Media’s White Savior Complex





Publishing is very white. Despite saying for years that they’ll do something about that—well, the numbers say something different. Lee & Low, publisher of children’s books, did a study they called the Diversity Baseline Study 2.0 (DBS 2.0), an update of a diversity survey done in 2015—when publishers started saying they needed more diversity and inclusivity. The high points: The industry remains 76% white, only a 10% difference from one of the whitest, in the same year—law. Making publishing among the whitest industries.Iwrote a piece on this earlier, and if you want a deeper dive into the statistics, and how publishing is exclusionary, you can get that here. I shared the piece on Twitter, and literary agent and consultant Steven Hutson commented on it, about a piece he wrote for Publisher’s Weekly back in 2018, “Defining Literary Diversity,” and you can check that out here. His piece talks about speakers at the L.A. Times Festival of Books:

No doubt we celebrated diversity that evening — diversity of gender, race, age, religion, and sexual orientation. But diversity of thought or of worldview? Nowhere in sight. Almost every opinion expressed from the podium that night was one-sidedly partisan. The speeches were positively monolithic and uniformly liberal. Hutson is somewhat more conservative than me. But he brings up a good point about why diversity matters — that the goal is diversity of thought and worldview. And not continually coming from what is a very center-neoliberal, very white, and predominantly older and traditional place. Publishing’s age average is the early 40s and mostly upper middle class. In that context, it’s hard to read the kind of gatekeeping publishing does, through its agents and acquisitions editors, as the action of a kind of neoliberal white savior.