The title of this post came from the title of the most recent post over at On the Wrong Side of the Alligator.
The simple answer to the question is “Yes. Absolutely.” The publishers who put an author in the black section solely because of the race of the author do it every day; if they didn’t feel they could justify it, they wouldn’t bother separating the titles based on skin color to begin with. They point to their own sales figures which show them, apparently, that the best chance a black author has is to be marketed as a black author, regardless of the content of the author’s work. Their justification is based on sales figures that show them how successful the AA niche is for black writers, and for some reason, they have become unable to see a difference between a black writer’s work and work that is specifically geared for the AA niche.
That’s wrong. I’m not defending the practice: It’s racism. There’s no way around that obvious point to anyone who takes a moment to consider the matter objectively.
Unfortunately, business doesn’t always allow complete objectivity: businesses want to make money. And those businesses who are making money by segregating authors of color regardless of their subject matter are only looking at the figures they already have convinced themselves tell the whole story, whether they do or not.
In television, I deal with consultants who like to do a lot of market research. One of the things they ask news consumers to do is rank the kinds of stories that have the most interest. They come up with categories like “Breaking News,” “Breaking Weather,” “Your Local Forecast,” “School Stories,” and other categories. Somewhere in the list is the category, “Sports.” Naturally, most people put things like “breaking news” near the top. Sports ends up, usually, near the bottom.
This leads some local stations to cut their sports segements down to maybe two minutes on a good day, or even to knock them out of some shows completely. The research convinces the consultants that no one cares about sports. But that’s not what the research shows: it merely shows that people care about other things more than sports. (Look at the success of networks like ESPN and tell me that no one cares about sports!)
Sure, there’s a big difference between race and the content of a newscast. But in this example, there is no difference in the way research and sales figures (or ratings) are being misinterpreted. It’s flawed conclusions from research taken too literally that leads to situations like this.
To get it back to the example at hand, one of the complaints black authors who have been treated this way have expressed is that by being segregated into the African-American niche market, they are being excluded from exposure by up to 85% of book customers who don’t buy AA books; they’re walking into the marketplace with the disadvantage of getting only 15% of the market if they’re a complete success.
A valid complaint, indeed.
But let’s take that scenario and reverse it: if a publisher believed that the book could be a financial success as a mainstream-marketed work, why would that publisher settle for shelving it in a corner and thereby shutting out more than three-fourths of potential buyers? Let’s say you owned a business and you made a product that you genuinely believed would be embraced by all segments of the population. Would you then market your product to such a specific clientele — and only that clientele — to guarantee that you’d only get exposure to a fraction of the customer base?
The very idea is so ridiculous that it’s laughable. And therein lies the problem: for publishers to have reached this point so easily, it’s clear that their sales figures and marketing research — to their experts — must justify the practice. Otherwise, one would have to wonder why they’d go to the expense of publishing a book and then “hide” it from the majority of book customers.
That doesn’t, in any way, make the practice right. But understanding how they reached a point doesn’t require one to agree that the point is the right place to be.
Defining “Justification”
What concerns me is that there seems to be no difference between looking for the reason racism is happening so regularly in the publishing industry and advocating it. What does it mean to “justify” racism?
If you search for the logic in such a practice, are you automatically setting out to prove that the practice is okay? No. If you determine why the publishers feel it’s the right thing to do — despite the fact that it clearly isn’t the right thing to do — are you then advocating what they’re doing? Of course not. In fact, you may well be providing a more convincing argument about how wrong the practice is.
The color of your skin shouldn’t determine what shelf your novel lands on in a book store. And the color of your skin shouldn’t determine which side of this issue you must be on, either. I think that is being lost in the anger of the discussion.
Early on, when I tried to ask why publishers would market the work of black authors as “AA” without regard for the content of the story, and suggested that they must think that’s the best way they can sell those titles, some assumed that I was advocating this practice. I wasn’t…then or now.
The same thing happened to J.A. Konrath, who made similar points that I made, and was then jumped on for “defending” the practice. But this reaction is like accusing a prosecuting attorney who digs for the suspect’s motive in a crime of being an advocate of first-degree murder!
The reality is that racism always requires ignorance and often requires hatred. Sometimes the hate is a direct result of ignorance, but it doesn’t have to be.
While there certainly seems to be a good deal of ignorance in operation here, based on an obvious lack of research that shows that a mainstream novel which happens to have been written by a black writer could sell just as well as work written by a white writer, I don’t see hate in the publishers’ motives. Maybe it’s there and I’m missing it, but it just seems more logical to me that if black authors were hated by the publishing industry, the publishers wouldn’t buy their work at all.
And the lack of any obvious hate-based “conspiracy” is important to recognize: Mere ignorance can be fixed; blind hate is a much harder obstacle to clear.
Finding the reason the publishers are segregating the work of black authors without regard to the content of the work still doesn’t make what they’re doing right. But in exposing their justification for it, we should have a starting point to begin to deconstruct their preconceived notions about what is and isn’t salable.
Indeed, the acknowledgment that racism is occurring shouldn’t be the end of the discussion. There are no points to be awarded for such a conclusion. That acknowledgment should only be the beginning of a bigger discussion: what to do to convince publishers that their methods are wrong?
That’s the difference between justifying something and advocating it.