Holding up the ethnic minority mirror
Though Malorie Blackman‘s essay in the Guardian is more strictly applicable to UK publishing, it can be extended here as well, considering that the number of people of ethnic minorities who work in the publishing industry are very, very few. “I’ve always loved reading but, in all the thousands of books I read as a child, not one of them featured a black child like me. Not one,” Blackman writes. “My major reason for becoming a writer of children’s books was because I wanted to write all the books I’d missed as a child. All the different types of stories where the protagonists were black but the story was not about their colour, their whole colour and nothing but their colour. For this I’ve been accused of copping out and evading the issue. Could we please get away from this idea that the only thing [black & ethnic minority] writers can or should write about is racism?”
More to the point, she calls for more diversity in publishing. “What we need in publishing is not just more BME writers, but more BME editors, art designers, sales, marketing and production managers. It never once occurred to me before my mid-20s that I could become a writer, because I couldn’t see myself reflected anywhere within the publishing industry. And though the will is now there to be more inclusive, in actual practice not that much has changed. But as I said, the will is now there and that’s a start.”
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