Remember the furor over the breakdown of reviews by gender at major review venues that VIDA published last year and earlier this year? Roxane Gay did a similar count that broke down reviews by race of the authors being reviewed at the New York Times Book Review. The numbers are ugly:
We looked at 742 books reviewed, across all genres. Of those 742, 655 were written by Caucasian authors (1 transgender writer, 437 men, and 217 women). Thirty-one were written by Africans or African Americans (21 men, 10 women), 9 were written by Hispanic authors (8 men, 1 woman), 33 by Asian, Asian-American or South Asian writers (19 men, 14 women), 8 by Middle Eastern writers (5 men, 3 women) and 6 were books written by writers whose racial background we were simply unable to identify.
Click the title to read the article in full.
ouch. it would be interesting to do a study of books published by Big 6 houses and compare how the two sets of statistics line up.
Possibly not much better. Some of the commenters at their site have been arguing that if the publishers dont publish writers of color at representative percentages, it gets the NYTBR off the hook. Which, not so much.