Jamie, you are making an assumption when you say, “In other words, when it comes to reading and editing, I’m color blind.” Color blindness is an assumption that color doesn’t matter.
Like Tobias I’ll again point you to the post on Angry Black Woman. She has answers to your questions of “why?” and “how can we change this?” that are far better than mine.
I’m still formulating a response to ABW in my mind, but the developing thoughts are: most of ABW’s suggestions put the onus on the editors. Being a submission editor I certainly have thoughts on her suggestions. Some I think are good, others I think pass the buck.
I can’t imagine anyone keeping stats on race. I don’t even know how they’d do it. We’d have to ask, and we can’t even count on authors to put in a word count! (I do keep stats on gender. 30% of submissions are by women, 33% of purchases are from women authors.) I can’t speak for stories from well known authors as those get immediately passed up to the editor. Of the other stories submitted, I’d estimate less than 1% (probably along the lines of 0.1%) featured a clearly defined character of color. This is why I have my doubts that editors can do much on their own to help fix the problem.
ABW, rightly, calls out editors for not doing enough to promote diversity. I’ve not read her blog before, so I don’t know if she’s called out authors and readers already. In the end, I think it will take the efforts of established writers to make a dent.
Aside: We are seeing a fair number of submissions from India in recent months (maybe about 1.5%).
I don’t see it as part of sfwa’s mandate, and I think the “Delany, Butler, etc.” list is evidence that sfwa itself is not a racist organization. Specifically, if it was, it seems to me that Delany or Butler or any of the very fine et ceteras would’ve spoken up. To suggest that they were afraid to speak up or too blind to see the racism around them seems awfully insulting.
I don’t see it as part of SFWA’s mandate, but it hardly means SFWA is not a racist organization. Delany/Butler doesn’t grant SFWA immunity, since the 1960s organizations kind of have to take anyone qualified, so I’m not impressed with this argument. Black people can get into country clubs in the south that have a similar size as SFWA, but the fact that a few members are black doesn’t mean it’s no longer anything.
Do I think SFWA is racist? I don’t know. My instinct? I pretty much doubt it. The first SFWA member I met was Mike Resnick, who I certainly wouldn’t call racist. He and I may disagree, but he’s a writer who casts his net far and wide for interesting material and who I respect a great deal for the Kirinyaga series. But then there was a past officer when I joined who in his personal newsgroups maintained that no NY publisher would accept a minority protaganist and that readers wouldn’t either, and was warning newer writers not to do it. So SFWA is pretty irrelevant to me in that it reflects its field and I don’t see it as a change agent. Nor would I even for a second want it as one, it hardly works for writers as writers, let alone as an agent of social change.
But again, not relevant to the real question. Does SFWA have a racially diverse make up?
No.
That’s all this question is. White people keep trying to take the question “Is X a racially diverse community” and turning that around into a defense of “We’re not racist” and other counter-arguments.
Using the magic phrase doesn’t make SFWA anti-racist, it just underscores the lack of diversity.
Again, no claims against SFWA one way or another, no aspersions. But it ain’t diverse.
Diversity is an issue which interests Clarion West a great deal. It’s a 6 week writers workshop held in Seattle every summer. They strive for both gender and racial diversity in both students and faculty. I can’t speak to the choice processes of the other 2 Clarions, but I do know Clarion West takes these things into account consciously. So perhaps our future will be a little less lily-white.
MKK
Sure, I’ll say it: SFWA and publishing don’t represent the racial or the economic realities in the US. This wasn’t news in the mid ’80s when I joined with a novel about a dark-skinned woman, and it isn’t news today. Has anyone claimed otherwise?
I pointed out on the SFWA LJ that any SFWAn who wanted to start a SFWA diversity committee could–I really can’t imagine the Board vetoing it. Committees within SFWA seem to be free to do anything that fits vaguely within SFWA’s agenda. If you (meaning any SFWAn reading this) want to do something about this within SFWA, go to the Board. If there was the slightest resistance, you’d be able to get an enormous petition of support in an instant.
