![]() Who wins the major prizes? Who gets coverage in major magazines? So shows that “91 percent of novelists who win major awards, such as the Pulitzer,” and “90 percent of the most reviewed novelists” are white. Instead, he constructs his map of cultural redlining through a robust, multifaceted consideration of the publishing industry. So does not rely solely on data about which authors are published through mainstream publishing houses. So notes that many might expect Random House to “present the least amount of racial inequality between white and black authors” because it is the publishing house that hired Morrison (“the industry’s most prominent black editor”), “published Ellison, Stokely Carmichael, and Toni Cade Bambara,” and “brought out The Black Book.” However, So challenges this perception by surveying publishing data from 1950 to 2000 he finds that 97 percent of authors published by Random House during that period were white. Throughout Redlining Culture, So draws this map, providing facts and figures that bear out the truths Morrison knew firsthand. But what does all of that look like as a type of empirical structure or map? If we could draw the American literary field like a midcentury map, what red lines could we see? What patterns of enclosure, domination, and isolation would we find? We know all that as a kind of talk, as a series of historical anecdotes or stories. ![]() We are aware that “ook prizes might recognize a breakout star like Toni Morrison but almost no one else.” However, we don’t actually know what shape these exclusions take in terms of data points. We know about much of the racism inherent in the publishing industry, such as the ways that “book reviewers at elite magazines like the New Yorker prefer to talk about white male authors and rarely review” authors from underrepresented groups. It was a pattern, a thick line that walled off nonwhite writers from the coveted resources of not only lucrative book contracts but also book reviews, literary awards, and bestsellerdom. But it was hard to see: it was no single publisher, editor, marketer, reviewer, prize committee, or reader. That structure was the real problem, and she felt it all around her. So tells us that he believes Morrison felt she was not successful as an editor becauseĪll of individual achievements were still not enough to offset a larger structural problem. So coins the term “cultural redlining” and links it to the literary publishing market and to Toni Morrison’s experience as an editor at Random House. The concept of redlining, the discriminatory practice through which people in certain communities - typically those with high numbers of low-income Black and Brown residents - are denied access to financial services such as bank loans, is often discussed as one of the most devastatingly effective forms of racial discrimination in the United States. Given the resilience of “acial inequality, as a main feature of postwar literary production and reception,” he argues that we can, and must, do better. In this gift of a book, So challenges racial hegemony and discrimination in the publishing industry - and, by extension, in the country at large. “hrough every phase of the literary field,” he explains, “from production (publishing) to reception (book reviews) to distinction (book sales and prizes), white authors exercise a distinct racial command” over authors from underrepresented groups. Deploying tools from economics, cultural analytics, data analysis, and more conventional close-reading, he shows us just how racially stagnant the mainstream publishing industry has been, and continues to be, despite its proclamations of improvement. ![]() In his new book, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2021), Richard Jean So interrogates and dismantles that claim. THE NOTION THAT the publishing industry historically favored white authors but became increasingly inclusive following World War II has been circulated for decades. ![]()
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