White writers and characters of color, part two

Two weeks ago, I posted some thoughts about white writers creating stories about characters of color. It was a meditation born of several things, among them the fact that I am a white writer who often writes about characters of color, the fury around American Dirt, and the recent selection by the publishing house I work for of a book of short stories by a white writer about black kids in Baltimore, stories born out of his twenty-two years of work there. 

This is just a very brief addendum to say that Adam Schwartz, the winner of our contest this year and soon-to-be author of The Rest of the World, published his own apologia for writing stories about characters of color recently. 

I'll let his commentary speak for itself for the most part, but I wanted to add something he shared with me. I wrote that he had been told by a potential editor that his book was wonderful (it is), but that she couldn't see how she could publish it "in the current climate." Adam told me this week that it was an agent, not an editor, although really, in publishing, you need one before you can get the other, usually. He also showed me a lengthy piece of the email he got from that editor. It was pretty devastating. He asked me not to share more than a short piece of it. 

Basically, she praised his book, but then said that, among other things, there is a cultural movement now to let diverse voices tell their own stories, and while this movement is important and a necessary corrective, it might overreach at times. The final line she told him was that "at this cultural moment, it’s hard for me to imagine being an effective advocate for The Rest of The World. For this reason, as much as I admire it, I think I need to step aside."

I've said this already, but I don't want to act like there is some phantom reverse racism going on in publishing. There isn't. Adam eventually got his book published with us. You could say it all worked out. But I think it's clear there is suspicion and trepidation about white writers and characters of color. Maybe that suspicion is justified, and maybe there is still space to earn your right to write those stories as a white writer, but after American Dirt, I think it's going to be even harder to earn it. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that this particular novel got the emperor's clothes treatment by one reviewer after another until someone finally called it out for being naked. There are a lot of books like Adam's that are going to have a hard time being read now because someone pushed the wrong book by the wrong white writer.