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’

Michelle Legro
Momentum

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A customer browses the shelves at Eso Wan Books, a black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles. Photo: Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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.”

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Michelle Legro
Momentum

Deputy Editor, GEN. Previously an editor for Topic, Longreads, The New Republic, and Lapham’s Quarterly. gen.medium.com