But what do you do? Start having quotas for stories and covers and authors? How many points for a woman? How many for someone with brown skin? Do Asians count the same, or are they worth less ’cause they’re not as dark? Do you get any points for poor white males, or are all white males the same?
Sure, acknowledging the problem is the first step. It’s been acknowledged for most of the twentieth century. What’s step two?
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. F&SF fandom is pretty much self-selecting. It takes a strong individual in the minority community to chose F&SF over, say, Gangsta Rap. Most writers were readers before turning to writing. A subset of a subset.
And you’ve got to have a breakthrough. That’s what is asked of every writer if they want to become published.
So the question is not why isn’t there more diversity in F&SF? The question is how can we increase market share amongst minorities? I don’t have that answer. If I did, i’d be in marketing at Tor or Baen or Firebird.
Also, when was the last story with a nonwhite protagonist given a white person on the cover? I know the last time it happened to me: 1986. Witch Blood, an Asian-influenced fantasy, got a cover with a couple of white guys fighting on the parapets of a Europeanish castle.
Ace Books was not terribly enlightened in those days.
Toby:
Thanks for your thoughts. I’d be the last one to argue that there isn’t a lack of diversity in SF&F. As I said earlier, I still remember the days when finding a woman character who wasn’t window dressing was beyond rare. There are still markets where every woman writer I know feels it’s futile to even submit. Saying there isn’t a problem would be really disingenuous considering some of the discussions I’ve had on gender bias in SF&F.
I did read the post at ABW and I read most of the comments before I couldn’t take the name calling anymore. Heated is one word for it.
I’m not sure about a lot of her solutions. They lean heavily toward putting the entire burden on the editors, which is not entirely fair. For smaller zines and even some of the larger ones…wow, how would you do that kind of out reach with no staff and no money? She never answers the question of where these venues are that non-white, non-male writers will see any editor’s attempts to reach them.
I tend to think the solution lies far beyond the slush pile and the problem goes much, much deeper, rooted in poverty, literacy and the other issues I mentioned earlier. But that is another discussion, one that most people don’t seem interested in.
Stephen G.: You are making some mighty big assumptions about me and my world view. Hard as it is to believe, there are some of us who see people as people, who judge them by their words and actions and not the color of their skin. Kind of an idealist viewpoint, not often in fashion or even popular, but I cling to it anyway.
And before I become even more sorry that I ventured an opinion on this subject, I’ll bow out.
Jamie,
I stated the single assumption you are making when you say that your reading and editing is color-blind: that in this arena color doesn’t matter. Do you disagree with that assumption? What other “mighty big assumptions” am I making?
Tobias: You turned my point inside-out. I’m not defending the status quo, I’m offering my theory on why it is the way it is. It is exactly like saying african-american literature is not diverse. Why does that category exist? Why is it not just plain literature? Somebody constructed marketing fences and placed these books inside. Now, that sub-genre attracts that kind of writer, and that work doesn’t get read by the rest of us.
SF doesn’t have that fence, but it certainly has fences that we inherited. I don’t think the problem is that SF won’t accept non-white writers, the problem is that the writers just aren’t there. Where are they going? That comes back to your observation and your original post, and it’s something that I wondered about for many years and never really understood.
Also, I take issue with your point B. Read my post again. Nowhere did I say it’s okay, because it isn’t.
Steve Buchheit: Of course it’s descrimination, there’s nothing soft about it. It goes back to “but we’ve always done it that way.”
Wymann Cooke: That is exactly the right question. How do we increase market share, and increase it everywhere? You get diversified writers by generating diversified readers. I think you do that by taking risks.
I’ve been shying away from pointing out weird assumptions, WAG stats, and logic flaws in obviously sincere posts on this issue. Especially as I support many of the principles involved.
So I’ll just say — doesn’t the existance of the Delany, Butler etc list and the current lack of diversity prove that positive discrimination of the kind being proposed won’t work? History would indicate that it’ll simply result in a new diversity list. Which might be nice for those writers picked to be on it, but won’t produce actual diversity any more than the previous list has resulted in diversity — that certain women get published by certain magazines hasn’t discouraged the belief that those magazines are not generally welcoming to women, after all.
[The identification argument clearly is about readers who’re not me… because if the strongest identification with a character comes through having a character who resembles you — I must be a rabbit.]
My greatest frustration in many of these discussions is not having enough of the right statistics, or actually knowing how wide the gap is between how I think the world should be (including ‘what I like’) and what sells. Because, ultimately, what sells is the major limiting factor on what anyone can do — and that includes professional editors.
[People regularly talk about cover art not representing the racial origin of the characters inside… and I find that interesting because clearly the publishers aren’t as worried about their being non-white characters inside, as they are concerned that the initial response to the cover art will be negative. And when I’ve heard people discuss having women/black/gay characters there’s often the argument that they should be there for a reason —
Which makes me wonder if readers haven’t been primed to assume that the presence of minority characters in a book means the book will involve some kind of message about feminism/race/sexuality. Can’t help wondering if there’s not a link between marketing gurus not wanting people to know beforehand that there’s colour inside and people associating characters of certain types with messages rather than damn good stories. Also can’t help comparing that to a couple of recent books with plain and unashamedly homosexual characters ‘Melusine’ and ‘Carnival’ where the cover copy elides that fact — despite it being a key plot point in ‘Carnival’ (‘starring team’ doesn’t eqactly equate to lovers). Seems to me that publishers believe the reader needs to see the story first and not hit any triggers about race or sexuality because they won’t read past that to see there’s a great story on offer.]
In the absence of any other evidence, my own theory on why SFF’s professional writers aren’t a more diverse set is — artificial selection and breeding to type — the close community and the culture within that community.
Scott wrote
I’m still formulating a response to ABW in my mind, but the developing thoughts are: most of ABW’s suggestions put the onus on the editors. Being a submission editor I certainly have thoughts on her suggestions. Some I think are good, others I think pass the buck.
I would agree. I personally think a successful fix would need to be more comprehensive, it involves greater societal issues in the US, fandom demographics, and SF/F publicity issues. I don’t think there are any simple/easy fixes, but general awareness is a helping first step.
I can’t imagine anyone keeping stats on race. I don’t even know how they’d do it. We’d have to ask, and we can’t even count on authors to put in a word count! (I do keep stats on gender. 30% of submissions are by women, 33% of purchases are from women authors.) I can’t speak for stories from well known authors as those get immediately passed up to the editor. Of the other stories submitted, I’d estimate less than 1% (probably along the lines of 0.1%) featured a clearly defined character of color. This is why I have my doubts that editors can do much on their own to help fix the problem.
Right, but ABW actually talked about letting writers of color know they were welcome. For example, I see SF/F editors in fandom and nightshade forums, but I don’t see any of them in, say, SciFiNoir being accessible, a large Yahoogroup all about diverse SF. These sorts of things can be done by editors interested in outreach or in keeping up with these issues. I’m not saying editors have to, but the fact that none of them do, but invest lots of internet time in other venues, is something to ponder.
Aside: We are seeing a fair number of submissions from India in recent months (maybe about 1.5%).
That’s cool, Scott. I was wondering about South African, Kenyan, and Indian SF of late, as they’re all strong English speaking and India in particular I would love to see more fiction from. I hope we can find ways to encourage writers like that.
will shetterly
Sure, I’ll say it: SFWA and publishing don’t represent the racial or the economic realities in the US. This wasn’t news in the mid ’80s when I joined with a novel about a dark-skinned woman, and it isn’t news today. Has anyone claimed otherwise?
TB: Some people seem to think so. The fact that I’ve never been able to just post or say outloud that SF has a diversity problem without a huge amount of offended mail and hurt people who then argue about what caused it and who’s fault it is indicates there’s a lot of awareness to go.
I pointed out on the SFWA LJ that any SFWAn who wanted to start a SFWA diversity committee could”“I really can’t imagine the Board vetoing it. Committees within SFWA seem to be free to do anything that fits vaguely within SFWA’s agenda. If you (meaning any SFWAn reading this) want to do something about this within SFWA, go to the Board. If there was the slightest resistance, you’d be able to get an enormous petition of support in an instant.
TB: Where am I recommending that SFWA do anything? All I did was point out that the diversity of authors was lacking.
But what do you do? Start having quotas for stories and covers and authors? How many points for a woman? How many for someone with brown skin? Do Asians count the same, or are they worth less ’cause they’re not as dark? Do you get any points for poor white males, or are all white males the same?
TB: With all due respect, Will, WHAT THE FUCK? Who said anything about quotas, are you intentionally trying to derail this conversation. What gives? I’m not sure what you’re trying to do, but it’s not appreciated. You’re putting words that were never in my mouth.
I think it’s remarkably illuminating that all I’ve done was point out that SF has a diversity problem, and everyone is throwing arguments at me and throwing their hands up saying ‘but what can we do’ and running off down paths.
Sure, acknowledging the problem is the first step. It’s been acknowledged for most of the twentieth century. What’s step two?
TB: Really, because I’m seeing a lot of resistance and defensiveness the moment I point it out, and I still see and hear authors taking discussions of diversity and derailing them with all sorts of other issues.
Again, had it not been a problem, responses to my post would have run more like this:
“Yeah, you’re right, that’s embarrasing. Do you have any thoughts on how we might be able to fix that issue?”
Instead I have a lot of defensive white people getting offended, leaving the discussion, or changing the topic away from the initial comment.
Now, as someone who likes having friendly discussions about race, I feel slapped down, because this is usually the exact pattern I get whenever I say ‘SF isn’t diverse.’ First the usual names get invoked like a charm. When I point out the ridiculousness of that I get defensive ‘I don’t see race’ and ‘how dare you try and make quotas’ response.
It’s almost stereotypical, although we’ve avoided a good amount of here, I’m still croggled that all I have to do is point out a simple fact and watch people work themselves up into a bunch of assumptions about what I’m saying, proposing, and accusing them of.
Why is that, do you wonder?
Thanks to most if not all of you for remaining calm 🙂
24. will shetterly on May 8th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Also, when was the last story with a nonwhite protagonist given a white person on the cover? I know the last time it happened to me: 1986. Witch Blood, an Asian-influenced fantasy, got a cover with a couple of white guys fighting on the parapets of a Europeanish castle.
Ace Books was not terribly enlightened in those days.
And the point of this in regard to my post was? What, that the diversity problem is fixed? I”m not sure what your point is.
Jaime wrote:
Stephen G.: You are making some mighty big assumptions about me and my world view. Hard as it is to believe, there are some of us who see people as people, who judge them by their words and actions and not the color of their skin. Kind of an idealist viewpoint, not often in fashion or even popular, but I cling to it anyway.
And before I become even more sorry that I ventured an opinion on this subject, I’ll bow out.
Jaime, you may not know, but the ‘I don’t see color’ is a particularly vexing phrase in these debates and a marker for certain patronizing actions by white people that deflect any conversation.
I would truly, truly encourage you to follow this link and start reading and clicking around.
The best scrib I’ve seen on this is http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2007/05/color_theory.php from which I’ll excerpt, but you all should really read the entire thing:
I have yet in my life to see a white person walk up to another white person and say “I don’t see your color.”
Jaime, I would encourage to retain this belief, but not verbalize it. It comes off as overly defensive and is an action and piece of language overly frequently used by people who mean the exact opposite.
I’m not saying this accuse you of anything, but to point out that you are using a piece of lingo that probably marks you with a group of people.
It would be like me saying “I don’t see women or men” everytime I talked to women, but never men.
That’s a good point, yeah. Hell, I avoid books with abstract covers and literary looking covers for that same reason 🙂 It’s certainly one I’m trying to break (the covers for Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin are exactly the sort of thing that helps break that momentum).
“Jaime, I would encourage to retain this belief, but not verbalize it.”
Toby, if someone hadn’t pointed me at this I wouldn’t have come back. When I said I was bowing out, I meant it.
If not for the prodding from Stephen G. I never would have verbalized this. It is the way I live my life, not some oh look at me flag I wave around to prove that I’m ‘enlightened’ or ‘not one of those people’. It’s not even something I think about. It just is.
