Published on July 25, 1995
Ever been to a fire in New York City? Or walked by a firefighters’ demonstration? Anybody who’s ever seen a mass of New York’s bravest can’t help but be struck by a blazing demographic trait shared by the hook-and-ladder crowd: they are overwhelmingly white. How white? According to Charles Mann Associates, a research firm that analyzed 1990 census data, more than 88 percent of New York’s 7930 uniformed firefighters are white. Since — as everyone knows — only a minority of the city’s adult population is white, such an unusually high concentration of whites makes “Firefighter” New York’s fourth whitest job occupation. That little fact is one of the city’s startling racial injustices, made more shameful by the fact that firefighters are paid with taxpayers’ money.
There are, however, a few places in New York besides a firehouse where you’re even more likely to encounter nothing but white faces. Your best bet would be a publishing party. According to the same statistics, the whitest occupation in New York (of those jobs with more than 500 workers) is “author.” Almost 93 percent of New Yorkers who call themselves authors are white. The fifth whitest occupation — 84.73 percent, just a shade darker than firefighter — is “reporter/editor.”
Perhaps this comes as a surprise. After all, one of the most enduring American legends of the last decade or so is that the media is left-wing. (It used to be amusingly surreal to hear the media denounced as left-wing by the right-wing commentators who run most of the shows on the electronic media; by now it’s routine.) And since, the conventional logic continues, the media is the enforcer of the left-wing’s political correctness, it is probably overflowing with blacks, Latinos, Asians, and the white leftists who do their bidding. What else would you expect since the media and publishing worlds are headquartered in New York City, the Minority Mecca?
It ain’t necessarily so. In fact, it ain’t even remotely close. The existence of the words “New York” in a magazine’s title is no guarantee that the staff there looks at all like the city’s broader population. New York is approximately 25 percent black and approximately 30 percent Latino; New York is approximately zero percent black and zero percent Latino. And its chief competitor? “For the first five years that I was writing for The New Yorker,” says a longtime contributor, “the closest I ever got to a person of color was a young white fact-checker with dreads.”
While journalism and book publishing are separate businesses with distinct cultures, New York’s print media industries have at least one significant trait in common; like firefighting, they’ve been shielded from the demographic shifts in New York over the last several decades. But while lack of minority representation in firefighting probably has little effect on how fires are put out, the workers who populate the publishing industry exercise tremendous control over a range of social and policy debates — not the least of which, these days, is about the presence of minorities in the workplace, sometimes called (in shorthand) affirmative action. And while affirmative action might get a friendlier hearing among people in publishing than among people who put out fires, the fact remains that the publishing industry resists affirmative action more than most.
Even the friendly hearing is somewhat in doubt. The issue of race in publishing is often met with silence. The silence has official faces. The Magazine Publishers of America, for example, does not keep any statistics about the racial makeup of its constituent members. The silence can also take on a more subtle form: Most of the white editors interviewed for this article were either defensive on the topic or asked to remain anonymous or both.
This is not to say that publishing as an industry has failed to recognize that it has a color problem. On the contrary, a dramatic racial news event will often cause the industry to look at its white makeup and issue calls to do better. “After the King riots,” noted an August 1993 article in the media trade magazine Folio:, “the executive committee of the American Society of Magazine Editors called on the Magazine Publishers of America to work with its members and appropriate minority groups to recruit as many people as possible for hiring by magazines in all departments.’”
The industry might argue that there hasn’t been enough time since the 1992 Rodney King riots for marked improvement in minority hiring. But the article was referring to an ASME proposal from 1968, after riots that erupted from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It is the best estimate of more than a dozen magazine staffers I have interviewed that minority representation in the magazine industry in New York — including such black-targeted titles as Essence — hovers around 8 percent. That figure includes administrative and financial staff; the editorial makeup is estimated at 5 percent.
If the numbers of people of color in the magazine industry as a whole seem sad, the numbers at individual titles are pathetic. In a Nation column in March, Katha Pollitt noted that left-of-center publications are among the worst offenders. She said the Nation has employed one nonwhite editorial staffer in 13 years (she missed one; there have actually been two). The New York Review of Books employs none out of nine. Harper’s Magazine currently employs none out of 14. The Utne Reader, zero out of 12. The Progressive, one out of six. Mother Jones, one out of seven. In These Times, one out of nine. The New Republic, two out of 22. Ms. magazine employs four out of 11 editorial staffers, including the editor-in-chief.
