On Saturdays in late ’90s, my father, a taxi driver, would pool his tips for the week and take me, a child too precocious for his own good, to a local bookstore in search of my next read. Together, we silently wandered the store, picking up paperbacks and inspecting their pages. On shelves that often faced the front windows sat the works of Don DeLillo and E.
L. Doctorow and Virginia Woolf, while giants like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and J. California Cooper, architects who built entire worlds depicting the plurality of the Black American experience, were relegated to a corner labeled “Black literature.
” To get from one section to the next, I walked down aisles that felt as long as city streets. * Recently, following the departure of several high-level editors of color—particularly women of color—from various publishing houses, the conversation about diversity in the industry has been reignited. I’ve been surprised by the complicated feelings it’s raised in me, a Black, queer editor who has worked in magazine and book publishing for nearly a decade, the insecurities I thought my wins had extinguished, the fear.
Certainly, diversity is a real and crucial issue in publishing. I know this all too well; I value it and try to hold the door open for others. As Toni Morrison once said, “The function of freedom is to free somebody else.
” (Morrison is recognized by most readers for her novels, which are among the greatest of all time, but she was also a book edi.