Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson

fact are not prejudiced. How many books by writers of colour do you think you’ll find on their bookshelves? I’d lay odds that if there are any at all, they will be far outnumbered by the books by white authors. Not necessarily because those readers are deliberately choosing mostly white/male authors. They don’t have to. The status quo does it for them. So those readers’ self-satisfied “I don’t know” is really an “I don’t care enough to look beyond my nose.”
    And that’s cool. So many causes, so little time. But don’t pretend that indifference and an unwillingness to make positive change constitute enlightenment. If you truly want to be a colourblind, unprejudiced reader, you can’t do so from a place of being racism-blind, or you’ll never have the diverse selection of authors you say you’dlike. Why get pissed off at people who are fighting for the very thing you say you want?
    Yet I don’t think there’s some conspiracy of evil racist editors. There doesn’t have to be. The system has its own momentum. In order to be antiracist, you actually have to choose to do something different than the status quo. People who’re trying to make positive change (editors and publishers included) have a hell of a battle. Fighting it requires a grasp of how the complex juggernaut of institutionalised marginalisation works, and what types of intervention will, by inches, bring that siege engine down.
    We’re in a genre that is heavily invested in the romance of the individual villain and the lone hero who defeats that villain. We want to know who the bad guy is. Dammit, we want someone to blame! And there are people who say and do racist things, consciously in ignorance. You can try to change them, or to limit the harm they do. These are useful and necessary actions. But pulling the weed doesn’t destroy the root system, and what do you do when you realise that we are all in some way part of that system? I don’t know all the answers. I’m sure that some of what I say here is going to come back to haunt me with its ignorance or naiveté. Remember when Robert Silverberg published that essay about why the stories of James R. Tiptree, Jr. (pen name of Alice Sheldon) could only have been written by a man? I’m impressed by how graciously he later acknowledged that he’d been wrong. That’s a grace to which I aspire. I have a feeling I’ll need it.
    There are those who fear that if books get published according to some kind of identity-based quota system, literary excellence will suffer. What seems to be buried in the shallow grave of that concept is the assumption thatthere are no good writers in marginalised communities. That huge prejudice aside, there is some validity to the fear. If you want to vary your diet, you put a larger selection of foods into your mouth. You don’t toss vitamins into the toilet. The latter would be attacking the problem from the wrong end.
    So to speak. So what would be attacking the problem from the right end?
    A few years ago, when I was about to put out the call for submissions to the anthology
Mojo: Conjure Stories,
I had two equal priorities that the received wisdom in this field says are antithetical: I wanted to choose stories based on the quality of the writing; and I wanted to end up with an anthology (about an African diasporic form of magic) that would actually contain a lot of stories by black writers.
    It took me some hard thinking to figure out the flaw in the logic that leads people to think that antiracist diversity and literary quality are mutually exclusive. This is what I came up with: there are many steps to editing an anthology, and they have different priorities. Efforts to broaden the representation have to happen at the beginning of the process, not at the stage where you’re selecting for literary quality. If I wanted black writers to send me their stories, I’d have to specifically invite them. And in an effort to right the systemic imbalance in