And the truth is that it wouldn’t matter what I said in a discussion like this, or how carefully I phrased it or if it was an honest belief on my part or not. Unless I accept everything ABW says as the gospel truth, which I don’t, I was doomed before I started. I’m white, so every thought and opinion is suspect. At best I’d come off as rather dim but well meaning. At the worst I’d have people openly screaming racist as they are on ABW’s post whether that was true or not.
But I stepped onto the mine field with my eyes open so I can’t complain about getting my leg blown off. I might as well go for the full package.
From the time I started writing and editing its been drilled into my head that the writing and the story are what mattered, that you judge the writing and not the writer. It has also been drilled into my head that the burden was on the writer to find the best place for their work. Editors and publishers don’t go hunting for you, you have to track them down yourself.
None of this excludes stories with POC or gay characters or women or anything else you can name. But the burden is still on the writer to write stories with those characters and then send them out. The burden will always be on the writer.
Did editors come looking for women writers and books/stories with strong women characters back when such things were rare? Was there a big outreach program by editors to encourage women to write and read SF&F? No. Women beat on the door, kept beating on the door, and raised a ruckus until they started to be let in. They encouraged and supported each other and the trickle became a flood. Women are still beating on certain doors.
I know it’s not at all a popular opinion, but if you want to change the face of SF&F so that there is more diversity, writers with Black, Hispanic and other ethnic backgrounds will have to do the same thing. The writers need to seek out beginners to nurture and mentor and encourage. The writers need to address the root causes of why POC don’t write and submit SF&F, why POC don’t read genre books and do what they can to change it.
The burden is on the writers. No one else.
And for the love of Jack and Jill, stop pushing the rest of us away. I came into this with an honest desire to understand why more POC weren’t writing SF&F and the root causes. The only answers I get are pats on the head and pointing me at blogs where the name calling repels me. Why would any of us willingly put ourselves through the kind of treatment I see on ABW, no matter what our sincere desire to change things? I feel very pushed away right now and not inclined to even think about this issue again.
More honesty. All the focus on the differences pushes us further apart, as writers and as people. It does more harm than good.
And now I am gone and not coming back.
Scott wrote: Do we know the percentage or African American authors in other genres and/or literature? If sf has a significantly lower percentage then it’s an sf problem and issue. If not, it’s not an sf problem but a societal problem.
Do we have to set the bar that low?
From Toby:
Right, but ABW actually talked about letting writers of color know they were welcome.
I considered that one of her excellent suggestions. Of course Escape Pod welcomes all authors, but it wouldn’t hurt to say so explicitly. I’ve been meaning to revise the guidelines for a while now, and this will be just the thing to get me off my ass.
I’m also considering putting message saying we’d like to see more stories featuring minority characters in the rejections.
Tobias, no offense meant, but I think you’re reading too fast. For example, you say:
Toby: You’re right, it is a problem, what can I, as a white aspiring writer, do?
So far as i know, the things I can do are: buy books with people of other races in them. Buy books with people of other races on the cover. State explicitly that I want and like the diversity I’m seeing in the characters and would also like to see it in the authors. (Interesting that Carnival was thrown out as an example of “hiding gayness” on the cover blurb, which may be true, though i knew too much going in to notice – when it is also an example of a positive step here: the cover is one of the most honestly African faces out there, even through the mask.)
And write books/stories with other races. Which sometimes I do, though with an imaginary fantasy world, it’s harder to say they’re representative of a culture. (I also write so many gay or bi or kinky characters that I have one book I actually describe as The heterosexual one.)
Kathryn Allen: [The identification argument clearly is about readers who’re not me”¦ because if the strongest identification with a character comes through having a character who resembles you — I must be a rabbit.]
I don’t think it’s a one-to-one ratio, per se. “I identified with X, who is Asian/white/black/First Nations/hobbit/alien/etc. when i’m not, so how is this relevant to identifying?” Like you, I identify with problems and personalities first.
