Braiding Past into Future

People from communities of color are underrepresented in publishing. Our books make up less than six percent of the titles released each year, and that’s despite a century of fighting against the gatekeepers. The results of this systematic exclusion are clear: we are also elided from the national conversation, starting in elementary school. Those who live in this country are trained by textbooks, libraries, classrooms, TV, cinema to see US life as almost exclusively white. Certainly literary and intellectual life are constructed to make us invisible, and that project is complicit in promoting the racist white…