The majority of these magazines also publish few to no columnists or regular writers who are not white.
On this score, the Voice comes out better than most. Depending on the definition of “editorial” (versus “administrative), there are 18 nonwhite staff members out of approximately 80 paid Voice editorial staffers, a considerably higher percentage than most publications in the Voice‘s category. That includes one black woman as features editor and another as chief of research, about as high as people of color ever get in the industry.
In the middle ranks, however, the numbers are less impressive: as of last week, two out of 18 senior editors, two out of 17 staff writers. (Breaking those numbers down a bit more, one senior editor is Asian, one black; while the literary editor is Latino, there are no Latino senior editors or staff writers, and haven’t been for several years.) The Voice currently has no front-of-the-book columnists who are not white, actually a step backward compared to years past.
All the ostensibly liberal publications make a fat target for reasons of hypocrisy. Some are even hypocritical about their hypocrisy. The Harvard-dominated New Republic is an important national magazine that has made several high-level hires in the last few years, all white people; TNR’s idea of affirmative action is accepting some of its interns from Yale. In an April Washington Post story on the whiteness of liberal mags, New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan begged off the hypocrisy charge, pointing out that TNR had “taken an editorial position against affirmative action.” They have not, however, taken an editorial position against hiring people of color; they simply don’t do it. Note the logic here: the only way a person of color is going to be hired at the New Republic is via affirmative action, they don’t believe in affirmative action, ergo, they won’t hire people of color.
It’s difficult to explain exactly why this color gap exists at publications that portray themselves as progressive, and are the first to attack others for institutional discrimination. Jill Petty, a black former Nation staffer who wrote a letter to the editor following Pollitt’s column, describes “a real artificial climate” about race. “People didn’t want to talk about it … It’s like it was up to me to bring it up. There was no vocabulary, no manners.”
Part of the problem in addressing these issues at progressive publications is that many of us white lefties seem to act as if our commitment to liberal or radical politics is enough, that progressivism is like a really high SAT score that gets you out of a remedial class that for others is required. A protective feeling about our fragile institutions sets in; surely, we tell ourselves, there are bigger causes to take on than the fact that Harper’s could use a black editor.
Potential black and Latino reporters are wary of going to work for a paper perceived, in Public Enemy’s lyric, as “The Oldest Continually Published Piece of Shit in the Nation.”
But as burning as the hypocrisy issue is — readers have every reason to expect that the racial makeup of The Nation is more diverse than that of The National Review — the left-of center magazines are hardly the only white-dominated bastions of publishing. In some ways, they are an imprecise target. Liberal mags represent a tiny fraction of overall jobs and revenues in the industry, and their turnover is often so infrequent that they amount to quasi-tenured systems. William Whitworth, editor of The Atlantic Monthly — okay, we’re stretching the definition of “liberal” here — says he has not hired an editor in a decade.
Moving up the economic ladder a bit, to magazines with circulations at or near seven figures, one finds some better integrated staffs. Time magazine says that its staff is approximately 15 percent minority, including one Latino executive editor and one Asian senior writer. Newsweek‘s staff has roughly the same.
But most popular magazines are as bad or worse than the industry standard. “I was hired as senior associate editor at Premiere years ago because Spike Lee insisted on having black journalists on his set,” says writer and editor Veronica Chambers. “It was ridiculous, but I got a job. Before that, they didn’t even have black cleaning people or black secretaries there.”
A trip through the Hearst building in Midtown will turn up entire titles — big, hefty, successful titles like Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping — where no people of color work in editorial.
Rolling Stone, despite a reputation for documenting the hip, employs no writers or editors of color; in the more than 700 issues Rolling Stone has published since 1967, it has published exactly one cover story by a black writer. Officewide, Wenner Media — which includes Rolling Stone, Us, and Men’s Journal — claims a minority employment rate of 15 percent, though the rate for editorial staff is certainly lower. Condé Nast is scarcely better — try finding a black or Latino name on the editorial masthead of Vanity Fair, Mademoiselle, or GQ. The company won’t stoop to defend its nearly all-white staff, cloaking itself in the ultimate denial; senior vice president Paul Wilmot says, “As a private company, we release no statistical information of any kind.”
