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Roxane Gay: White Publishing, White Reviews

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Posted on June 7th, 2012 at 4:50 pm

Must read study by Roxane Gay and assistant Philip Gallagher over at The Rumpus about book reviews and (an absence of) color at The New York Times:

The numbers are grim. Nearly 90% of the books reviewed by The New York Times are written by white writers. That is not even remotely reflective of the racial makeup of this country, where 72% of the population, according to the 2010 census, is white. We know that far more than 81 books were published by writers of color in 2011. You don’t really need other datasets to see this rather glaring imbalance.