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A Few Statistics on the Extreme Whiteness of the Book Industry
‘We were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data’
When Toni Morrison worked as an editor at Random House from 1976 to 1983, about 3% of the books published during that time were written by Black authors. After Morrison left to focus on her writing career, that number dropped significantly: Between 1984 and 1990, Random House published only two books by Black authors, one of whom was Morrison.
After a summer when anti-racist books and books by writers of color climbed the New York Times bestsellers list, the newspaper decided to do a deep dive into racial inequity in the book publishing industry. This was always a portrait of astonishing Whiteness, but the study’s authors were still shocked by what they found. They’d set out to answer the question: How many writers from major publishing houses—in this case, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday, HarperCollins, and Macmillan—identify as a person of color?
The result: “Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.”