Making the question of publishing’s glass ceiling more urgent is the fact that, of all marginalized groups, people of color are the last to pull a winning ticket in what Lani Guinier calls America’s “oppression sweepstakes.” When Andrew Sullivan was appointed editor of The New Republic in 1991, it was a breakthrough: a gay white man could edit a national political magazine without — in the eyes of all but the most squeamish observers — turning the magazine into a gay-specific sheet. With Tina Brown editing The New Yorker, white women, too, have “proven” that they can run a large-circulation general interest magazine. There have been no comparable publishing breakthroughs for blacks, Latinos, or Asians.
What’s more, other media industries have had moments of ceding control to people of color. The recent squawk over Connie Chung’s departure from CBS underscores that, however briefly, a Big Three network was willing to place an Asian woman in one of its most visible — and financially important — positions. And remember the black filmmaker vogue of the early ’90s?
Newspaper and magazine editors generally offer the same excuses for the persistent whiteness of their trade. They argue that the reason they don’t put people of color on the covers of “general interest” magazines is that such images don’t sell. Like Gorbachev adorning Vanity Fair — which cut newsstand sales in half — each magazine has its little horror story about the time there was a black person on the cover.
They have less persuasive answers when asked why they don’t put the work of black or Latino writers on their covers. “I haven’t seen anybody whose stuff really blows me away,” says a white editor at a monthly magazine. “I would be more than happy to use a black writer if I thought that he or she was the best person to write on a given subject. But that’s almost never the case.” A slight variation on this rationale is that the handful of minority writers who are known in the magazine editing world are overcommitted, and thus tough to rely on.
It’s hard to underscore how deeply offensive these explanations are. “That’s a load of crap,” says Utrice Leid, a WBAI radio host and former editor of the City Sun. “If I put a bullhorn out the window and shouted for quality black writers, there would be a stampede.”
White editors usually deploy less inclusive recruiting methods. Mostly, they cull from other mainstream publications, which themselves aren’t printing many articles written by people of color. Those editors who regularly read the black press — I found no one who said they consulted any Spanish or Asian-language periodical — say it’s adequate. “Part of the problem is the lack of a farm system,” says one prominent New York editor, who asked to remain anonymous. “In any other area —environmental journalism, academia, politics — there’s one or several excellent magazines or newsletters that we can tap into. Compared to those, the black press is a joke.”
It’s pretty hard to defend the black press. New York’s two weeklies, the Amsterdam News and the City Sun, are erratic and often sloppy. There are talented people working and writing there, but the papers seem unable or unwilling to separate out their occasional scoops and original analysis from the steady flow of rubbish that fills out their pages.
Leid maintains that the mediocrity of the black media is partly due to the fact that they once were farm teams. During the civil rights era, she says, mainstream newspapers and magazines “were embarrassed by their lack of black faces, so they raided the black papers and usurped the talent.” For that and other reasons, she says that “black papers no longer are attractive as plausible careers for beginning writers. The publications are unstable and the reputations are shot.” Some staffers at black periodicals are offended at the suggestion that they should function as a recruitment squad for their white counterparts. “I work just as hard to find and nurture new writers as my white editor does,” one female black editor told me, “and I am not about to start asking, ‘How will this person work in the white press?’”
She needn’t worry. Even if today’s James Baldwin were writing regularly in a niche publication, there’s reason to doubt that he would make the reading list of most white editors. Quasi-academic magazines, such Black Scholar and Reconstruction, often have good material. It’s true that they don’t make much of an impact on any readership, but certainly not on white magazine editors, most of whom shrug at the mention of these journals. Writing off the black press is just one more way of evading black writers.
So if the above explanations are evasions, why don’t editors recruit more writers of color? One Latina woman put it succinctly: “You can’t get in unless you know somebody. And people know people like themselves.” In fleshing out the social element of both journalism and book publishing, almost every person of color I interviewed brought up the same ritual of insularity: the publishing party.
