In a recent dust-up between the privileged elites and Black Lives Matter activists some douchebags resigned under fire from their cushy, well-paid, benefit-rich, non-profit literary jobs. Then Hope Wabuke resigned from the National Book Critics Circle because NBCC did not want to sign-on to her draft statement asking that NBCC admit “culpability in this system of erasure of Black and Indigenous Peoples of Color (BIPOC). (Guardian newspaper US Edition 6-13-2020)
An NBCC board member responded with “it was absolute nonsense to suggest white gatekeeping stifles black voices.” (Guardian newspaper US Edition 6-13-2020.
Hope Wabuke, in her attempt to get a simple statement from NBCC against racism, uncovered the real way the privileged elites stay in power. Ideological hegemony. Look it up, Antonio Gramsci expounded on this in detail in his works.
The US publishing industry has served as the gatekeeper for the Anglo-Saxon privileged elites forever. In erasing BIPOC voices, they are also silencing working class voices, the social class to which most BIPOC writers and artists belong.
Check out my soon-to-be-released e-book of Chicago short stories, An Infinity of Days in the Psychotic Atomik Empire. Free for a limited time. If you want the paperback, the book was first published at Plain View Press in 2007. My e-book, There Ain’t No Justice, Just Us is available at Xlibris. Gregory Alan Norton