Jessica V Aragon (@JVA_writes\X) "tweeted" that she: "[...] spent the last year recording every english [sic] language fiction deal in Publisher's Marketplace [...]"
Fig. 1 (Source: @JVA_writes\X)
And after "[...] googling over 4000 authors [...]" she was able to post the "[...] current book deal landscape [...]", which revealed that (approximately) 70% of the books deals that occurred between October 2022 and October 2023 were dealt to white authors. (See Fig. 1)
Fig. 2 (Source: @JVA_writes\X)
In addition, Aragon found that, with the exception of graphic novels and pictures books, white writers dominated every genre. For example, book deals involving the the mystery, horror, and fantasy genres were, over 80% of the time, given to white writers. (See Fig. 2)
(Note: Aragon tweeted she may have "miscategorized" some data (e.g., "PI authors should be 0.2%, not 0.02%.") but that her post is: "[...] representative of the current publishing landscape.")
Connectedly, Gabi Burton (@query_queen339\X) "tweeted" that "[...] every. single. author [...]" on Barnes and Noble's "Best YA Books of 2023" list is white.
Thus, my (rhetorical) question is: Should BIPOC writers self-publish? At a minimum, maybe BIPOC writers should self-publish (immediately) after being repeatedly rejected by traditional publishers. Otherwise, unless the status quo in the traditional publishing industry changes, manuscripts written my most writers of color may never see the light of day.
Paul Piff, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, did a study where Monopoly players were divided randomly by flipping a coin into rich and poor players.
The rich players were given two-times as much money as the poor players, the rich players got to roll both dice instead of one; therefore, the rich players got to move around the board a lot quicker, and when they passed GO, they collected $200 while the poor and slower players only collected $100.
Consequently, the rich players became more dominant, significantly ruder (e.g., The rich players belittled the poor players.), the rich players were less compassionate, and despite their initial advantage in the game, the rich players acted as if they deserved to win (i.e., The rich players didn't acknowledge that they had a significant advantage in the game.)
Piff related Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2019):
"When you watch patterns of human interactions, people who feel entitled and deserving of their own success, are more willing to privilege their own interests above the interests of other people and often engage in ways that undermines other people's welfare; so, that they can get ahead."
"We translate perceptions and experiences of being better off than others - materially, to being better than others."
Jia Tolentino relates in her New Yorkerpiece "THE AGE OF INSTAGRAM FACE: How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look" that in the last decade there has been a:
[...] gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.
A class of celebrity plastic surgeons has emerged on Instagram, posting time-lapse videos of injection procedures and before-and-after photos, which receive hundreds of thousands of views and likes.
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Americans received more than seven million neurotoxin injections in 2018, and more than two and a half million filler injections. That year, Americans spent $16.5 billion on cosmetic surgery; ninety-two per cent of these procedures were performed on women.
Thanks to injectables, cosmetic procedures are no longer just for people who want huge changes, or who are deep in battle with the aging process—they’re for millennials, or even, in rarefied cases, members of Gen Z. Kylie Jenner, who was born in 1997, spoke on her reality-TV show “Life of Kylie” about wanting to get lip fillers after a boy commented on her small lips when she was fifteen.
1900 William H. West Minstrel Show Poster
But what is additionally (extremely) interesting about these developments is that not too long ago, having "lush lips" was proclaimed to be unattractive and was used to racially stereotype African Americans. But thanks to the Kardashians, non-whites are free to openly admit that full lips and buttocks are actually attractive.
Kylie Jenner Lip Fillers | Before and After
Coincidentally, this weekend's edition of the metro (New York City edition) included an article on the spike in lip injections around the holidays.
The subtitle of Margeret Talbot's The New Yorker article "Color Blind" is: "Scholars have known for centuries that Greek and Roman marble figures were routinely covered in bright [white] paint. Why does the myth of their whiteness persist?"
In the text of the article, Talbot shared: "For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public."
This was and is done because there's: "[...] a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish."
This behavior is ironic since, in general, the Romans practiced classism as opposed to racism. Talbot referenced Sarah Bond, a University of Iowa classics professor, who wrote in a Forbes essay: "[...] the Romans generally differentiated people of color on their cultural and ethnic background rather than the color of their skin [...]"
And Talbot wrote: "[...] though ancient Greeks and Romans certainly noticed skin color, they did not practice systemic racism. They owned slaves, but this population was drawn from a wide range of conquered peoples, including Gauls and Germans."
"Pale skin on a woman was considered a sign of beauty and refinement, because it showed that she was privileged enough not to have to work outdoors. But a man with pale skin was considered unmasculine: bronzed skin was associated with the heroes who fought on battlefields and competed as athletes, naked, in amphitheaters."
If not the root, a root of segregation is the vehement objection to interracial relationships.
In Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, a New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award winner, Ibrahim X. Xendi related:
Klan violence was needed to “keep the niggers in their place,” explained Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first honorary “Grand Wizard.” To the Klan, the only thing worse than a Negro was “a white Radical.” But the worst offender was a suspected Black rapist of a White woman. Klansmen glorified White womanhood as the epitome of honor and purity [...]
And Robert Beck wrote in his memoir, Pimp: The Story of My Life:
Greenie, the white man [...] locks all Niggers inside tight stockades [i.e., in prisons and segregated neighborhoods]. He’d love it if the Nigger broads wasn’t locked in there. The white man is scared shitless. He don’t want them humping bucks [i.e., oversexed Black men] coming out there in the white world rubbing their bellies against those soft white bellies [...] That’s the real reason for keeping all the Niggers locked up.
