Revisiting the Perez/Hobart controversy, Part 2: white women and racial gatekeeping in literary fiction
the efficient market hypothesis fails again!
The illustrious Alex Perez recently put up another banger of a tweet about the sorry state of PoC fiction, expanding on the thesis he laid out in the Hobart interview I covered in part 1 of this series.
To summarize the sentiment: all prestige PoC literary fiction is exactly the same, and it’s all terrible.
My take: the reason it’s all the same (and the reason it’s all terrible) is because all prospective PoC writers have to pass a racial chokepoint in the publishing industry that filters out psychological diversity.
The reason it filters out psychological diversity is because the institutions of literary publishing have undergone psychodemographic class capture (i.e., they’ve congealed around the group preferences of upper middle-class liberal/progressive white women).
Think of each individual person in the traditional publishing system as a node in a network. In cases of psychodemographic class capture, each individual node is already aligned with the aesthetic and moral norms of the network from the outset. Any potential deviation outside of these norms is subsequently policed and punished by other nodes in the network—by other people. These are the basic dynamics of conformity that operate in any social system (and publishing, moreso than many industries, is very social).
Stop thinking of literary agents as gatekeepers manning a checkpoint. The term ‘gatekeeper’ implies some degree of breadth in the process of selection. That is much too soft of a term to describe how the system works, which is very narrow in its range of appetite for what is deemed “acceptable PoC fiction.”
Instead, think of literary agents as the first major chokepoint in the publishing system that filters out almost everything.
Now—lest I be accused of complaining—let me assure you, dear reader, that I have nothing but respect and admiration for white women in publishing. In fact, I have closely worked with several such writers in the past, and my experiences have been uniformly positive. Some of you are going to cringe, but I have learned a great deal about literary fiction from white women.
Another caveat: I don’t believe that the demographic composition of publishing institutions is in any way the result of centralized conspiracy, planning, or conscious co-ordination. In writing this series, understand that I’m not describing anything like a conspiracy, rather, I am describing the end state of a natural & emergent psychological phenomenon that results from the (mostly) organic process of cultural change. The axioms of my theory would be equally true if any other group had effectively conquered all of our literary institutions. If I were writing this article 50+ years ago, I’d be writing it about white men in the power position.
Further to that, I salute the proto-Nietszchean will to power that is made manifest in a single group’s ascent to maximum aesthetic control and dominion over the literary medium. One cannot claim to respect ‘markets’ and the ‘sigma grindset’ and then bitch and complain when white women succeed at doing this (and I am a grindset-respecter, if I am anything). Relatedly, it bothers me when people accuse writers of lacking in ambition. Writer have ambitions in spades. They want, as all artists do, to inflict their aesthetic vision upon the sands of time, to seize minds and atoms.
Of course somebody wants the wordcel throne! Are you surprised by this?
I don’t believe in the culture war, brothers and sisters! I believe in the culture game! No matter how egregiously political or morally didactic literary fiction may (currently) be, what we are doing will always (partly) transcend politics. We are trying to etch ourselves into the memory of the singularity and proliferate our works deep into the strands of the lightcone.
We are aiming for the motherfucking pantheon, here.
So—can I fault a certain group for securing the mantle of literary fiction?
Nah, bro. That’s just the game. If it has been said—so it be.
Now, some of you may accuse me contradicting myself because I sometimes whine about publishing corporations on Twitter. If anyone points this out to me directly, know that I will block you because I am a human being and I’m wholly entitled to reasonable levels of personal hypocrisy when shitposting.
Let’s talk about purity filters
Recall the data from part 1: most literary agents are white women:
Recall also my definition of psychodemographic class capture:
Capture, in this context, means that the vast majority of the system’s outputs are aligned to the group’s average (a) positive aesthetic tastes, (b) negative aesthetic tastes, and (c) transgression norms.
Capture, in this context, is a form of functional centralization. It doesn’t matter if there are many different literary agents, editors, and publishing houses, if they are psychologically homogenous. Homogenous systems produced homogenized outputs.
So—we’ve established that upper middle-class white women hold the first major chokepoint in literary publishing (by acting as literary agents).
How best to illustrate my model of literary culture as purity culture?
Some things are best illustrated with an example.
Let’s bring up an brief excerpt of PoC-produced prose fiction that wouldn’t have a hope in hell of making it past the chokepoint described above.
Then, we will enumerate all the ways in which it fails to meet the tests of purity. For context, note that this is an observational story about an Asian male written from the perspective of a white protagonist who is a racist:
As I walk out of the gym, I notice Jason sitting cross-legged in the corner, his eyes closed in a meditative state that approaches a parody of his own ethnicity. Objectively speaking, his connection to his own lineage is tenuous at best, but he still retains the tendency to regress into the pre-set mold of a cultural stereotype. In this respect he is no different than any of the other Asians: a subspecies of human beings forever constrained by archetypal barriers to true individuality.