Book parties. Winter holiday parties. Anniversary parties. Pulitzer celebration parties. Your editor’s birthday parties. Democratic convention parties. Last Thursday of the month parties. Magazine-launch parties (that is, through the late ’80s; in the early ’90s they were effectively replaced by magazine-folding parties).
New York’s publishing world is juiced by a seemingly endless stream of booze, ladled — often for free — at bars and galleries and in-house office parties. Somewhere in the city, every night of the week, there’s a semibusiness, semisocial party at which, even if lacking an invitation, a person with some connection to publishing will not be considered wholly out-of-place. These parties are a staple of the industry, the way that casting calls are for actors: trade publications such as Advertising Age and Media Week usually carry a page of party pictures every issue.
More than in most industries, these parties play an essential networking role. Writers need work, editors need writers, everybody needs intelligence on what the ostensible competition is doing. It is a kind of community formation, raising the same problems faced by all community formations. “I think it’s a club,” says Faith Hampton Childs, a black literary agent. “And like most clubs or closed societies of elites it is hesitant to open up to others.”
I have attended, conservatively, 200 of these parties over the last six years. I can say with confidence that there have been fewer than 10 occasions on which there were more than five black people in the room. On many, many occasions, there were precisely two black people in the room — often the same two (you know who you are).
The tokenism of publishing parties is, of course, a reflection of the tokenism within the industry, but in some ways it’s worse. While your publisher may dictate who gets hired, he or she doesn’t dictate everyone who get invited to a “personal” party. “I went to any number of parties and gatherings, and there would be very few people of color,” says former Nation staffer Petty. “I got so tired of people coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re the only black person here.’ And I would say, ‘Don’t tell me, tell the person who put together the invitation list.’”
The all-white New York publishing party becomes a deep symbol of how life and work blend together in an incestuous mix, and how segregated both can become, even in a theoretically diverse city. “You could think you were at the Chevy Chase Country Club in the twilight of 1947, instead of 1995,” says agent Childs. “I get so sick of being the only black person, or one of three in a crowd of 450 people, and having nobody think that there’s anything wrong.”
This topic, of all topics, brings out a defensiveness among white people in the publishing business. To raise the point is automatically to be perceived as critical, and the people who give the parties do not want to be criticized; criticism appears to disrupt the all-important sense of gentility that the publishing party is designed to embody. One editor, who agreed to talk off the record, says, “We have to justify the expense as a reward for our writers and our advertisers, and very few of those people are black or Hispanic. On another level, I think people feel threatened by the anger that black people — rightly or wrongly — represent and they’d just rather not deal with it.” It’s a social catch-22: you won’t get ahead if you don’t go to the parties, but for the most part you won’t get invited to the parties if you’re black or Latino.
The withdrawal of whites in publishing into all-white social enclaves doubtlessly warps their perceptions of the few writers of color whom they do use. That is, publishing’s social apartheid conditions editors to think in race-specific terms. Jill Nelson, the author of Volunteer Slavery, a book about her experiences as one of the few black reporters at The Washington Post, complains, “As a freelancer, I find that the stories I’m asked to do are afterthoughts. I’m the one they call late. It’s almost as if I just began to exist when the white editor called me [to say], ‘give us the Negro perspective.’”
The workplace equivalent of not being invited to the party is not being listened to — even when asked for the “black perspective.” A midlevel black female magazine editor says: “Whenever it’s a ‘touchy’ subject, like welfare or affirmative action, if you don’t like something, you’re being overly sensitive. My opinions are always considered to be emotional whereas a white person making the same argument is considered to have made an intellectual decision.”
Added to this dead end is the role of what Veronica Chambers, lately of The New York Times Magazine and about to begin a Freedom Forum fellowship, calls “being publicly black.” Whenever her magazine printed an article on a black subject, “My phone would ring off the hook on Monday morning.” Angered black readers would call her she says because “I am the one black face that they know.” Soothing tempers “was part of my job, but it wasn’t part of the job of the white person sitting next to me.”
Under these pincerlike pressures, she says, it’s little wonder that the few people of color who break into the magazine industry ever stay. “There’s never anybody senior, there’s never a black managing editor or executive editor. People either hang with that stuff or don’t hang — and most don’t hang.”
