Diversity Syndrome: On Publishing’s Relentless Pigeonholing of Black Writers

When talking about children’s literature there is an oft-referenced concept that uses mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors to illustrate the importance of books that reflect our lived experiences and offer us pathways into understanding the lives of others. The idea was first articulated by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop who, in the original 1990 essay, described how it’s deeply important for all children to see themselves in literature, not just those belonging to the dominant culture.

Dr. Bishop suggests that both marginalized and dominant-group children have suffered from this absence: the first, because of the implicit lesson that their stories are unimportant and their possibilities in life limited, the second, because we live in multiracial and multicultural worlds in which growing up isolated from other perspectives can produce a dangerously inflated sense of ethnocentrism.

Thirty-some-odd years after Dr. Bishop’s seminal essay, the landscape of literature has shifted. There are more books that reflect experiences beyond those of the dominant culture, and thus more authors from marginalized backgrounds. I’m one of the kids who grew up with the rising number of diverse books… but an insidious phenomenon has risen along with us. I call this phenomenon diversity syndrome, and here’s how it manifests.

Diversity syndrome is a cultural condition where the “otherness” of an author is elevated over the impact of their work, to the detriment of the author, their work, and their audiences. Much like structural racism, it’s more systemic than individual, though individual actions certainly uphold or subvert its existence. An illuminating case study of diversity syndrome in the real world is that of Black authors of what I’ll broadly define as speculative fiction.

A word, first, on genre and race. The term “speculative fiction” has contested definitions: here, I use it to mean anyone whose written imagination is located in the fantastic, whether that’s represented in New York City with six people functioning as avatars of the boroughs (N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became) or in an interstellar hunt for the meaning and translation of a language whose fundamental quality is change (Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17). When it comes to race, I’m a Black writer of speculative fiction—I enjoy examining the experiences of those working in my preferred genre. But beyond that, I think both Black authors of any genre and speculative fiction authors of any race have two of the most glaringly obvious experiences of diversity syndrome.

We’ll start with three Black authors of speculative fiction whose writings and experiences provide a succinct and personal overview of the history and evolution of a racialized experience of diversity syndrome.

In 1980, Octavia E. Butler, the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship—aka the “Genius Grant”—wrote an article titled “Lost Races of Science Fiction.” Originally published in the first (and last issue) of Transmission Magazine and reprinted twice, first in 2016 in Gerry Canavan’s book Octavia E. Butler and most recently in 2020 in Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories, Butler opens with a story of her first year in college in 1965 when a professor told their class to avoid writing Black characters unless their race was essential to a plot. She goes on to examine why there was such a dearth of diverse characters in science fiction.

For Butler, the root cause was a subtle combination of racism, habit, and ignorance that created a massive blindspot for authors when it came to writing diverse casts. They decided, consciously or otherwise, that Blackness is an experience so much more alien than writing actual aliens, one they couldn’t possibly hope to represent in fiction. This extreme othering will be familiar to most people of marginalized identities, then or now. It also sets the stage for those who participate in the effort of representation to be othered along with their work.

In 1998, Samuel R. Delany, a novelist and critic, wrote an article simply called “Racism and Science Fiction” in The New York Review of Science Fiction. In it he recounts his first experience “with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice” in which a publisher openly said that representing Black characters in speculative fiction creates unrelatable characters. This happened in 1967.

He goes on to discuss how, after Butler’s 1995 MacArthur Fellowship, the resulting focus on and separation of “African-American science fiction” meant Delany and Butler were repeatedly paired for public appearances—no matter that the two were writers of completely different temperaments on the page, concerned with distinct topics. This glaring example of diversity syndrome, though, as Butler’s article shows, certainly wasn’t the beginning of the issue.

More recently, in 2011, N.K. Jemisin, a NYT-bestselling author of speculative novels and short fiction, wrote a blog post called “A brief public service message” in which she lambasts “people in the [science fiction and fantasy] genre treating [her] as N.K. Jemisin, Professional Black Woman.” From being constantly asked for her feelings on Octavia Butler—though Jemisin considers her a “career influence,” she doesn’t consider her a literary one—to being mistaken for countless other Black women at events, she offers the most straightforward public summarization of diversity syndrome I’ve seen: “What pisses me off is being tokenized, essentialized, stereotyped, and being noticed for nothing but my racial and gender identity.” Jemisin went on to make history by winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row, for each book in the Broken Earth trilogy. She certainly has more meaningful things to discuss than her race.

