Who could have seen this coming?

Publishing hired many black women executives after George Floyd's demise, because George cared about nothing more than Black Woman Joy in the book industry. Or something. Four years later, though ...

Working in publishing is much like being an architect: it’s a highly genteel field that many people would like to get into, so the pay isn’t terribly good for basic supply and demand reasons. Plus, you need to live in an expensive metro area, usually New York in the case of publishing. You have to hone your tastes to be classy, which isn’t cheap, and you have to keep up with the latest trends in elite culture via travel, theater attendance, conferences, going to the hot new restaurants, and so forth, which isn’t cheap either.

So, a large fraction of architects and publishers bolster their meager pay with some family money.

For example, I went out to lunch with a publisher decades ago. We went to a really nice restaurant on Broadway. He was a great guy, very classy, an American aristocrat. (His father was a giant in arts and letters.)

Not surprisingly, not many African Americans go into architecture or publishing.

Also, not surprisingly, white elites periodically go off on jags in which they demand more black architects and/or publishers, even though encouraging blacks to go into publishing and architecture is probably not in the economic best interest of blacks.

The biggest mania of all was in the months following George Floyd’s death, when New York publishing houses rushed to name numerous black women to top executive posts. After all, there’s nothing modern publishing needs more than more women.

And as we all know, the Efficient Market Theory proves that there must be countless blacks who would be better than whites at doing any job. It’s easy to name examples of organizations that flourished by employing more blacks, such as the undefeated 1939 UCLA Bruins football team with Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, and Jackie Robinson, the 1946 Los Angeles Rams with Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, or the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers with Jackie Robinson. After all, 1939-1947 wasn’t very long ago, so there must be lots of more recent examples, although nobody seems to be able to think of any.

And Kimberlé Crenshaw’s discovery of Intersectionality demonstrates that those teams would have done even better with black women on them.

From the New York Times news section:

‘A Lot of Us Are Gone’: How the Push to Diversify Publishing Fell Short

Lisa Lucas was among the big hires meant to shake up the industry. Her departure, alongside other prominent Black editors and executives, has led some to question publishers’ pledge to diversify.

By Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris

Aug. 21, 2024

When Lisa Lucas was hired in the summer of 2020 to take a big job at the country’s largest book publisher, there was a sense that things were finally starting to change in what has long been an overwhelmingly white industry.

Lucas, who became the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken, imprints within Penguin Random House, was an unusual choice for the job. Executives in the book business often spend decades working their way up the ranks. While Lucas was a well-known figure in the literary world — she had previously been the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards — she had never worked in corporate publishing.

Lucas’s hiring was written up in major news outlets as evidence that publishers were committed to diversifying. …

This May, Lucas was abruptly let go, informed of her firing just a few hours before it became public. …

She was also among a small but influential group of Black women editors and executives who were hired around 2020, when nationwide protests over racial inequality led publishing houses to pledge that they would recruit more people of color. Now, as Lucas and other prominent Black women in publishing have lost their jobs, or quit the business entirely, their departures have led some in the industry to question publishers’ commitment to racial inclusion.

But not to question: “What in God’s name were they thinking back in 2020?”

Dana Canedy, who became the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s eponymous imprint in 2020, left the company after two years and is now managing editor at The Guardian U.S. LaSharah Bunting, who was hired as an executive editor at Simon & Schuster in 2021, left in 2023 and now runs the Online News Association. (Both Canedy and Bunting previously worked at The New York Times.) And Tracy Sherrod, an industry veteran who was hired by Little, Brown in 2022 with a mandate to publish fiction and nonfiction by Black authors, was among a small group of editors at the imprint who were recently laid off.

The effects of their departures may be widely felt in the book world, where top editors and publishers hold enormous sway as cultural gatekeepers who can jump-start writers’ careers and set literary trends and movements in motion.

“These Black women who were brought in, publishers looked at them as disposable rather than creating industry titans, which is what they deserve to be,” said Dhonielle Clayton, a novelist and the board chair of the organization We Need Diverse Books. …

At the executive levels, white people accounted for nearly 77 percent of the jobs in 2023, a roughly one percent decline since 2019. …

In an interview, Lucas argued that the failure to address racial imbalances in the industry is not just a moral issue but also a commercial blunder. It is a sign, she said, that major publishing houses have still not developed scalable strategies for marketing and selling books by nonwhite authors or reaching nonwhite readers.

“For a person of color in this industry, a lover of books, the fact that not one mainstream publisher has come up with a long-term plan to capture minority dollars is insane to me,” Lucas said. …

Well, Lisa, maybe they were paying you to come up with that scalable strategy?

The current atmosphere is a stark shift from 2020, when protests over racism broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and publishing came under scrutiny for its history of undervaluing Black employees and writers. That June, more than 1,000 publishing professionals signed up to participate in a “day of action” to protest, among other things, the industry’s “failure to hire and retain a significant number of Black employees.”

Many Black writers and professionals spoke out about racial disparities in the book world. In response, major publishers recruited and promoted Black editors and launched new imprints devoted to books by nonwhite authors. Publishing companies said they would diversify their work force and the books they publish, and created new diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Editors acquired books that addressed race and racism, many of which sold well.

Four years later, there is a growing sense that the momentum has stalled. Some agents and editors say that publishers’ appetite for books about race and racism has waned after sales for some of the titles they rushed to acquire failed to meet expectations. …

The writer and publisher Roxane Gay, whose imprint at Grove Atlantic focuses on underrepresented voices, said that while the industry has done more to promote Black authors and editors in recent years, it has not made the meaningful or lasting changes that some hoped for.

The morbidly obese Roxane Gay is the cousin of Claudine Gay, who was hired as president of Harvard post-George Floyd, but then fired when it was pointed out that some of her already thin academic output was plagiarized.