By comparison to magazines, most of New York’s daily newspapers have done a decent job of increasing numbers of people of color in their workforces, even at high levels. Progress at The New York Times has been achingly slow, but the paper now boasts of a black op-ed columnist (Bob Herbert) and a black assistant managing editor (Gerald Boyd). Although the Times‘s total minority representation is an iffy 13.7 percent — compared, say, to a surprising 18 percent at The Wall Street Journal — the paper of record has also shown itself willing to give prominent beats covering more than “minority” issues to reporters of color, such as James Dao in the Albany bureau, or Mireya Navarro on AIDS.
The Daily News now has three regular black op-ed columnists (Stanley Crouch, Playthell Benjamin, and E. R. Shipp), a Latino news pages columnist (Juan Gonzalez), and an Asian news columnist (Berry Liu Ebron). Overall, the News has one of the highest minority representations among the nation’s daily papers, approximately 21 percent of its staff. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that the News achieved those figures only under the supervision of the Justice Department, after a Manhattan jury in 1987 found that the paper’s promotion practices were discriminatory. What’s more, the News‘s high figure was achieved in part by mass layoffs.
When it folded this weekend, New York Newsday, probably the city’s most liberal-identified paper, had, along with its Long Island parent, a workforce that was 16. 7 percent minority. Its pages featured Sheryl McCarthy, Les Payne (as columnist and assistant managing editor, though he’s based in Long Island), and Merle English (in the Brooklyn editions). New York Newsday had a black editorial page editor, and listed in its staff directory both “Asian American Issues” and “Latino Issues,” followed by a handful of appropriately named reporters. Because of contract complexities, it is too early to know how the closing will affect the Long Island edition’s racial composition. One Newsday columnist predicted that the paper would become “a little whiter and a little more male than we used to be.”
But even when numbers and visible minority faces have seemed promising, these papers are still far from paradise for people of color. The Times has a tendency to lose its black reporters (such as Michel Marriott to Newsweek, E. R. Shipp to the News, and Gwen Ifill to NBC News), in part, some reporters say, because the wait for meaningful promotion is too long. The News stands charged with disparate treatment of columnists; veteran black columnist Earl Caldwell had a column spiked and, he says, was fired because he hadn’t reported both sides of a racially charged story, while News management publicly supported white columnist Mike McAlary for a similar omission. McAlary is currently the defendant in a libel case for his coverage of a black woman’s rape complaint last year in Prospect Park.
At Long Island Newsday, racial friction recently arose from what is, in New York, a rarity: the hiring of John McGinn, a half Native American trainee assigned to the tabloid’s sports desk. The imminent hire prompted a conversation between Eric Compton and Norman Cohen, both sports copy desk editors, about whether it would now be acceptable to wear a Chicago Blackhawks jersey in the office. While details of the conversation are disputed, in January, Compton, 44, was booted, and denied an estimated $27,000 in severance pay because Newsday management said he’d been fired “for cause,” meaning he’d violated workplace rules. According to Editor & Publisher, Compton had been suspended in December 1993, for showing fellow employees a mocked-up trading card, picturing a black pro wrestler and using as a caption the name of Les Payne, the paper’s highest ranking black editor. In April, a state unemployment appeal board ruled that the paper had insufficient reason to fire Compton.
Regardless of what happened, the incident underscored the raw racial tensions at Newsday. Legendary tab editor John Cotter, who died in 1991, had been pushed to resign in 1987 for referring — he claimed in jest — to a black editor, Hap Hairston, as a “dumb nigger.” Over time these tales circulate and affect hiring; according to Newsday sources, there was an unofficial black writers’ boycott of the Newsday sports desk through the early ’90s. The demise of the New York edition will no doubt fuel conflict between whites and minorities, all struggling to take the remaining jobs.
None of this comes close to the sad record of the New York Post, which doesn’t bother even trying to pretend that it’s integrated. In 1993, when the New York Times finally put Bob Herbert on its op-ed page, the Post became New York’s only English language daily that employs no black columnists. (They pick up Thomas Sowell and William Raspberry from syndication services.) In fact, The New York Post has barely any reporters of color. It does not give figures to the ASNE.
