Thoughts on the 2017 World Fantasy Awards

I’ve pretty much finished all the reviews of the World Fantasy Awards fiction nominees. I’m not going to look at the collections, so it’s time for a wrap up of what I thought.

What really jumps out is the considerable overlap this list has with other major SFF awards, especially the Hugos. In order to complete reviews of the whole World Fantasy list, I had to read 2 novels out of 5 nominees, 1 long fiction out of 5 and 3 short stories out of 5. All the others I had already reviewed as part of either the Nebula or the Hugo Awards. This makes my reviewing job easier, but again, it points out the inbred nature of the SFF awards and the lack of diversity in sources the works are drawn from.

Speaking of diversity, this list is notable for leaning heavily to black and white nominees and totally shutting out both Asian and Hispanic/LatinX/Native American authors. Counting up the ethnicity, it looks like there were three black authors out of fifteen or 20% of the nominees, which well beats the approximately 12% African American population demographic in the US. The list gets extra diversity points for having one nominee of Arab descent, but Arabs are currently designated white in the US.

There are a couple of folks who are LGBTQ and advertize disability diagnoses. Again, the absence of Asian and Hispanic/LatinX/Native Americans could have to do with the lack of diversity in sources the fantasy audience draws from. Gender breakdown was 4 women to one man in the novel category, 2 women to 3 men in the long fiction category and 5 women to 0 men in the short fiction category. This adds up to 10 women to 5 men, following the current trend to strongly favor women writers in the awards nominations. There was also fair diversity of publishers except in the long-fiction category, where Tor.com published 4 out of 5 of the nominees.

I’ve already reviewed each of the works for quality, content and logical coherence. All of these were well written, with a few real standouts. I don’t have any complaints about the winners. They were first class in all categories. I did note some strong political messages in some of the works. This is a troubling issue. Doesn’t it affect readability when the author’s political views are so obviously promoted that they take over the story?

Again, many congratulations to the World Fantasy Winners!

Discrimination in the SFF community?

A while back I made the comment that the major SFF awards seem to be discriminating against Hispanic/LatinX/Native American authors. In the past few years, it’s been easy to run down the list of nominees and see a good representation of African American, Asian and LGBTQ authors, with a sprinkling of Arabs, Pacific Islanders, etc. However, there’s been a consistent shortage of Hispanic/LatinX/Native American names in the nominations and in the Locus reviews and other reading lists that feed into the awards. This is in spite of the fact that Hispanics are the largest US minority, and combined with Native Americans, come in at about 1/3 of the population. Comments on the blog suggested that the issue was that the people who vote for the awards just don’t like the type of fiction those people write.

The lack of representation is no surprise. Despite the large numbers of Hispanics/Native Americans in the US population, they’re still highly marginalized and discriminated against in jobs, education, housing, immigration and lots of other areas. There’s really no shortage of accomplished writers within this group, so it makes you wonder what’s been going on in the publishing and awards systems to keep the Hispanic/LatinX/Native America authors so unrecognized. Now, we have a clear case of discrimination within the SFF community that suggests what might be going on.

Jon Del Arroz is Latino and, as such, falls clearly into the marginalized minority brown author-of-color category. Like many Hispanics, he apparently also falls on the moderate to conservative side of the political spectrum. His current publisher is Superversive Press, known for pulp type fiction, but also a publisher of fairly right leaning works.

Del Arroz posted a blog here about his experiences back in the spring. According to Del Arroz, he was initially promoted at local Bay area cons as a minority author, but found himself placed in panel discussions that were political and left-leaning, rather than about SFF or promoting books. Once his politics became known, says Del Arroz, then the discrimination started, based more on his ideas than his race.

In the late summer, Del Arroz was lumped with those “middle aged white dudes” after his nomination for the Dragon Awards. This was followed by a campaign in December 2017 to try to get the SFWA management to reject his application for membership. He’s also been banned from WorldCon.

So, are Hispanics/LatinX/Native Americans being excluded from the SFF community mainly because of their political views? Clearly Del Arroz thinks politics is currently trumping his marginalized minority status as a Latino. How does a socially conscious community reconcile this kind of behavior?

Whiteness vs. Minorities in the SFF Community

So, I’d guess the previous blog will be interesting reading for those in the SFF community who are calling for increasing diversity. This will also probably be interesting news for editors and publishers who thought they were supplying it.

The invisibility of certain groups who thought they were actually a minority also explains a lot about certain relations in the SFF community. One example of this is Vox Day, of course, who clearly identifies as Native American. As a minority, why doesn’t he receive affirmative action benefits from the SFF community? Answer: Because Native Americans don’t really count toward diversity. Day also extensively publishes and promotes Chinese writers. Sorry, those writers are all invisible, too. In fact, Day is widely criticized for being white-supremacist, racist and anti-diversity instead. Another example is Larry Corriea, who seems to think he belongs to a minority group, but instead doesn’t qualify as Hispanic because he’s from a European heritage and not Latino.

Let’s look at some of the Asian writers who are currently seen as evidence of diversity in the SFF community. Here’s the list of notable Asian-American writers from Wikipedia: Ted Chiang, Wesley Chu, Georgina Kamsika, Ken Liu, Marjorie Liu, Malinda Lo, Marie Lu, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Cindy Pon, Vandana Singh, Alyssa Wong, Laurence Yep, Charles Yu and Kat Zhang. I suppose we can also add Rajnar Vajra and Hugo winners Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang to this list. Sorry, these people are now all “white” and no longer evidence of diversity in a SFF publication. This also means that magazines like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed that seem to specialize in Arab and Asian SFF aren’t supplying real diversity.

Actually, the SFF community was called on this a while back by Cecily Kane and Weston Allen in a study published by Fireside Magazine. Kane and Allen found that out of 2,039 short stories published in 2015 by 63 industry magazines, only 38 were by black authors. Kane and Weston cited only Terraform Magazine as representing real diversity in the SFF community.

What is Whiteness?

According to Jamelle Bouie, the recent election is a case of “white won.” If that’s so, maybe this is a good time for another look at what that word “white” means. I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog that white is more a set of power relations than about race. This means that whiteness is about power and privilege and not really about skin color at all.

One of the mistakes that neo-left activists have made, according to David Marcus in a response to Bouie’s article, is that this group has equated privilege with skin color, assuming all white people are privileged and demanding they should admit this and apologize for oppressing people-of-color. According to Marcus, the struggling white working class (along with a big chunk of the middle class) has responded to this demand with a hard swing to the right. He suggests that “whites” will no longer accept that minorities should be allowed to pursue their own interests to the detriment of whites, and that things people-of-color say will no longer be ignored in the political arena.

So given that this is really about power and privilege, who turns out to be white and who turns out to be a minority? This is an interesting topic. First, people of Arab ethnicity are currently making a move to withdraw from the “white” race into a MENA (Middle Eastern/North African) category. Although Arab-Americans have been designated as white for the last 70 years in the US, they increasingly feel they don’t have the privilege that whiteness should confer.

Next, it occurs that Asians are actually “white.” This is a social phenomenon that goes back several decades, when suddenly Asians became invisible in diversity counts (and started to sue about discrimination in university admissions). If you’re interested in further reading on this topic, see an article here by Eugene Volokh written in 1998. Non-Latino Hispanics also turn out to be invisible in diversity counts, and I’d hazard a guess that Native Americans are mostly invisible, too. So that leaves only blacks and Latinos as the minorities who actually count.

Next blog: How does this affect the SFF community?