Risky Business: Digital Publishing In The Age Of #BLM
By: July Westhale
Tags: Writingwhileblack, Publishing, BlackLivesMatter, Digital Media, Language

H ow does one even begin to talk about publishing at a time like this?

In the last few weeks, the United States has been embroiled in the biggest Civil Rights movement of my (an ’86 millennial) lifetime. And while systemic and deadly racism in this country is as old as this (colonialized version of) the country itself, the visibility around #BlackLivesMatter and police brutality has skyrocketed.

It is incredible to watch. It is horrifying to consider how long we, as white and white-presenting folks, have stood to the side and allowed this to go on.

My job isn’t to soapbox about the #BLM movement among so many writers of color on Medium who have done it better, and told their truths, and given us, white folks, their labor so that we might be called to act. My job, which is multi-faceted and never-ending, is to have these conversations with fellow white folks, not just in the performative space of social media, but in actual, tangible community. Action items, action items, action items.

And my job, as a digital publisher and editor, is to get to fucking work.

You may or may not be familiar with what’s been happening in publishing over the last few weeks (which is to say, you may or may not have been keeping abreast of the giant, needed reckoning that has come for this industry) by way of the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe.

Tochi Onyebuchi and L.L. McKinney, two black young adult fiction authors, started the campaign as a response to the letters of support of #BLM by publishing houses.

“Publishing houses, y’all BLM statements are cute but I’ma need that SAME energy when we start talking Black writers and book advances. If y’all think the receipts are bad now, it’s about to be CVS on this website, and y’all don’t want that,” Onyebuchi tweeted on June 5.

The tweet went viral, and soon authors from all over the world were sharing what they were paid for advances.

“The conversation highlighted the disparities in compensation, especially between black and white authors. Some users also used the opportunity to discuss other inequality issues in the publishing industry, including the lack of representation on The New York Times Bestseller List, which can play a significant role in a book’s success.” — Anagha Srikanth // “Viral hashtag ‘Publishing Paid Me’ reveals secrets of racial inequality in publishing industry”. “I hope that [the publishing industry] stops treating Black authors and Black stories like they’re there just to shut us up. It almost feels like at times, like, ‘Here, there are some Black stories coming out this year, now shut up and let us go back to doing what we do’ — because those Black stories don’t get a marketing push, they don’t get the budget that you see these other authors get,” McKinney told Buzzfeed.

I’ve been in publishing for a decade, starting out as an unpaid intern at Copper Canyon Press, an all-poetry press in the Pacific Northwest. I was brought onto Arktoi Books (a lesbian imprint of Red Hen Press) after I voiced frustration at the lack of diversity in the titles CCP was publishing (aside from anthologies! Writers of color were nearly exclusively anthologized). And while I was occasionally given a bit of change for my labor (money that always came right out of Eloise Klein Healy’s pocket), I wasn’t ever able to make a living in traditional publishing without making a dramatic move to the East Coast.

So a few years in, I moved to digital publishing. I worked as an editor for various literary journals (Narrative Magazine among them), and as a contributing editor for journalism outlets (Autostraddle) before starting PULP Magazine with Katie Tandy in June of 2019.

I say all of this for context; I’m not working in massive Big Five publishing houses, nor am I working in a traditional literary field (anymore). Because we don’t publish full-length books, we aren’t working with advances or royalties, but rather, flat fees for work produced (along with whatever extra Medium’s clap metric has been able to provide writers).

And not only is PULP not a traditional entity in the #PublishingPaidMe movement, PULP is also — and this is vital to consider — a magazine about bodies, sexuality, sexual labor, identity, etc. Everything under the umbrella of the body.

The reason this is vital to consider is because conversations about the body are not neutral.

We cannot talk about bodies without talking about everything that goes into having a body: one’s own relationship with their own selfhood, the relationship the world has to the body (which can never be parsed out from white supremacy, the patriarchy, socioeconomics, et al), and the lineage of trauma that brought said body into the world. And so much more.

So how can we ask folks who are already in positions of vulnerability to make themselves even more vulnerable by telling their stories? The fact is this: it is infinitely safer for white and white-presenting folks to go public with their own narratives about their bodies and their sexualities than it is for people of color, the latter of whom risk criminalization for far lesser crimes than wanting, or talking about wanting.

