Is American Fiction true to life? Yes, and our publishing industry has a big problem with Black writers too
Is American Fiction true to life? Yes, and our publishing industry has a big problem with Black writers too
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00:00 What's going on with Black writers in the UK publishing industry?
00:03 In the new Oscar-nominated film American Fiction,
00:06 Monk is an African-American novelist who's disillusioned with the publishing industry's
00:10 obsession with reducing Black writers to offensive stereotypes to pander to white audiences,
00:16 and how the establishment profits from peddling "Black trauma porn".
00:20 To prove his point, he writes his own outlandish "ghetto book" under a pen name,
00:25 full of the most outrageous Black cliches he can think of,
00:29 but to his horror, opportunistic white publishers lack it up
00:32 in an attempt to advertise their diversity credentials, and it becomes an instant hit.
00:37 They want a Black book.
00:38 They have a Black book.
00:39 I'm Black and it's my book.
00:41 You know what I mean.
00:42 Obviously, the film is satire, but I spoke to five Black British authors
00:47 who told me it's actually surprisingly true to life.
00:50 Author of the list, Yomi Aragaki, told me that Black writers are, quote,
00:54 "basically told for commercial reasons that they have to write something
00:57 that puts race at the forefront."
00:59 Much of this, she thinks, came from the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement,
01:02 which prompted a sudden rush across all sectors of entertainment
01:06 to prove that they weren't racist, what Aragaki describes as a, quote,
01:10 "scramble for Africa".
01:11 Rennie Ello-Lodge, the author of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race,
01:15 agrees, saying that after her book shot to the top of the UK book charts during that summer,
01:20 suddenly all these other very similar anti-racism books started cropping up.
01:24 The issue here isn't that these books are being written,
01:26 it's that Black writers shouldn't feel forced to pigeonhole themselves
01:29 into writing about race in order to get published.
01:32 Aragaki even told me that during the Black Lives Matter movement,
01:34 she knows Black people who had publishers DMing them on Twitter,
01:38 asking if they wanted to write a book,
01:40 and coercing writers that might want to write about something else
01:42 to write about anti-racism instead.
01:45 For author Derek Owusu, the impact of the 2020 scramble for Africa
01:49 has actually impacted the quality of the literature able to be produced by Black writers,
01:53 because editors are now scared to properly edit Black British writers
01:57 for fear of being accused of being racist,
01:59 which he thinks is evident in some of the writing that's been produced recently.
02:02 They also all agreed that the appetite for Black voices
02:05 has dissipated across the whole entertainment industry since 2020,
02:08 pointing to the slews of Black-led TV shows that have been cancelled over the last year,
02:12 essentially because it was a disingenuous PR campaign.
02:16 As Aragaki puts it, for something to be a trend,
02:18 it means it also has to fall out of fashion.
02:21 (upbeat music)