64 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Soapbox
Maybe it’s because
I’ve spent so much of my
life as “the only one” that
I’m attuned to the sub-
tleties of discrimination.
Being the only black
child in my elementary
school classes, I was often
the only one in trouble
with my white teachers.
My college offered spaces
for people of color, but
there were white stu-
dents who complained
that our protests about unarmed black
people shot by police were “too loud.”
Working in a corporate job as an editor,
the greatest difficulty was convincing
white coworkers and supervisors that
books I wanted to acquire featuring char-
acters with brown skin were worthy.
“I didn’t connect with the character”;
“The plot didn’t have enough tension”; “I
didn’t find the story relatable”: often
times, these are phrases said by white
readers who can’t connect with a character
of color because they haven’t been asked
to in the way that so many people of
color are regularly asked to connect with
white characters. Many speculative books
feature stories of slavery and discrimina-
tion and oppression but no people of color.
Our stories and settings are taken because
they are deemed exciting—the stories of
underdogs rising from the ashes—but our
society teaches us that brown skin isn’t
worth a featured role. People of color
aren’t often afforded the opportunity to
tell our stories with main characters that
look like us.
Fantasy and science fiction novels are
metaphors for our world. If a speculative
book looks at our world through the eyes
of a marginalized person, white readers
might not connect with that character,
because they haven’t faced racism. They’re
not excited by a plot where black and
brown characters must fight white oppres-
sors, because they have to see themselvesas the villain rather than
the hero. They see a main
character that doesn’t look
like them, and without
quite knowing why, they
don’t find the story
relatable.
After the first Hunger
Games movie came out,
racist fans were shocked to
learn that Rue, a major
character and friend of
Katniss, is black.
“Awkward moment when
Rue is some black girl and not the little
blonde innocent girl you picture,” one
viewer wrote on Twitter.
This mentality prevails. If a book fea-
tures a character whom white readers
can’t conceive of as relatable, they decide
the book simply isn’t good. They don’t
realize they’re centering the book’s worth
on their own identity and ignoring the
possibility that the book wasn’t written
for them, in the same way that most
stories I read growing up featuring all
white, straight, and cis protagonists
weren’t written for me.
To create more diverse lists, publishers
with overwhelmingly white teams need to
see and understand this, first and fore-
most: sometimes, books just weren’t
written for them. If a story isn’t relatable
to their own life, it doesn’t mean the book
isn’t good. It means that they and the
writer view the world through different
lenses. To publish more diverse lists across
the board, including science fiction and
fantasy, publishers need to hire diverse
editors who might relate to and connect
with more diverse stories, so that they can
help to put those much-needed books into
the world. ■© ashlee cainWe Need
Diverse
Editors
“To create more diverse lists, publishers with overwhelmingly white teams need to see and
understand this, first and foremost: sometimes, books just weren’t written for them.”An author argues that
publishers should hire
more diverse editors,
since white editors often
don’t relate to stories
about people of colorBy Kacen Callender
I’m one of the lucky few authors who have
had the chance to see the inside of the
publishing process firsthand. I worked for
a Big Five publishing house for about five
years. I’ve seen the way previous sales and
comparable titles factor into the decision
to buy a book, along with many discus-
sions about how much a publishing team
does or doesn’t love a project. “The team
just didn’t love it enough to make an
offer” was a phrase I often heard.
For much of those five years, I was the
only black person at the table in meetings
and one of the few people of color. Our
office was actually more diverse than sim-
ilar imprints. I was glad that I had a chance
to make my voice heard. Still, I struggled
with the challenges of being the only one.F
or a few years, I was the only black
local student at a private school on
St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin
Islands, and I was the only black student
in some college classes on an overwhelm-
ingly white campus. My experiences of
being “the only one” are what helped
shape my fantasy novel Queen of the
Conquered as I looked at the complexities
of privilege and oppression through a
Caribbean-inspired fantasy lens.Kacen Callender is the author of the Lambda
Literary Award–winning middle grade novel
Hurricane Child and the YA novel This Is
Kind of an Epic Love Story. Queen of the
Conquered is their first adult novel, out from
Orbit on November 12.