In addition to (infrequently) writing essays for The Essence of Water, I have another blog, The Deckle Edge, where I write about books, authors, and ideas. Last fall I added a podcast to The Deckle Edge where I interview writers to learn about their backgrounds and how and why they do their work. Its an excuse for me to have an extended conversation with interesting people, while helping them promote their work. It has been an enormous and unpredicted joy. Early on I invited guests whose books I enjoyed and reviewed or who I knew had a new book being released. These were engaging discussions and I began learning the craft of how to interview writers. As the podcast developed, I began asking guests “who should I be reading?” and “who would make a great guest?” That has afforded me warm introductions to authors and poets I might not have otherwise encountered or who might not otherwise have given me the time of day. It’s been a delightful surprise and the guest list has evolved in a serendipitous way. It has also made me feel part of this community of writers, like I’ve somehow pierced a veil into a previously hidden world.
Many guests have been very complimentary and occasionally I’ll receive a positive note from a reader/listener through the contact form on the website. The readership/listenership for The Deckle Edge isn’t huge but I believe we’re doing high quality work, having interesting discussions, and numbers will follow and these little notes have been real encouragement.
And then this week I received an email from the editor of a very well respected independent publisher of poetry. Her note said,
“I stumbled onto your podcast and am grateful for the kinds of conversations you’re having about books and independent publishing. However, I’m startled at the lack of diversity in terms of who you’re interviewing and wanted to note I’d be much more likely to subscribe and recommend the podcast if I saw a gender balance and more people of color on the episode list. Thanks for this opportunity to give feedback.”
She is, of course, absolutely right. The vast majority of my guests so far have been white men. I have been aware of it and it’s bothered me and as I pointed out to the editor in an email response, the gender issue will be resolved over coming episodes with several women already recorded or scheduled.
But they are still all white.
Now, I haven’t excluded authors from the podcast or even from my reading list because of their gender, skin color, or background. In fact, the only time I’m aware of consciously considering the author when selecting a book is when its an author I already know. Like many people, I will often pick up a book because I’ve read and enjoyed the author before, but in general I’m buying books because of content, titles, or yes, even cover art. So, my knee jerk response is indefensibly defense. I haven’t excluded people of color from my reading list or from the podcast, its just that people of color and women aren’t particularly active in the areas I choose to read.
Like Charles Scharf, the CEO of Wells Fargo, my instinct is to blame the lack of diversity in my reading and podcast guests on the lack of available talent and, in some ways, Scharf and I are not wrong about the result, even while we’ve misattributed the problem. For several consecutive years I took a team to recruit and interview freshly minted MBAs at the National Black MBA Association Conference, one of the largest such conferences in the US. You would think that the NBMBAA Conference would be a great source of diverse talent and it was. But the vast majority of attendees were white guys from white guy schools. The sheer volume of BYU students always shocked me. There is no denying that women and people of color are underrepresented in business schools and in finance. It is a fact.
And yet, the note from the bold and forthright poetry editor has nagged me this week. Like a mosquito inside the tent, her criticism has hovered around the edges of my consciousness, an ever present reminder that I’ve fallen short of even my own ideals.
Like many people, I have been horrified over the last many months to see so clearly how present racism remains in the US. That which I grew up thinking we had overcome, had grown through and past, has been lurking underneath the surface the entire time. The events surrounding George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, the response to the ongoing immigration crisis at the Texas/Mexico border, the recent attacks on Asian Americans…these things have literally turned my stomach and figuratively broken my heart. It is evident that through the privilege afforded by being a white male in the US, by being a member of what Warren Buffett has famously called “the Lucky Sperm Club,” I’ve been able to avoid seeing the pain that was there all along. And even now, as I reflect on what I’m writing, I see that I’ve even been deluding myself. To think that I didn’t see racism when I lived in south Louisiana, when I lived in Houston, where I live now is absurd and a complicit self-deception.
We who write and read for The Essence of Water take great pains and great pride in challenging our own thinking. We actively seek to read authors who may hold different opinions than our own and kindly but forcefully challenge each other when we disagree. It is an active process, a kaizen for the mind, through which we try to hold our own thoughts lightly, well aware of the many diverse and valid opinions in the world.
But that’s the gap in my other reading and my podcast, perhaps in my thinking. It isn’t enough to read widely with regard to subject matter and remain indifferent to the author behind the words. Publishing books, even when done well, is still a business and if I individually, and we collectively, aren’t buying books written by people of color in every genre we read, then there will be no books published by people of color in every genre we read. Supply will always rise to meet demand, but we act as if we have a supply problem when it’s really a demand problem. I think too many of us, from the comfort of our white male privilege, have been too passive about the issues of diversity of race and gender. Instead of passively waiting for and being “open” to diversity, waiting for supply to increase, we must actively search for it and bring it into the light. We must become champions for diverse thought and experience. We must demand greater diversity across the board.