It’s probably a good idea to define, here, what I mean by ‘risk’, with the caveat that there are probably a good many risks I’m not considering. However, by ‘risk’, by ‘harm’, by ‘vulnerability’, I’m talking about the fact that a white, cisgendered woman writing about orgasms and mental health isn’t going to be penalized in the same way (from a career standpoint) than a transwoman of color is, for whom the baseline of upward economic mobility is decidedly less accessible.

According to Yes! Magazine:

“Trans people are a demographic highly at risk of being victims of violence and discrimination. The Human Rights Campaign has estimated that trans women are 4.3 times more likely to become homicide victims than all women, and the vast majority of the victims are Black. Trans people often are denied work or fired when they come out as trans, present as their true gender, ask to be called by a different name or pronouns, or when their employers otherwise find out their gender identity.”

In addition to the real threat of losing the ability to support oneself, BIPOC (and especially trans and/or queer BIPOC) also face increased online bullying, and sometimes, the threat of violence.

So, in a landscape that is already fraught, demonized, high-risk, and vulnerable, how do we offer space to BIPOC writers to tell their stories of sexuality and identity when doing so puts them at especially high risk?

I recently had a conversation with a white friend who works in a much larger-name magazine. She had expressed frustration at the level of stubborn refusal on the parts of the magazine’s editors to acknowledge that the structure of publishing must change completely in order to dismantle the inherent systems of racism it promotes.

“My editor,” she wrote to me in a text, “believes, truly, that the important thing is who the story is written about, rather than who is writing. He isn’t able to move past that. He genuinely doesn’t see the problem, here.”

So what is the problem here?

As I see it, the problem is one of not taking cultural/colonialist context into consideration (how’s that for alliteration?). If the United States were not a country informed socially and infrastructurally by Jim Crow and the old confederacy, then who is telling the story may not have the same effect — this editor might be right (though that’s a hell of a conjecture). Because we wouldn’t have the problem we have, which is to say, the way our systems are systematically set up to promote the trajectories of success for white people, including (very presently, and historically) in publishing.

Sure, yeah, it might be optimism that has this editor saying that we are beyond this problem (because, pals, that’s exactly what is being said). However, that’s an incredibly dangerous and toxic thing to assert in this moment, when we have been so violently reminded that no, we are definitely not beyond this. Furthermore, it creates a kind of cultural gas-lighting for already disenfranchised communities of writers — to say, hey, yeah, what you’re experiencing isn’t actually real, because we totally moved on from that.

Not to mention that it ignores the very commodity that it traffics (which is to say, words). Language is and always has been a tool of conquest. If you don’t believe this, just take a minute and think about what constitutes ‘professional’ language: ‘proper’ grammar, diction, the ‘talking white’ we saw so poignantly represented in Boots Riley’s “Sorry To Bother You”, the latter of which sparked a new conversation about the concept of “code-switching.”

In The Guardian, AT McWilliams writes:

“Thanks to the breakout film, code-switching has re-emerged in America’s racial discourse. When Einar Haugen introduced the term in 1954, he sought to describe the fluid nature with which multilingual people moved between languages. Since then, the term has expanded to capture how individuals adjust all forms of communication and expression based on their audience… But Sorry to Bother You, a fantastical dystopian satire, paints a darker picture of this natural linguistic technique. Soon after the main character, Cassius Green, begins a new job as a telemarketer — and fails to make a single sale — a black co-worker offers a radical suggestion: “Let me give you a tip. You wanna make some money here? Use your white voice.” Cassius’s new white voice quickly becomes his greatest asset. Sorry to Bother You then uses Cassius’s surreal code-switching to illustrate the tragedy of assimilation, but the reality of the linguistic act is far more complex. And as a tool for social mobility — or in the case of black people, a tool for survival — it must be examined for both its power and potential peril.”

In considering the linguistic double-edged sword that is code-switching it’s worth bringing up how language has also been used as a tool of resistance; African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has its roots in English dialectical sources. Primary among these sources is the settler English spoken in the American South in the 17th century:

“The roots of AAVE were established during the first century of the British colonization of America, in the Chesapeake Bay area (Virginia and Maryland), and later, in the Carolinas and Georgia. The socio-historical evidence suggests that conditions in most of the South were favorable for Blacks to acquire relatively close approximations of the dialects spoken by White settlers, particularly indentured servants. Since Blacks were exposed to a variety of British English dialects and shaped by influence from African languages and possibly also from creole varieties introduced by slaves brought from the Caribbean, AAVE evolved against a background of continuing language contact.”