Post management has offered the same excuse for years: poverty, which is only a slightly less spurious rationale today than it was during the reign of Murdoch I. The Post managed to find the money in 1994 to pay right-wing conspiracist Christopher Ruddy, who had to be dumped when his creatively sourced reporting on the death of Vince Foster proved an embarrassment. In September 1994, the Post also managed to find the resources to steal William F. Buckley Jr. away from the News.
The situation has reached a point where it fuels itself. Over the last several years, boycotts of the Post have been launched in black and Latino communities, in part over the Post’s refusal to hire minorities even in token numbers. Potential black and Latino reporters are wary of going to work for a paper perceived, in Public Enemy’s lyric, as “The Oldest Continually Published Piece of Shit in the Nation.” In response, Post managers complain that they have tried to recruit black reporters, but the potential hires won’t come.
Under the best of circumstances, the print media’s domination by whites would be a stain of dishonor. In today’s political climate, the persistence of whiteness leaves the press ill-equipped to raise persuasive challenges to the accelerating attack on civil rights. It also corrodes credibility: the arrogance and denial that accompany discussion of race in publishing shed light on why the public holds the media in only slightly higher regard than it does used car salesmen. ♦
Research: Geronimo Madrid and Ed Frauenheim
Published on August 1, 1995
On the surface, book publishing seems a world apart from the realm of newspapers and magazines — and certainly it has different rhythms, scales, and ownership. Book publishing also appears to be more integrated, at least judging by the slew of nonwhite writers who’ve made the bestseller list over the last several years: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Cornel West, Marian Wright Edelman, Amy Tan. But for all the millions of copies and dollars those names represent, the industry remains almost completely white. As black mystery writer Walter Mosley wrote last year, “American publishing, the very bastion of liberalism, the benefactor of the First Amendment, has kept any hint of color from its halls.”
Although most houses today are an arm of some entertainment conglomerate, publishing clings to several traditions that harken back to an age of tweedy gentlemen. Editors still conduct business over two-and three-hour lunches, often several times a week. During the summer, many houses give their employees every Friday afternoon off, the quicker, presumably, to get to literary hideaways in the Hamptons or Berkshires.
These informalities, the intertwining of business and friendships, also extend to publishing’s talent pool. “They hire their friends, or the children of friends,” says agent Faith Hampton Childs, who is black. Lit people always mention Erroll McDonald and Sonny Mehta, but the list of editors of color generally ends there. “You won’t get arthritis counting them on both hands,” says Childs, adding that publishing “is much less integrated” than her last profession — the law.
Thus the number game in the magazine or newspaper business — a higher or lower percentage of people of color — can’t even be played in book publishing. A handful of publishing houses — Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, Berkeley/Putnam, Warner Books — together with their subsidiaries account for a majority of the books published in the United States. In these companies, the question is not how many people of color they employ at decision-making levels, but whether they have any at all.
The mere request for data is met with a wall of silence. “We don’t give out those statistics,” says Andrew Giangola of Simon & Schuster. “We don’t keep them, and if we did, we wouldn’t make employment figures public,” says Stuart Appelbaum, a spokesperson for Doubleday. “It’s almost impossible that we can get you that kind of information,” says a publicist for Random House and Knopf. In 1994, the authors’ group Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) announced the formation of an Open Book Committee, to pressure publishers to open their corridors to more people of color. Headed by Walter Mosley, the committee has commissioned a research firm to find out just how many — or few — people of color work in the book trade. The theory, according to one committee adviser, is that “these publishing people have to be shocked or shamed into doing something.”
There are a few white editors on the inside who are grappling with the problem. Eamon Dolan has been an editor at HarperCollins for three years. He meets informally and semiregularly with about a dozen similarly placed book editors in various New York publishing houses. Recently, the topic of book publishing’s overwhelming whiteness came up. Dolan says that in his own shop, there are “15 or 16” acquiring editors who are responsible for HarperCollins’s 250 titles a year. All of them are white, a situation he says is true at every major house. “If anything, Harper may be slightly ahead,” Dolan says, citing one lower-tier editor who is half Latina.
