Embracing Differences

摘要

Literature has a diversity problem. So does Hollywood, the Fortune 500, Congress, and most of America. This shows that the literary industry isn't going to solve its diversity problem on its own, because another name for the problem is pervasive structural inequality in American society. Centuries of exploitation, discrimination, marginalization, and ghettoization have left their residue throughout American culture and on the American psyche. The literary world has dealt at least somewhat with that history, publishing a significant, if still inadequate, number of books that address things like slavery, genocide, conquest, and patriarchy. But those books are written by people like me, authors, who, among being other things, are employees of the literary industry. We don't control the industry itself, even if the industry couldn't exist without us.