Language as a way to get through. Language, also, as a way to survive. **

Language is colonialist. Language is a tool of resistance. This is the crux of the struggle here.

** Yes, I understand these are origin examples, meaning that one might be keen to dismiss that they exist in the past, as my friend’s editor did, and that we have moved past it. However, considering the fact that telling one’s own narrative is a relatively contemporary privilege, particularly within oppressed communities, it would be arguable that an essay, a piece of writing in say, a sexuality magazine such as PULP, would also constitute a kind of radical archive of experience.

T o parse out what you want from history and to leave all the rest is white privilege. White communities have been able to do that forever, and could continue doing that forever if we wanted.

The point is to stop ourselves from doing this. The point is to take everything apart and work from the ground up. It will be uncomfortable. It will be laborious. It will be embarrassing, probably. But it’s the only way to get out of this feedback loop that keeps pushing certain privileged classes to the top.

So what does this have to do with PULP, and sexuality?

I have spent so long thinking about this idea — that it is radical, yes, to have a magazine about sexuality and bodies in a time when bodies are still so criminalized, and what that means in the context of who gets to tell what story. And who gets to tell what story and still keep their job, their kids, their independence. A lack of nuance and understanding of context (see above) isn’t going to move us forward, and is actively harmful (meaning, for example, that representing the experience of a high-end white sex worker isn’t representing the experience of all sex workers, and to pretend it does could get folks actually killed).

Does it mean I don’t ask Black folks to tell their stories? I thought about in the car, in the shower, walking my dogs around my war-zone neighborhood, where herds of cop cars have always been but have been particularly present for the last few weeks. There’s no world that needs an all-white publication of any sort.

I wrote an accountability statement for PULP in the beginning of June, in large part as a way to think about big, systemic action items my co-founder and I could take, especially in this moment in time, when we are about to move PULP to its own site, off Medium, and change around the way we do things.

“Can we commit to publishing primarily writers of color?” I asked Katie.

She looked thoughtful (and pixelated, thanks Zoom). “I would like to get there. But we haven’t earned that trust yet.”

And she’s right. We have to earn that privilege. We have to make ourselves a community that folks of color feel represented and supported in, especially if we are asking writers to talk about the bodies that carry them through this gorgeous, busted, unraveling world.

I don’t have a clear answer on how to do this. But I feel so fucking honored to be taking on the work to figure out what will likely be many answers. The history of racism in publishing is long, complex, and tangled. That means it needs complex untangling.

Part of that untangling is understanding the risk that writers of color take in talking about their experiences, especially under the umbrella of sexuality. And working to provide for support for that, through fair wages, through stepping in to act as shields, to putting our own bodies in the line of fire. It will be uncomfortable. We will likely fail many times.

A recent solidarity statement by the literary organization, Writing By Writers, said it well:

“We want to be allies, even in the knowledge that we will be imperfect allies because of the structures of intolerance built into our institutions and the macro and micro aggressions we have been blind to because of our privilege. We understand that we have in the past been guilty of exclusion and oppression because, among other reasons, exclusion and oppression is deeply embedded in our tool, the English language. We commit ourselves to be mindful of both our words and actions, to become better allies every day.”

I like that take on allyship — to have it exist as an evolving practice that admits all modalities of past, present, and future, and what allyship might need to take on to remain porous and salient and helpful and, by all means, not harmful. It recognizes that even the concept of allyship is rooted in an understanding of folks of color as Other and whiteness as a central concept, when we so clearly need to de-centralize whiteness completely. It recognizes that white supremacy is a rigid structure that will struggle with change, especially with being de-centralized.

I reiterate here that I don’t have the answer, and that’s in part because just one answer isn’t the right path. What I do know is that trying is better than not trying. What I do know is that narratives help make space for other people to find their stories, to reclaim themselves, especially if they have been dismissed or disallowed from joining the conversation to begin with.