In Dolan’s view, the shortage is partly attributable to publishing’s economics. Book and journalism editors repeatedly explain that their internship programs are a prime recruitment pool; for reasons few seem interested in exploring, intern applicants are overwhelmingly white. “I looked at more than 100 resumes for this summer’s internship program,” one New York editor told me. “As best I can tell, four of those people were black and two were Asian. By the time I phoned them, they had made other plans for the summer.”
Of course, it’s understandable that many potential interns would make other plans — the pay of publishing internships is low or nonexistent. One of publishing’s grand traditions is to make interns bust their asses for months, receive no pay until they get some first “break,” and earn the right to a scandalously low entry-level salary as an editorial assistant. How low? Through the late 1980s, a starting position at the prestigious house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux paid just around $10,000 a year — below the poverty line for a family of four. Today the position pays $16,000.
And yet there’s never a shortage of people who want to take a job at FSG, or indeed to take just about any position in publishing. Gerald Howard, an editor at W. W. Norton, says: “When one of my editorial assistants announces that they are leaving, I’ve never seen an ad to fill that spot. I lift my pinky and the most staggering résumés hit my desk. They come from a network of agents, writers, and academics … It’s not really an open process. It’s not closed consciously, but it doesn’t seem to have to open.” What this means, though, is that a lot of people who’ll fill those slots are “children of privilege,” as Dolan says — which in America means overwhelmingly white. Alternately, they are people willing to be very poor for a period of time — and that too may act as a screen against many people of color.
In fact, the low pay of publishing can be a hurdle for many among the working class, regardless of race. In Dolan’s case, he calls himself “the child of immigrants,” that is, Irish immigrants, for whom “book publishing doesn’t have much cachet … My family looks askance at my career. They made huge sacrifices to send me to a big, fancy college — and what’s the return on their investment? Eight years into my career I’m making in the mid five figures. My brother maintains mainframe computers … and makes a lot more money. He’s considered the success of the family.”
“You cannot cover America unless you have a staff that reflects America.”
Dolan’s theory of how publishing economics — in both books and journalism — keep out people of color is borne out in the experience of Rosa (not her real name), a 25-year-old Cuban woman who recently left book publishing. Upon graduating from college, Rosa took an entry-level job in a firm that published legal directories. This was dull work, but Rosa hoped it would open an avenue into publishing fiction. “I thought it would be a lot of fun, and challenging,” she explains. “I’ve always loved to read, and I wanted to learn how a book actually goes from being an idea to a finished book.”
In 1993, a coworker of Rosa’s from the legal publishing firm got a job as an editorial assistant at Pocket Books. “She was always telling me about how great it was, and encouraging me to make the same move,” Rosa said.
Through her former colleague, Rosa heard about an opening at a similar mass market publishing house, whose paperback writers include several best-selling authors. In the fall of 1994, Rosa was offered an editorial assistant position there. The job required her to take a sizable cut in pay, to $19,000 a year. This, Rosa says, “upset” her parents, with whom she rents an apartment. “They couldn’t understand why I was doing it, because I do need to pay a lot of the rent.” Her parents, who have lived in the United States for 20 years, “don’t make much money … They really are worried about the financial side of things.”
Nonetheless, Rosa understood that to succeed in book publishing, she had to endure what is essentially an apprentice track, from editorial assistant to assistant editor to — for the lucky — acquiring editor. She took the job.
Rosa found herself one of two people of color in an office of about 30 people. “It was pretty white,” she recalls. Rosa says that she found the atmosphere somewhat intimidating. Although she says she was well treated by her immediate boss, the rest of the white people in the office were less than welcoming. “No one ever said anything that was racist, not at all,” she recalls. “But I had a feeling like they didn’t know what to do with me. Mostly, I didn’t talk to that many people.”
Rosa also found mass marketing not to her taste. “It wasn’t what I expected,” she says. “Really, I didn’t have the temperament to be in that business. It was a lot more selling than I realized. I couldn’t see myself being successful.”