The template of his life is but a minor variation of the standard immigrant sob story; a Lifetime movie that ends in the cyclical melodrama of a working-class tragedy that used to only happen to white people.
In the nineteen eighties, a Korean husband and wife disembark from a transcontinental airplane in search of upward social mobility available through open channels located in the imperial core of the hegemon’s central state. Opening a small convenience store in a predominantly black neighborhood, they establish a socioeconomic beachhead with the hope that their future children will go on to make something of themselves and ascend the rungs of a less rigidly hierarchical society defined by its enduring commitment to Anglo-American dynamism. Some years later the universe detects the growing embryo of their hoping, dispensing a boy whose sole purpose is to witness the complete obliteration of his otherwise-stable nuclear family in the United States of America.
No second child is born.
Roughly once a year—whenever he’s reached the uppermost tier of borderline-blackout intoxication—it comes out much like this: in the same detached, narrational tone of a third-person observer sheltered by great swathes of temporal distance from the events that long ago transpired.
When Jason was ten years old, he watched a masked man step through the doors of his family store and turn to face the figure of his father. In keeping with a social script with which they were both familiar, the man retrieved a pump-action shotgun from a black Adidas duffel bag and began listing a simple sequence of monetary commands to the Asian patriarch manning the register. Unbeknownst to him, said patriarch was an old-school rooftop Korean who’d survived the riots of the nineties with the aid of semi-automatic weapons. Had the robber possessed a threat model commensurate to reality, he would have known that Jason’s father grew up under the tutelage of an even stricter father, the former captain of a US-backed South Korean death squad that specialized in the torture and extrajudicial execution of suspected communist sympathizers. Consistent with this combination of genetic and environmental influences, the middle-aged cashier standing behind the register had inherited an above-average proficiency in the usage of firearms and a militant regard for the preservation of capital.
Along with these adaptive traits, he’d also inherited the family’s running streak of semi-functional alcoholism and its concomitant effects on reaction time. Wasted from hours of day drinking and unwilling to part with his cash on a voluntary basis, Jason’s father was slow to the draw during the ensuing standoff. The delayed yanking of a pistol from underneath the register activated a reciprocal reaction in the robber’s trigger finger, unloading twin barrels of hot lead into Appa’s face at point-blank range. The shells produced their effect instantaneously, flash-rendering the angular geometry of his lower jaw and its accompanying mouthparts into an indecipherable organic slurry. Standing in the corner of the store, Jason watched his father slump against the wall behind the register, breathing bubbles of blood through a mangled cavity located in the approximate location of his former throat and its now partially liquefied anatomy. On the security camera, the assailant took one hundred and fifty dollars, placed it into his bag, and exited the premises. In the epilogue to this story, his mother quickly remarried an automotive engineer she met at a WASP-infested church in the suburbs. At the age of eleven, his adoptive American stepfather retrieved the VHS cassette from a cardboard box and forced Jason to watch the surveillance footage of his father’s murder on repeat. Seated in the quiet box of their wood-paneled basement, the cross-legged pair watched the film of the mangled face forming and unforming itself as the tape rolled back and forth over the entropic crucible of time. The perpetrator had been uncharacteristically sophisticated for the neighborhood, donning the perceptual ambiguity of a head-to-toe disguise complete with a balaclava, gloves, and ski mask. Jason’s stepfather looped the frames of the robber’s streetwise gait and arrived at his own version of a criminal analysis, concluding that the killer was African-American in origin. For the detectives assigned to the case, the progress of the investigation commanded little in the way of empathy or interest, and the file was closed after a purely perfunctory effort on the matter.
In the years that followed, Jason’s stepfather beat him almost every day until the boy outgrew his strength and the application of force was no longer a tenable exercise. Whether due to a fear for her own safety, displaced anger over his father’s passing, or a general attitude of neglect, his mother largely failed to protect him from these abuses.
Perhaps due to the copious amounts of bovine growth hormone present in the low-quality milk he consumed during his teenage years, the beatings did nothing to stymie the furious pace of his cellular divisions.
The boy grew out of spite—out of a burning desire to inflict upon the world that which had been inflicted on him.
Tonally speaking, can you imagine reading something like this in a modern literary magazine? In something off the shelf at Barnes & Noble? In your local independent bookstore?
In a bookstore literally anywhere?
It is to laugh.
If you are a PoC writer of literary fiction, you are only allowed the mirror the pre-set mold of what white liberalism has set out for you as per the cultural consensus of the Anglo-American empire.
