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In the light of this Telegraph piece accusing the Arts Council of 'virtue signalling' (which I saw via @tobikyere) I feel it's apt to share how toxic an environment the Arts space is for people of colour or from working class or disabled backgrounds. https://twitter.com/TeleTheatre/status/1276970123715362824?s=19
I've been working in publishing for close to 20 years and @flippedeye has had Arts Council support for just 4 of our 19+ years, yet every other publisher or critic (read white) we meet at events etc assumes we exist because the Arts Council funds us.
That's the first manifestation of fragility or entitlement in any of these spaces. They assume you're in the space cos a CONCESSION was made as a result of your difference - not because you merit your place. Yes, you fall under "disability/working class/Black phantom work-done"
At a talk I gave at the Southbank Centre in 2008/2009 (I think I was invited by @Natteitler & @Malikabooker was in the audience) some woman had the nerve to get up - under the guise of asking a question - to say her artist daughter would have more opportunities if she were Black.
That's the type of rampant, normalised, mainstream, public hostility Black creatives and cultural figures experience. It's major, it's daily, it's unrelenting and yet we are told it's not happening. Basically, you're doing a job very well, but you have the job as a favour!? What?
Normally, I would have ignored her comment, but as primary or secondary editor for many women writers who are Black or of colour or working class, who had struggled in the industry for years before getting their work out, I did.
I don't even remember what I said, but it had some element of throwing her voice back at her, reframed in parameters her unacknowledged privilege could 'see'. I asked her if she'd written her comment down before speaking since she was denigrating freestyling. & she turned red...
Imagine your only consequence being public blushing! How could she know of writers whose uni lecturers were hostile & put down their writing only to claim them publicly when they've graduated & made it? These things happen to Black & Brown women. It doesn't give "opportunities"!
It's the same assumptions that underlie the view that many other publishers & critics (read white) hold of @flippedeye. How can we be publishing all these people without being completely reliant on @ace_national? The answer is simple. The work means something to us. We want to.
The key is efficient use of funds. We did mouthmark series - début pamphlets for @NickMakoha, @InuaEllams, @DeniseSaul, @jsamlarose, @Malikabooker, @stillSHErises, Janett Plummer & @warsan_shire - on a fraction of a fraction of the funding Faber got for imitation Faber New Poets
I pretty much stopped going to industry events cos I was tired of people being stunned that we publish writers of any heritage (there must be some unwritten rule that Black folk can only edit Black writers...) You can only have the same convo so many times w/o turning to alcohol!
Reviewers and book buyers are a whole other story. One book buyer was warm by email, but after we met and the name Parkes could no longer hide my Blackness, my emails got no more responses. Reviewers whom I'd met socially would ask for books and when I sent them... silence!
At festivals and book readings, publishers would come up and try to poach our writers. Sometimes they'd speak to the writers, sometimes they'd come to me and tell me the writer deserved a bigger platform. With confidence! Yet, I knew we were selling more books than they were...
They never tried to poach our white writers - either because they wanted to tick diversity boxes or because they felt our white writers were somehow tainted by being with a Black publisher. But, Nick, Jessica, Inua, Malika, Roger, Warsan... yeah, we see you!
Some publishers were extra bold and wrote to us. Three in particular. Medium-large sized publishers. I'm sharing here screenshots from one of those conversations so you can see the audacity and the coded racism in what were supposed to be benign interactions.
I'll let you guess what year this was, but someone explain what "flipped eye could handle sales to SPOKEN WORD venues and OTHER kinds of places where she might be working..." means? Is that Black? low culture? Working class? Ghetto? I really need a non-race translation!
...then they move on to brag about royalties when we pay better royalties. @flippedeye has never paid royalties of less than 12% on full collections or prose work regardless of the discount we sell at. We make sure we negotiate discounts that allow us to pay or we pull out!
I think that in spite of a certain degree of shade, my reply was rather generous - given that I could see right through the coded classicism and racism in the original message...
...but look at the speed and degree of backtracking (read gaslighting) that happens in the follow up. Let's just say it's been years and I have not responded. I have a simple rule: if you gaslight me, you cease to exist...
Bottom line @Telegraph & @TeleTheatre need to fix up & stop being platforms for people to express fragility w/o having the context of what it takes for a Black, disabled or working class creative to even EXIST in the space. People drop out of conservatories cos of hostility!