Key to this revelation was an aversion to the publishing class. In Rosa’s view, the other people in her position dealt with the low salary in very different ways than she did. “Their parents own a house, or most of them do … A lot of kids think it’s fun, to be just getting by for a couple of years. It’s sort of like an adventure. I had to explain to my boss that we’ve been struggling like this for 20 years. It’s not fun any more.”
After just five months, Rosa left her publishing job, began taking predental courses, and took a job as a secretary. “It’s much easier work, and I’m making $5000 a year more.” She plans to begin dental school in the fall, and her family is pleased at the extra money.
If the economics of publishing is a chief barrier to hiring people of color, then the dismal situation is not likely to improve soon. For at least a decade, hiring and wages in the industry have been stagnant at best. As Dolan points out, most books lose money, which means that the portfolios of most editors lose money, which means in turn that publishers are loath to hire more or pay more. Magazines and newspapers, up against soaring costs and flat circulation, are in the same boat. Cutbacks are inevitable, and people of color — often the last hired — will be the hardest hit.
But maybe this ironclad logic is wrong. Maybe the only way for publishing to return to its previous economic strength is to learn to serve markets of color more quickly and deeply. A quickie biography of slain Tejano singer Selena shot to the top of the bestseller list this spring, surely in part because it was one of the first mass market books published as a bilingual volume. To institutionalize such successes, however, publishers need to expand traditional methods of marketing and distribution.
Susan Bergholz, an agent who represents several Latino authors, says that some of the most successful readings her clients have had took place not in a bookstore or auditorium but in a hairdresser’s shop in Santa Ana, California. “This guy started bringing in books for the women while they were getting their hair done, and he’s turned into a bookseller.” She cites Latino novelist Luis Rodriguez who says, “Not all Latinos are going to buy their books in bodegas, but some will, and you’re missing a lot of sales if you’re not there.”
Marketing people throughout the industry ought to be studying these facts and a thousand like them. As the city and country continue to get darker demographically, hiring editorial staff people who are in touch with the new populations should become a competitive necessity.
While few in the book industry seem to appreciate this incentive to dismantle the white monopoly, one magazine company offers a promising plan. A few months ago, when Norman Pearlstine took over the Time, Inc. magazines, the company pledged to begin breaking up the turf. According to Jack White, a black writer who has been at Time for more than 20 years, each of the Time-owned publications — including People, Money, Time, and Fortune — will now tie a portion of management’s compensation to their success or failure at integrating the staff.
White, who also functions as Time’s chief recruiter of people of color, said that Pearlstine surprised the staffers who’d been pushing for such a program by announcing it before they’d proposed it. “He called my bluff,” says White. “Now I’m willing to call his.” In a year, White hopes his newly aggressive recruitment — going after senior people such as bureau chiefs at large dailies — will bear fruit. “These guys [Time management] pride themselves on being the leaders in the magazine industry. Let’s see if they can lead in this direction.”
The publishing industry will not integrate until it recognizes diversity as critical to its mission. The potentates of publishing need to believe that diversity is something to strive for not because it’s mandated by the law or by political correctness or by a handful of cranky minorities in the newsroom, but because, in White’s words, “You cannot cover America unless you have a staff that reflects America.”
Author Jill Nelson suggests that a genuine commitment to diversity might mean challenging some of the standards of universalism ingrained in American letters.
“Diversity doesn’t mean, ‘Let’s hire some women, some people of color, some gay people, and some white men with ponytails, put them in a blender and make them come out like the straight white men who hired them,” says Nelson. “I don’t think that’s good management, and I don’t think it’s a way to cultivate people to do their best work.”
What’s needed, Nelson argues, is a commitment to actually seek out alternative voices, rather than try to adapt nonwhite populations to what are essentially white conventions. “I think we need to hear more from the people who really make up the society,” she says. “When experts are quoted, you would hear more from women, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. [Publishers] need to believe that it’s a good thing that we all bring parts of our culture and ethnicity to our work, instead of listening to the tiny percentage of white men who have posited themselves as insiders.”
President Clinton — the ultimate white male insider — insisted last week that affirmative action is good for America. When will the industry that controls America’s social and political conversation agree that affirmative action is good for publishing? ❖
Research: Ed Frauenheim and Geronimo Madrid
This article from the Village Voice Archive was posted on May 10, 2024