In practice, this means that you cannot say anything even remotely difficult on any axis of importance. If you are extremely talented and clever, you can, at best, bury something potentially dangerous under multiple layers of intermediated obfuscation. Note that this system merely constitutes a more advanced form of tokenism.
Let’s list out the ways in which the excerpt I quoted above fails to meet the threshold of purity.
POSITIVE AESTHETIC TASTE FILTER
Minor (but survivable) penalty:
Even for stories about characters who are non-black minority males, the points-based system of the intersectional stack prefers to elevate narratives that are not about heterosexual men.
It would be preferable if this Asian character held multiple additional layers of identity-based marginalization (for Asian men, being subject to racial violence—especially inter-PoC violence—does not count as a valid type of marginalization).
That each successive layer of added minority-identity would actually make such a character less representative of the modal Asian is unimportant. The idea of ‘Asian representation’ is merely a vehicle for elevating the most ideologically pure immigrant to the fore of the culture as successful instances of assimilation.Minor (but survivable) penalty:
It would be preferable if this story took place in some type of wordcel-dominated progressional managerial class type of setting, such as a university or NGO type of institution.
This character being working class, and not having any apparent desire to ascend the wordcel status ladder and (even tangentially) validate the life choices of workers in the publishing-industry, is somewhat sub-optimal. The character’s sole motivation is survivable.
Ideally, he would be concerned with the types of status-games that consume this class of Western intellectuals.Minor (but survivable) penalty:
It would be preferable if this story ended with the character somehow validating the core institutions of white liberalism in the end—specifically, liberal democracy, the institutions of civic society, the university, and so on.
This should feed into a Manichean framework that utlimately still situates the US as the shining city on the hill where the enlightened PoC’s reform the internal contradictions of the United States in a perpetual entrenchment of its planetary mandate for moral universalism.
NEGATIVE AESTHETIC TASTE FILTER
Barely survivable penalty:
White liberalism, as symbolized in the redemptive power of the goodwhites or NGO’s or teachers or universities or other institutions of preferred moral caliber, are not redeemed or validated by the end of the story. Instead, they are totally absent altogether.
It’s merely a matter-of-fact account of racial violence and brutality.
Further, reactionary right-wing Asian politics are connected specficially to official policies of East Asian American anti-communism efforts and direct USG involvement as opposed to preferred current-year enemies who would make white liberals the off-page heros of the story.Unsurvivable penalty:
This is a story about violent and traumatic abuse but the PoC victim doesn’t centralize their identity on victimization.
Instead of being clearly traumatized (i.e. sad), he achieves self actualization by becoming too powerful to abuse (angry).
Relative to the moral universe of the white liberal, he has learned the wrong lesson. The only possible moral the character of Jason has learned is that the most important thing in life is to become powerful so that other people can’t hurt you.Unsurvivable penalty:
This is a story that involves a lot of violence, and alludes to the possibility of inter-PoC racial violence that would inevitably make any literary agent deeply uncomfortable.
TRANSGRESSION NORMS
Unsurvivable penalty:
This story is told from the perspective of a racist white male. It does not matter that it is a narrative device meant to supply commentary on the psychological mechanisms of racism in general, because it could still be excerpted poorly and everyone involved could lose their jobs from Twitter.
This level of transgressive satire is no longer possible.Unsurvivable penalty:
This story alludes to the Koreatown riots in the nineties, describes a (possible) instance of black-on-Asian violent crime in the form of robbery & murder, and gestures toward the complex social dynamics of inter-ethnic racial violence in low-income multiethnic minority communities.
So who gets through, then?
Only certain types of people get through the chokepoint.
They are the least transgressive, the least interesting, the most credentialed, and the most supplicating PoC writers.
Yasha Levine often refers to these people are “weaponized immigrants”—writers and intellectuals who are instrumentalized by the broader aims of Liberal imperialism (he couldn’t be more correct).
As a class, they are urgent and brave adherents to an imperial power that, statistically speaking, most likely started the very wars that led their parents to flee their homelands and arrive in America in the first place. Indeed they are capable of incredible feats of mental gymnastics, that, in isolation, would be very impressive if they were not also so craven. Sometimes, they are able to achieve the miraculous, such as writing about atrocities like the invasion and occupation of Vietnam and then equivocating about the moral status of the two belligerents.
These are the people who have so deeply internalized the material advantages of conformity that they have subordinated themselves all the way down to the level of the unconscious. And then we are surprised when their stories are boring.
Nonetheless, I must tip my hat to them in one respect.
They are in fact true heirs of capitalism, for they understand who their real market is—and it’s not readers.
It’s literary agents.
Damn.
Exceptional as always, ARX.