Arguably, the most famous example of the fear of interracial relationships is the Emmett Till case. August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Till, an African-American, was kidnapped, pistol whipped, beaten, shot in the head, and tossed in a Mississippi river by two white men - Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. What did Till do to Bryant and Milam? He didn’t anything to them, but they believed that Till did something to Carolyn Bryant - Roy Bryant’s 21-year-old white wife.
According to Alan Blinder’s New York Times piece, “U.S. Reopens Emmett Till Investigation, Almost 63 Years After His Murder”:
[...] the events leading to the attack has repeatedly shifted. One account had the boy only insulting her verbally. In court, but without jurors present, she claimed that Emmett had made physical contact with her and spoken in crude, sexual language. She later told the F.B.I. that Emmett had touched her hand.
But when she spoke to the researcher Timothy B. Tyson in 2008, she acknowledged that it was “not true” that Emmett had grabbed her or made vulgar remarks. She told Dr. Tyson, who published a book about the case last year [The Blood of Emmett Till, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Longlist], that “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
However, Christopher Benson’s Chicago magazine piece, "Eyewitness Account: Emmett Till's cousin Simeon Wright seeks to set the record straight", Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin, said that Till whistled at Bryant, “[...] to get a laugh out of us or something.”
Thus, Bryant and Milam were so threatened by a 14-year-old African-American male that they brutally tortured and killed him for allegedly whistling at a white woman. And to send a message to other African-Americans, even though Bryant and Milam confessed to murdering Till, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
Even housing African-Americans in nearby low-income projects was unacceptable to some whites. In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein wrote:
[...] the Reverend Constantine Dzink, pastor of the King Catholic Church, wrote in opposition to the United States Housing Authority building the Sojourner Truth public housing project for African American families in Detroit [in 1941]: The “construction of a low-cost housing project [...] would jeopardize the safety of many of our white girls.”
And most recently, what did John Kovach Jr., a white Lorain, Ohio police officer, do after he discovered this past summer that his 18-year-old daughter had brought to life one of his greatest nightmares, per Katie Nix’s article in the The Chronicle-Telegram and a video:
“[...] he abused his authority by conducting a traffic stop on his daughter’s [African-American] boyfriend without cause and temporarily detained his daughter and her boyfriend in the back of his squad car.”
And Kovach threatened to frame the African-American teen.
“Have a seat in my car. We’ll make (expletive) up as we go.”
Obviously, the segregated neighborhoods in Lorain weren’t working; thus, Kovach tried the second method of keeping white women away from African-African men - prison.
In addition, Xendi wrote:
Klansmen religiously believed that Blacks possessed supernatural sexual powers, and this belief fueled their sexual attraction to Black women and their fear of White women being attracted to Black men. It became almost standard operating procedure to justify Klan terrorism by maintaining that southern White supremacy was necessary to defend the purity of White women.
Interestingly, (some) white men feared that white women would be attracted to Black men due to their "supernatural sexual powers"; thus, Klansmen condoned segregation as a way to prevent white women from seducing Black men.
The Greatest Fear of (Some) White Men
In The Guardian, David Olusoga wrote in his review of Stamped from the Beginning:
The causal thread of American racism, Kendi suggests, runs in the opposite direction to the way we normally presume. Racist ideas [e.g., oversexed African-American males] are manufactured to justify racial policy [e.g., segregation of white women].
Frank Rich reported in his New York magazine piece "Oklahoma Was Never Really O.K." that:
[...] the most lethal race riot in American history [took place in Oklahoma]. The match that sparked the flames was the usual — a black man was falsely accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.The official death toll was 36, but a 2001 study corrected it to between 100 and 300. All but one of the neighborhood’s blocks were destroyed, including nearly 1,300 homes and almost 200 businesses; some 8,000 residents were rendered homeless. Much as whites had looted the possessions of Indians evicted under the Indian Removal Act some 70 years earlier, so white Oklahomans helped themselves to the bounty of Greenwood’s affluent households. The culprits were let off as Curly was, no doubt under some spurious rationalization of “self-defense.”
That conflagration was still within recent memory at the time Oklahoma! arrived on Broadway in 1943. Or would have been had it not been purged from the record. And I mean literally purged. The dead were tossed into the Arkansas River and unmarked mass graves. News accounts were cut out of the Tulsa Tribune before they were assembled into bound reference volumes. The incident was not a part of the Oklahoma public schools’ curriculum until 2000, and only recently entered American-history textbooks. Any physical remnants of that 1921 inferno had long since been bulldozed by the time I passed through.
[UPDATE 03/24/2021]
There's a scene in Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) where J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) justifies assassinating Fred Hampton by implying to FBI Special Agent Roy Mitchell that a consequence of not stopping the Black Panther Party and Fred Hampton would be that Mitchell's daughter could bring a "negro" home and that there would be widespread rape, pillage, and conquer of (young) white women.
"When you look at [Fred] Hampton think of [your white daughter] Samantha, because that's what's at stake if we lose this war. And our entire way of life. Rape. Pillage. Conquer. You follow me?"
The July 23, 2018 issue of The New Yorker contains the article "The Big Question: Is the World Getting Better or Worse?". This excerpt from the piece describes the mantra "Bad and Better", which may be the best way to view racism in the US:
