Salutary read and REALLY highlights the insular, provincial, unimaginative, blinding whiteness of the publishing industry on both sides of the pond: https://www.vulture.com/amp/article/american-dirt-jeanine-cummins-book-controversy.html

"As Miller and Gurba began to argue over this, one Macmillan staff member blurted out that Cummins had never received any actual death threats."

And how the gaslighting just never ends!

"Prominent readers had praised it in terms worthy of a Nobel Prize."

I read it around this time last year and kept thinking exactly how pedestrian and cliched it was.

Just goes to show how white supremacy impairs literary judgement, eh?

"Her career hits include Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, another divisive best seller written by a white woman from the perspective of characters of color."

In my head, this is her:

“If the author bio influences you one way or another, that’s a problem,” she said. “It should be the work itself that speaks to you.”

This is SUCH bullshit that I can't even....

“I had assumed, based on the way the book had been presented to us, that he was from South or Central America,” one staffer said. “I found out he was Irish after publication day, and I would say my jaw dropped.”

Funny how our identities don't matter...until they suddenly do!

"If the author’s identity were irrelevant, why had Cummins and Einhorn overstated her tenuous connections to Latin America and reached for authenticity as a marketing tool? "

“The problem wasn’t necessarily that she wasn’t Mexican — the problem was that we published the book in a way that we said defined Mexicans.”

OMG! Someone at Macmillan with a brain!

"One of the stops was Blue Willow Bookshop, a store in a mostly Republican neighborhood on the west side of Houston. The owner, Valerie Koehler, a white woman, had loved American Dirt. So had her staff."

THE CRUX: Our stories matter only as trauma and pain porn for whiteness

“We all looked at each other and thought, What did we miss? Are we kind of tone-deaf?”

to:

"The email...was polite and perfunctory, informing Koehler of the fact that he and other local activists planned to protest Cummins’s reading...but she had found it “threatening.”

"It attributed the cancellation of the tour to “threats of physical violence” and “concerns about safety.” (A Macmillan employee told me the company had never received or reviewed any threats but had heard from a handful of booksellers who said that they had.)"

“It made it seem like the people who were upset with her were dangerous, vicious savages,” a Latinx Macmillan employee said. One of the problems with the book itself “was a representation of Latinx people as vicious, dangerous savages,” the employee continued.

I have SO so much awe for minoritised people in this horrendous industry that is publishing. The violence is constant, appalling and never ending.

They are unsung heroes of pushing for cultural change to equality and justice at huge cost to themselves.

"Several Macmillan employees pointedly noted that Einhorn didn’t seem to engage in a similar way. The editor attended an Oprah’s Book Club special dedicated to the conversation and answered a few questions, but for the most part, she seemed to her colleagues to avoid it entirely"

Can anyone imagine a woman of colour being allowed this much leeway in any place of work? This level of unaccountability?

But White Women? The innocence is boundless

"The industry doesn’t collect demographic data on readership, but when agents and editors talk about book-club readers, they tend to have a particular person in mind: “suburban white women ages 35 to 65 who lean liberal,” one agent explained."

Basically Karen is THE reader

“In my experience,” the agent said, “the books that produce this kind of frenzy take something complicated and simplify it so the book-club reader can find some thread of connection to themselves while at the same time feeling protected and safe.”

"The fact that it was written by a white woman was part of that appeal, the agent added. “People are tribal,” she said. “White women would rather listen to a white woman tell them about racism.”

The publishers...might have been oblivious to the nuances of the national conversation around race, but they didn’t misjudge their market. The book spent 36 weeks on the NYT best-seller list; according to BookScan, it was the best-selling novel for adults published in 2020.

This is the problem. Racism sells. Because White Womenlap it up. Why?

Because it reinforces their power adjacency. It reinscribes their privilege at the second step of capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy!

If you mised that yes, that makes them racist.

"A Latinx employee at Macmillan said the book had achieved “exactly what they meant for it to do.” “Publishers are not set up to be moral companies,” they said. “They are set up to sell books to readers.”

Which is why I don't bother with the moral argument. They DON'T CARE!

"But like every industry with economic power in the country, publishing is dominated by white people from affluent backgrounds, and its editors are taught to acquire manuscripts that personally move them."

But hide their bullshit as 'literary merit'

"Several editors and agents told me that discussions in acquisition meetings have undergone a marked shift since the beginning of last year, but others were skeptical about how deep or long-lasting these shifts would be."

"One Macmillan employee put it bluntly: A book like American Dirt “will absolutely happen again.”

I give it till January 2022 max...Whiteness NEVER stops!

"Under Einhorn, Holt will be publishing the paperback edition of American Dirt, along with Cummins’s next book. American Dirt is “a terrific novel and has been embraced by millions of readers,” a publicist for the company said in a brief statement."

8 books recommended by "literary influencer Zibby Owens - a list that perhaps only a white person like herself could have written. The Red Lotus, a thriller by the white writer Chris Bohjalian...Finding Chika, a memoir by the white writer Mitch Albom...and....American Dirt

You know what kills me? Not that publishing is capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchal.

But that it destroys SO many of us by its lies about literary merit and culture and values.

At least the murderous blood diamond folk don't pretend to be do-gooding progressives!

The one positive for me has been @lesbrains's incredible piece that I now teach not only for its razor sharp critical focus but also as a model of great writing for its radical, powerful, extraordinary use of language and form. If you haven't read it, do: https://tropicsofmeta.com/2019/12/12/pendeja-you-aint-steinbeck-my-bronca-with-fake-ass-social-justice-literature/