Well here we go again. Right on the heels of the diversity controversy that plagued the Oscars, it looks like the next target is the publishing industry. Evidently, people who write aren’t diverse enough either.
Award-winning English author Bali Rai, who is of Indian background, believes that just as Hollywood and the Academy Awards are gatekeepers for representing only select ideas and talent on the silver screen, the publishing industry is guilty of the same on the shelves of Western bookstores.
He tells the AFP:
Publishing in the UK is a white, middle and upper class monolith. Britain is 14 percent non-white, yet how many authors reflect that? If it's more than 0.5 percent, I'd be shocked…It is a sad fact that non-white people, the LGBT community and many more do not see themselves in UK fiction from childhood. So many -- including me to begin with -- grow up thinking that books are about middle and upper class white people.
Apparently Rai believes that “people like me don’t become authors.” He adds:
It's about more than racism in society -- although that exists -- it's about publishers being unwilling to think outside of their narrow ivory-tower worlds and break with tradition .Imagine if Harry Potter had been called Harish Patel or Hamza Pathan, for example? Would those books have been published, never mind become the mega-successes that they became? Right now, in the UK, the answer is no.
Rai acknowledges J.K. Rowling's first book was rejected by many publishing houses, but insists "no ethnic minority authors or characters" would be able to make such an impact.
Rai concedes that although diversity is being discussed more in publishing, the industry is only paying lip service to the idea, with token minority authors, rather than making wholesale changes to improve the situation.
He warns this reluctance to take risks, challenge orthodoxy, and seek out unheard voices in society is not only failing aspiring writers, but readers as well.
"If I were dictator for a day, and could change publishing…I would give my entire advertising budget to the rebels and the risk-takers, and the least represented," Rai claims, adding: "It might not make as much profit possibly, but it would add much more to literature."
