Book Publishing's New Brownface Problem
Let's Add Some American Dirt to the Already Explosive American Discourse on Race?
It’s been a rough year in publishing this week and it’s only Wednesday. Have you heard our latest? Take a seat, it’s a messy one.
So a writer I never heard of but who apparently wrote a bestseller named Jeanine Cummins just came out with a book called American Dirt. The New York Times, bless them, ran a profile, an excerpt, a review from one of their columnists, and a regular Sunday review by a major writer. Parul Seghal hated it and my friend Lauren Groff kind of did, though there was a whole mess because the NYTBR tweeted something taken from her original review which apparently praised the book more.
If you’d been following my friend Myriam Gurba you know all about this book. Myriam is one of my favorite people and she wrote one of the most brilliant books I’ve read in ages, Mean. We met online first because we chose her book for my old Wing book club but I was too sick to attend. Much later I moved back to LA when I was very ill and Myriam and I hung out a lot. The first time we hung out was her coming to the hospital to visit me when I was really struggling—she was the only friend who did that that time. We ended up spending many days at the beach and plotting a screenplay I hope we one day write and just laughing a lot about boys and books and crazy white people.
I read everything she writes so I read her review in Tropics of Meta, even though I already knew I would never read this book. Reader, this review is a masterclass and a massacre. I don’t know how any of us are still breathing after this all.
The short version is this book is sloppy badly-written brownface for white people and publishing is pushing it hard.
The book has gone on to being an Oprah book selection, with Oprah herself not just going on about in on Instagram but accompanying Jeanine on morning talk shows to praise it. They even mentioned the online “haterade,” which made me chuckle.
I guess I am part of the online haterade. I have no time for people, especially white people, who put on brownface—in her case, quite knowingly (in her author’s note she says “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”)—and profit off poverty porn for bestseller bucks. This woman got a million dollar advance—that’s 100 times more than what me and most writers of color (most writers, period!) I know make. Of course publishing is pushing this—it has to. The can’t afford for this book not to be a massive success.
Today Myriam tweeted a photo of a big publishing dinner celebrating this book—Jeanine had tweeted photos herself—and the flower centerpieces featured barbed wire! Wow, border chic! What elegant migrant realism!
Flatiron Books, have you lost your mind? How does this happen?
A lot of us are speaking out because we are tired of this. Just existing as a person of color in publishing is a lot—you are constantly educating your own editors and publicists, you are dealing with all sorts of blatant racism and microaggressions, and you are often very alone in your fights. Your own people will watch and won’t want to get their hands dirty often. I have walked away from so many sycophantic Iranian authors for this reason.
We get to be perpetual underdogs. And this book is going to succeed no matter what. Nothing speaks to the author’s privilege more than her not engaging the discourse at all. But our readers hear us and they are sick of it too. America is on its way to becoming a white minority country. No one is going to sit down and just take the injustice without a peep.
I am not going to link to the book but I will leave you with some excellent choices Myriam is supplying as a reading list: