I found this New York Times op-ed by Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, titled “Why Is Publishing So White?” very interesting. It is absolutely drenched in Critical Race Theory although the words “critical race theory” never appear in it so if you find such things too distressing to read, you can just take my word for it. Here’s an example of what I found interesting:
First, we gathered a list of English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018. That list came from WorldCat, a global catalog of library collections. We wanted to focus on books that were widely read, so we limited our analysis to titles that were held by at least 10 libraries and for which we could find digital editions.
We also constrained our search to books released by some of the most prolific publishing houses during the period of our analysis: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday (a major publisher before it merged with Random House in 1998), HarperCollins and Macmillan. After all that we were left with a dataset containing 8,004 books, written by 4,010 authors.
To identify those authors’ races and ethnicities, we worked alongside three research assistants, reading through biographies, interviews and social media posts. Each author was reviewed independently by two researchers. If the team couldn’t come to an agreement about an author’s race, or there simply wasn’t enough information to feel confident, we omitted those authors’ books from our analysis. By the end, we had identified the race or ethnicity of 3,471 authors.
We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.
I wasn’t a bit surprised at that outcome and I suspect few are. I wonder if the op-ed’s authors recognize that their method of analysis makes assumptions that essentially stack the deck in favor of their preferred conclusion, summed up by a quotation from Zora Neale Thurston:
In a 1950 essay titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,†Zora Neale Hurston identified the chicken-or-egg dilemma at the heart of publishers’ conservatism. White people, she wrote, cannot conceive of Black people outside of racial stereotypes. And because publishers want to sell books, they publish stories that conform to those stereotypes, reinforcing white readers’ expectations and appetites.
There are some other quotes in the piece that I think are actually more telling, for example:
This broad imbalance is likely linked to the people who work in publishing. The heads of the “big five†publishing houses (soon, perhaps, to become the “big fourâ€) are white. So are 85 percent of the people who acquire and edit books, according to a 2019 survey.
“There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color,†said Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins that is focused on Black literature.
Is a breakdown by race of the number of books published the appropriate metric? I can think of a number of others
- Consumers of books by race
- Book submissions by race
- Qualified job applicants to publishing houses by race
- Publishing house employees by religion
- Limit the analysis to first books by an author
just to name a few off the top of my head. I assume that some will consider even mentioning such subjects as indicative of overt bigotry. As Joel Stein wrote about who runs Hollywood, that just shows how dumb Americans have become.
Let’s do a little quick comparison. 80% of NBA players are black while 45% of basketball fans are black. I don’t believe that’s indicative of anti-white racism. I think it’s a sign that more blacks try harder to play basketball, starting at very young ages, than whites.
Do I think there’s racism involved in publishing? Sure. But I also think that publishers will not ignore a C note left lying on the table just because of the race of the person that put it there.
I’m confused. Is the study concerning authors “of color “, or only those determined to be Black? Are “white “ author’s considered to have no ethnicity for this comparison?
Were prolific authors such as Bill Cosby included even though their product is considered light?
Many African Americans produce entertaining material without a great deal of traditional education. People are different.
That’s diversity. Do the study’s authors want to do away with diversity?
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VkgAAOSwxydZqmgu/s-l140.jpg
Of those 7,124 books, how many were written by Jews? Jews are a notoriously literary and intellectual race, and are prolific writers. I would not be surprised if a majority of the books were written by Jews. And how about the editors selecting books for publishing? Book publishing and the arts are attractive careers for Jews, and they are good at it.
Black dominate basketball and football, because they have ON AVERAGE bodies and physical abilities more appropriate to those sports. There is no reason to believe any bias went into staffing these sports, especially at the professional level. Practice alone does not account for the dominance of blacks in those sports.
Similarly, suppose a neurosurgeon needs an IQ of 145 to be successful. IQ’s are distributed more or less normally. The Jewish mean IQ is about 115, so about 2.8% of Jews qualify. The white mean IQ is 100, so only 0.14% qualify. And with an average IQ of 85, only 0.0032% of blacks qualify. Numerically that is 1,300 blacks, 311,000 whites, and 168,000 Jews
Your brain surgeon will most likely white, but there is a good chance he will be Jewish.
My family dentist is a black Nigeria (Ibo?) whose family immigrated some time ago. He got his DDS at Ohio State University. He is quite good and amiable.
The refusal to acknowledge the reality of human biodiversity and the reality of race leads to all sorts of conundrums and to stupid behavior.
Here’s one you won’t find in the library.
The Middle Five
Authored by Francis La Flesche.
Born on the Omaha reservation in 1847, he was raised in traditional ways but later became proficient in English and wrote this book in 1900.
Many books are written about Indians but this one is straight from the horse’s mouth.
He’s not Hemingway, but he was there and lived his books.
Two points. First, success is not closely correlated with IQ. It is closely correlated with socio-emotional development. That’s as true in the professions as in anything else. Second, the threshold IQ for the professions is 115. The median IQ for a physician is around 125. Standard deviation is around 15 points. People with high IQs frequently find the practice of medicine too boring. My nephew, by coincidence a neurologist, probably has an IQ around 145. He mostly teaches.
I suspect that the retort of someone who believes in Critical Race Theory is that IQ tests are racist. I don’t think they’re precisely racist and I do think (unlike some) that they measure something real but I think that what they measure is at least in part cultural. A lot more is cultural than people realize. For example, linear rational thinking is clearly culturally-mediated.
The Middle Five is a pretty famous book.
Whites having no ethnicity was my oblique reference to Jews, who are apparently considered just white. The study was conducted to find discrimination against AA’s, and surprise, they found that.
Oh? Didn’t know that. To.
My point or at least part of it was that, if you want people who look and think more like you to get published, go to work for a publishing house. If there’s a barrier, that’s it. These days I suspect it’s harder to get a job with a publishing house than to get published.
On a side note if you look at the areas that Jews got into in the early 20th century they had something in common: low or no barriers to entry. Erecting barriers to entry is a way of pulling the ladder up after you.