Authors: Skin Color or Talent?

As I writer, I struggle with a number of things: finding the time to write, finding the inspiration to write, stopping myself from obliterating everything I’ve written in one fell swoop of my editing marker, and so much more. But the biggest struggle I have is not so much with the writing itself but with the color of my own skin.

Authors: Skin Color or Talent?

Like most writers, I read a lot. I’ve described this tendency to be gluttonous, or more complimentary, voracious. However, one thing most readers can agree on is that there is not a whole lot of ethnic or racial diversity in protagonists out there. Nevermind the clear racial bias in the authors that make it to the top-shelf magazines and newspapers. Roxane Gay and her assistant undertook the massive project of identifying the race/ethnicity of the authors of the 742 books that had been reviewed by the New York Times as of 2011, and what they found was positively offensive. Of the total 742 books, 655 of those were written by non-Hispanic Caucasians.

There is a disparity of almost 20% between the racial makeup of the United States and the racial makeup of the authors reviewed. This is certainly not due to the lack of writers or a lack of talent. Given that editors and agents are the key to getting published, is the first line of discrimination drawn by their hands? Is there a way to counteract this bias? I don’t have any hard statistics for it; there’s simply no way to know the racial/ethnic identity of every author of every submission that has ever gotten into the hands of an editor or agent. But it does make you wonder.

In the event that you do find a prominent non-white author, you will find that their work is treated like a zoo animal. They’re not being published or p...

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...kin, but there’s an overtly sexual connotation to that way of describing someone. Instead, you can go the wood route of deep mahogany and chestnut brown, but that sounds more like a table than a human being. Go the animalistic route of sleek panther-like human beings and once again, it’s dehumanizing and reducing these characters to wild creatures.

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The hardest part of this is that I don’t have an answer for any of the questions I’ve raised. I only have more questions. As a writer, do you write ethnically/racially diverse characters? Does the race or ethnicity of your characters play a large or small part in the works you write? How do you avoid cliches or stereotyping? If you’re a person of color, do you feel that your race/ethnicity hurts or helps (or doesn’t affect at all) your chances of getting published? What are your experiences with racial bias in writing?