"Published by the University of Nebraska-affiliated literary journal Prairie Schooner, “The Bees…” made it into BAP 2015 under the authority of this year’s guest editor, the fluidly-genred Native American writer Sherman Alexie. Alexie is beloved for his sharp, raggedly good-humored treatments of minority identity in America, and for BAP he adopted an editorial stance of affirmative action, choosing a lineup of writers that ended up 40 percent non-white...
Though the ratio of white to non-white writers published and reviewed in literary outlets appears to be holding strong around 9 to 1, there’s a decent contingent of white male writers who believe the “social justice movement” has put them at a real structural disadvantage. This perception can be induced by seeing just a few more non-white names and non-white faces, by hearing just a few people state that they’d like to publish some more diverse names. The fact that these white male writers are not the default anymore—that they can be named as white men and (sometimes unfairly) typified as pretentious—truly bothers them; this is not a demographic accustomed to being pre-judged...
A month ago, the writer Catherine Nichols tried a similar experiment, for the opposite reasons, and wrote about it here. She sent her novel out to agents under a white male pseudonym and got 8.5x the responses. (An important, integrity-marking difference: she didn’t then try to publish under the pseudonym; the case was closed.) Nichols’s piece showed the phenomenon that Michael Derrick Hudson probably believed had failed him—that it’s easier for white men to get published than anyone else...
It’s troubling that the most fledgling attempts towards reaching equal representation could seem, to anyone, like evidence that the still-dominant class of white men has already lost the upper hand. They haven’t."
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