But I’ve read books and watched movies where I realised afterwards that there was nobody female (Who was a character). And I’ve read older works where the same character I was cheering on would say something about women that was positively something weird and alienating. I understand the ‘slap’ that can be, to notice, even as you adore and identify with some characters, that really, you aren’t there after all, int his world with this person you like – or worse, you wouldn’t even be welcome in their world. And I came into fantasy and SF through more female writers (McKinley and Yolen, for instance) than otherwise. (Yolen also has some great commentary on reading older children’s literature where she belatedly realised the characters she identified with were denigrating Jewish people – Ie, Her. Which sounds a lot like people who’ve talked about noticing the lack of their race in f/sf.)
Oh, another example of where you’re reading quickly. I said: “If you (meaning any SFWAn reading this) want to do something about this–”
And you responded, “Where am I recommending that SFWA do anything?”
That was why I put the bit in quotes. There is at least one person who believes SFWA should be addressing diversity.
Part of the problem with these public discussions over issues that have been discussed before is that people tend to address things that were brought up elsewhere. Sometimes it’s to dismiss an issue, and sometimes it’s to address one. Generalizations get tossed around, like “everyone is throwing arguments at me and throwing their hands up saying “˜but what can we do’ and running off down paths.”
People have several choices when you raise an issue. They can ignore you, or they can attempt to deal with it. If all you want is acknowledgment that the f&sf community does not reflect the world, say so up front, and people will happily say, “You’re right.”
But if you want to figure out what to do about it, be patient with the people who would like to figure that out also.
Oh, regarding the cover issue, one last point of fact. When Ace asked Emma and me to create a shared world, we made Liavek vaguely North African because we were so tired of Aryan fantasy. The cover artists generally did a good job of conveying that, but the third book (1988) has a prominant blond guy in Europeanish clothes on the cover. So I think I would say that was the last time a book I was involved with got whitefaced.
Did you come into this discussion believing that? If so, we were all prejudged by you and the end of this discussion was predetermined by you, and is one of the best examples of why black people are discouraged from talking about race and diversity today.
No one demands that you accept everything ABW said (I don’t agree with her on 50% of her solutions), but you’ve made a number of assumptions, gotten yourself offended, and stormed off in a huff.
That’s your privilege.
But I would encourage you to think harder about this if all your discussions about race seem to end this way with non-white people, that you may need to not assume the problem lies with them.
And no, I’m not accusing you of being racist, but of learning some of the basics of how to have this kind of conversation, because right now, it’s all about how YOU want it to work.
That would be awesome! I think advertising this is important. Look at Strange Horizons lit guidelines:
It’s no surprise that more writers of color and women and other diversity as a result submit there with that sort of masthead.
If you think that’s not a popular opinion you’re not reading writers of color’s blogs or listening to us very closely. We push a complete wide variety of all those things, why do you think I’m writing books and encouraging other writers of color and working hard to make sure my voice is heard, or speaking to libraries about SF and diversity?
There has been some talk about “what can we do about it.” Here’s what you can do about it.
If a character comes to you and is African, Hispanic, Asian, Canadian, etc, don’t change that character’s race because you think it’ll make the story “sale-able.” Keep the character, bump the rest of the story up so it’ll sell. If you’re a writer who plans everything out and you haven’t been including characters that aren’t white, ask yourself why you aren’t including a greater diversity. “I can’t write (ethnicity) characters because I don’t know about them” isn’t an excuse. You do research for other parts of the story, don’t you? If the editors “buy the best story” then it really shouldn’t be an issue what “race” your characters are as to the sale-ability of the story.
In my stories (which, admittedly haven’t been published, yet) I’ve had main characters that are African (Kenyan, raised in England), American Indian, Mexican, and Afghani along with a good smattering of white-males. Not one of them did I say, “I’ll make this character this.” All these characters came out of my imagination this way. There was no “forcing” them, or dressing up a white-male in drag or “native dress” to get this diversity. This is just the way I think.
Examining my characters I’m surprised I don’t have any Jewish or Asian main characters (I certainly know enough people that fall into those catagories) and I haven’t written from the female viewpoint (and I know a few of those as well). I’m not going to change one of my old characters, but I’m sure, because I’m now thinking about it, that some main characters in the future will be those.
Well, that wasn’t the point of my little post, I was trying to point out that a reflexive action of trying to use 4 names to deny the first point had been eating away at me enough after being in this genre for 10 years that I wanted to write a message asking for it to stop.
This wasn’t the ‘how do we solve diversity’ post, but a big plea to beg my fellow readers that doing that is damaging to the field and denies the reality.
How do we solve it? Gosh, if I were omnipotent and omniscient I could answer that 🙂 I’m not. My statement is that just getting everyone to agree first off that there is a problem is the first step, you seem to think that’s been done, and yet whenever I’m on a diversity panel or in a post, I can’t get people to just nod and chorus ‘yes, the field lacks racial diversity.’ Instead I immediately have people explaining why it is so, or pointing out other non-diverse fields, or putting their non-racist credentials forward. I think we still have hangups on step one, because I still can’t state the obvious without hurt feelings, arguments, and people defending the field.
Just as I can’t talk an alcoholic into going any further until they admit there’s a problem (but I’ll get better, I can quit anytime, no I’m not drinking that much), it’s just as hard to find fixes.
Nor am I going to give out edicts on What Must Be Done in order to fix the problem. If I can’t get a number of people to just say ‘yes, you’re right, I’m going to go read and wonder how I might help or ask you and a bunch of other writers of color how they think I might help and listen to all what they say and then think it over’ then there is no real point in giving out edicts.
No one likes being told what to do.
As for what I’m doing is I’m writing stories with massive casts of minorities with a strong pulp and adventure sensibility which core readers in the field seem to often twig to. I’m playing to two demographics here, one I want to write SF/F that people of color can see themselves in, and two, I’m trying to disassociate the fear people have of ‘Message’ that comes with seeing or encountering minority characters.
Part of that is due to some writers who try to compensate by inserting characters of color who’re basically mouthpieces for a people. An honest mistake, and it’s a step on the path to writers trying to diversify their cast, but now we need one more step, which I think a number of authors are striving for.
That isn’t to say I won’t engage big issues or don’t, but the goal is to provide a sense of sheer fun: here is what I love about the genre, and here is how I’m fixing it’s vision of the future, isn’t this cool and fun?
The cover issue, the late 80s seem to be your datapoint, and the data point of a couple other writers. I’ve never blamed authors for their covers.
Nalo, Steve Barnes, and my latest novels seem to have good covers. I see some novels that feature characters of color that have abstract art for the cover, but that can be well argued to be a marketing decision as an attempt to aim a book at mainstream.
And yet, the only character of color on a novel cover I’ve seen was in Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Crescent City Raphsody. Conincidentally, all the other white author/character of color books I seem to encounter feature abstract art.
I’m not calling conspiracy b/c I haven’t done much of a survey, I wouldn’t mind counter-examples that prove me wrong here. I do think there’s more wiggle room, but I’m not 100% convinced the problem is all gone.
That sounds like a fantastic list, Lenora, of things you can do. I won’t add anything to it, it sounds like you’re actively thinking about how you want to participate.
Yeah, Fantasy can be tricky there, but thinking about it like you are is half the game.
The only other thing I recommend if you have the money is Nisi Shawl’s “Writing The Other.” It’s $9 + $3 s/h, it’s a great crib sheet to handling these issues in fiction.
My guess is that it’s a very similar feeling, yes.
I did say so up front, and the reactions were not affirming of the point, but moved away into why it was, or what could be done, if anything, and so on, which is distressingly past the prime point.
May there aren’t enough places online to discuss race in SF, so every nearby topic becomes the place where everyone then pours themselves into it…
Will, about the covers… it’s not blatant, but one reason reason Jenny is cropped at the neck on Elizabeth Bear’s ‘Hammered’ might be that the light tan skin visible masks the character’s ethnicity somewhat. (And yes, I’m qualifying that because I’m not sure how dark a skin tone she should have, just that the covers seem a little paler than I think she would be in real life… umm fictional life?)
And as Lenora Rose said, the skin tone beneath the mask on ‘Carnival’ is definitely dark. But IIRC there are only darker skinned people left because the nanotech ate all the white people.
#38. Lenora Rose on May 9th, 2007 at 12:58 pm