Modern racism is almost too crude a title for this phenomenon, though it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate from a semantic perspective. The impact of diversity syndrome is an insidious and nasty experience, and it can elude immediate identification if you aren’t living within it or attuned to its presence. Examining the experiences of these astronomically talented Black authors of speculative fiction spotlights the experience to a nearly comic degree—it’s a laugh so you don’t cry sort of thing—and, hopefully, gets my point across.

But let’s look more closely at the interactions of race and genre. Black authors are frequently and repeatedly asked to speak on their experiences as Black writers. Panels want to focus on the impact of race on these authors’ careers and whether they believe having an all-Black cast will negatively impact their work.

Similarly, despite being some of the highest grossing and most commercially popular genres, authors in speculative genres are frequently pigeonholed at conferences and in interviews, their expertise presumably limited to worldbuilding and fantastical premises. Black authors of speculative work sit at the apex of the two issues, frequently relegated to a strange place of hyperinvisibility as if Blackness and speculative fiction are both some extreme “other.” They are pushed to the margins and told to stay in their boxes, valued for their perspective on their race and their genre but not much else.

The experiences detailed by Butler, Delany, and Jemisin continue today. Many Black authors of speculative fiction have versions of these stories. In this context, what does it mean to craft meaningful stories that excite and challenge, stretch skills and open minds, all the while knowing the tendency of the current climate to pigeonhole Black authors into being racial experts in their genre?

Delany suggests a solution of “social vigilance” in which awareness of this issue of othering is elevated and discussed publicly so as to counteract the implicit bias that strengthens the social structure of racism. That’s certainly one approach, though as Jemisin says, and many authors agree with, “I talk about race, gender, and other issues of social justice because I have to.” Many of us would like this conversation to no longer be necessary.

When readers pick up work by Black authors of speculative fiction expecting it to be centered on the authors’ identities, or approach these authors with questions confined to specific racial or genre-based expectations, they are pigeonholing the authors and limiting their own ability to experience the richness of these narratives. These authors are frequently specialists at crafting stories that are intensely meaningful to our current reality without trying to “make a point” as Black authors, something the social impacts of diversity syndrome might indicate they should aim to do; we should really be trying harder to understand that Black speculative literature is much bigger than just Black.

Another approach to these questions can be found in the latest work of P. Djèlí Clark, a speculative fiction author who recently released a fantasy novel called The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. In a blog post sharing the release news, Clark discusses the freedom that came with crafting a narrative in which he wasn’t bound to our world or history. He could focus on writing an action-packed, comic narrative absent the deep-rooted biases of our lived experiences; though of course, since publishing takes place in our world with our history, there is plenty of meaning to be found in his choice of a Black heroine.

Clark didn’t craft this narrative to be centered on this political choice, but on the power of the heroine and the intrigue of her cityscape. If his readers approach the work in the same way, they’ll be taking a step in the right direction when it comes to counteracting the effects of diversity syndrome.

I’ve heard many versions of the “yes, but” argument on this topic. Yes, but we talk about race as a good thing, not a bad thing. Yes, but it’s important to point out social identities so readers can find the authors best for them. Yes, but we’ve been told that Blackness should be celebrated—why is this any different?

Yes, and. As a Black woman writing speculative fiction, it’s deeply meaningful to me that there are Black folks writing in this genre, and it’s necessary for us to be able to find them. Publishing is an arena in which many of those who share my identities have historically been denigrated and ignored. Race is also deeply meaningful from a story perspective because we’ve made it so in our cultures and our histories. But it is just one part of a human experience, one that can inform our writing as much or as little as we choose if we’re being conscious about the whole thing.

If we do our jobs as authors right, our race should be one of the least interesting parts about any of us. So when those authors who share my identities are treated as mouthpieces of an entire race, or when their contributions are framed by their racialized identities as if to say “this is the source of their brilliance,” I know the industry still has a ways to go.

Diversity syndrome can place a fatally narrow lens on Black authors crafting broadly meaningful stories. We should write, publish, and read speculative fiction by Black authors because Black authors are and have always been some of the most powerfully inventive writers around—whether because the experiences of racialized existence have forced an innovate-or-perish sort of existence or simply because brilliance does not discriminate across racial lines.

And really: why ask N.K. Jemisin again and again about worldbuilding when she also creates incredible characters? When she raises the literary stakes again and again as well as any writer alive? Black authors of speculative fiction can be great at everything. Watch us be so.