From Publishers Weekly:
In the wake of yet another publishing scandal with race at its center, I’ve received nervous emails from writers worried about their forthcoming novels. Could what happened to American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins happen to them? The answer is yes, maybe, but probably no.
The most reductive line of thinking emerging from the conversation around American Dirt is that white writers shouldn’t write about a culture that’s not theirs, but that’s not actually what the critics are saying. What they’re angry about is that writers of color get erased, that their stories don’t get elevated, and that white writers (and publishers) cash in on legacies of trauma.
Publishing’s whiteness problem has been extensively written about. It’s also something I have personal experience with. In 2007, I was involved in a race-related publishing kerfuffle. The story has echoes of the American Dirt saga. A writer of color pitched me an anthology at a conference. I responded that she needed famous writers attached to the project if she hoped to sell it to a publisher. When she asked for examples, I named some authors off the top of my head, all white women. The following week she posted about our exchange on her blog, suggesting that my answer showed a pattern at our house of ignoring voices of color, noting the dearth of writers of color on our list, and calling me out publicly.
I responded by saying that we didn’t get very many submissions from women of color—and in so doing promoted an old and tired narrative that I didn’t even know existed before I blundered my way into it in an effort to defend myself. From there, things escalated. The story was widely covered. There were calls to boycott our press.
We issued an apology, which was poorly received. Cries of too little, too late. Not having had bad intentions doesn’t matter when you’ve shown the depths of your ignorance, when you’ve exposed your shadowed internalized racism. I was embarrassed and hurt, and it would be a long while before I would see the positives of this experience.
The fallout that ensued might have been a wake-up call to the industry, but it was not. The only people who learned that hard lesson were those on our small staff. Since then, there have been innumerable race-related missteps in the publishing world. Accusations of racism are at the heart of the Romance Writers of America’s current implosion. J.K. Rowling’s rendering of the native wizards in her Fantastic Beasts series has widely been seen as disrespectful and drawing from racist stereotypes. Early last year, Amélie Wen Zhao, the would-be author of Blood Heir, announced that she was pulling her own book from her publisher after it was denounced by early readers as racist.
Based on my experience, I can’t offer a road map for successfully managing these crises or encouraging good discourse. Time passed and eventually people forgot.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
Of course, traditional publishing is an elitist, classist, racist, sexist business and has been so for a very long time.
PG expects more publishing scandals to pop up from time to time.
If you really want proof that commercial publishing is classist and elitist, ask yourself a question: Why are royalty statements due twice a year for an industry that has had three “seasons” since the nineteenth century? Here’s a hint: Look back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and determine how often corporate bonds paid interest, and how often property taxes were actually paid outside of mortgages (which collect money each month for the escrow account). Especially east of the Mississippi.
Now ask yourselves about the class status of people who would, in the late nineteenth century, even know that… let alone attune their lives to that kind of schedule.
I worried about this for my novel, The Fisher Boy, set in Ghana. I had all Ghanaian beta readers that made corrections, ensured me it was culturally-accurate, etc. I don’t know if she did that but you can’t make everyone happy. A reader giving a poor review for my book Fire on the Flight Deck said something like this author never worked on the flight deck. I did, however, serve four years in the Navy and worked as a yellow shirt on the flight deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier. There will always be critics.
Could what happened to American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins happen to them?
Zillions or authors hope so. The book is#3 on Amazon.
That’s right. The Oprah Book Club is king. But, a good controversy trumps a book tour any day.
Today it fell all the way down to #4.
But it’s #3 in Hispanic American Literature and Fiction. Wonder what the consumer demographics are for that category?
The “most helpful” amazon reviews are pretty scathing.