To revisit Charlie Scharf for a moment, he is right, there is an insufficient pool of diverse talent from which to choose in the financial services industry, among many others. But Charlie is wrong in the same way I have been wrong professionally, and on my blog and podcast. He’s blaming the supply side of the equation. If one of my teams brought me a problem we would never simply shrug our shoulders and move on. Instead, we would ask “why” until reaching the root cause and that’s where we would begin to take action. If there is insufficient diversity of talent in the financial services industry, we have to ask why and then we learn there is insufficient diversity in MBA programs and undergraduate business programs, and again we have to ask why. The answer to that question is going to be at least a two-fold response that is both a lack of role models and an underrepresentation of diversity in STEM programs in high school and junior high. We can continue pulling the thread, but I think the point is made.
In the end, it’s a demand problem.
It isn’t enough for any of us to profess to be “open” and “supportive” of diversity. It isn’t enough to be outraged and shake our heads in disgust. We must become active in the promotion of diversity. We must seek it out and challenge our closely held beliefs, rage against our own passivity. We must become champions of our brothers and sisters. We must demand more from ourselves and the societies in which we live.
And so, my sincere thanks to the poetry editor for removing a few more scales from my eyes. It would have been easy for her to remain passive, to dismiss me and The Deckle Edge Blog & Podcast as yet another person who doesn’t get it, but she didn’t. She was courageous and hopeful and took action, a light in the darkness, and I’m grateful. I cannot solve the problem of racism in the US and the world, but neither can I do nothing.
Lots to think about there, Matt – and it does probably call for us to think about our choices in the book club, too (although I’ll point out that you chose both Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the Dispossessed”, our lone book by a Black author to date, and Okakura Kakuzo’s “The Book of Tea”, our lone book by an East Asian author, so you’re pacing us on one level).
But you’re right. I’ve tried in the last year to do exactly as you suggest – bias my self-directed reading towards novelists and essayists who are diverse. What happens is that you are forced to read more, and forced to think more – because you can’t also just ignore the good authors from more privileged backgrounds. But that’s really the promise of a diverse reading list: you think more, and you (hopefully) apply that thinking to the things you were going to read anyway. You acquire new frames of reference and that makes you realize that the same old authors – Sontag, say, or Nietzsche, or Foucault – are really not all that interesting, and don’t say much worth reflecting on, particularly when compared to the diverse authors who have had to put their own thoughts through a crucible.
When voices are ignored for too long, what they have to say actually becomes more and more interesting – because you have to ask yourself, why have I been ignoring it? Of course, some of it might be good, and some of it might be trite – we are under no obligation to ignore our sense of good writing, of good thinking, and of the beauty of words arranged with a certain care. But we are under an obligation not to ignore the voices.
Send your poetry editor who wrote those words to you, warm regards from The Essence of Water. I’ll note, too, that this isn’t an exclusive blog, for any moral philosophers of color out there who are dying for a chance to be published on an out of the way website that does as little as possible to promote itself…
I’d like to start by thanking the authors on this site, and although I have not yet listen to anything on The Deckle Edge blog I plan to check it out soon! I also like to dispose of another matter, I am not a white male, hence I would check some diversity check-boxes – how many depending on how we are counting the traits.
When I read this piece I recognize very well the posts I read on this site in the mission statement you have in the text. But I was mostly caught by the note you received (maybe was the bold font?) Is not the objection she raised as much as the fashion it was presented and that it was, although mildly put (“much more likely”) linked with the possibility of her recommendation. Still, it felt it was hinged on/only on this specific. I would venture to guess that enlarging the audience, although desirable, might not be a primary target. I’ve also ventured to figure out how her note might have been first perceived by you (how non-presumptions of me!). I imagine the feeling of a party host being made aware of his guest list was short of expectations or even disappointing. Being caught off guard, the host is reckoning…Was it a faux pass? Was he being slightly impolite, or straight out rude?
I wonder if instead of going with the note above she would have chosen to introduce an idea, comment or suggestion, recommendation, maybe rounding out something in your podcast, enriching a dimension of remark, coming from a diverse authorship body she appreciates. Being editor on the respected publisher I infer would mean having access to ample supply of it. Getting back to the party idea, what if you are a guest to a wonderful event and notice the napkins are gone, but you happen to know where the stash is – would you take care of it or proceed to get your generous host and inform him you’ll be (by applying a logical complement) ‘less likely’ to have good things to say about his get-together if he’s not mindful of the napkin situation..
Let’s not take this lightly, napkins might be essential – at ‘Essence of water’ parties the drinks are rich, the only ‘water’ you’ll get is from the outside of your glass!
Now, circling back a bit (thank you for reading this far, btw!) I mentioned in the beginning I’m not a white male, and I wonder.. would the reception of the above comments was altered/’upgraded’ somehow to make some sort of sympathetic allowance for this fact? What if I would not have mention anything at all about it…could have the comment been suspected, or rather how strong the suspicion would be, to be yet another defensiveness from, you guessed it, a ‘white male’?
After a dry-mouth moment of the ‘being a fraud’- feeling brought by possibility of any of these were true, I catch my breath and hope it is not so! But some doubtful thoughts still linger, feeling like…well, like a “mosquito in the tent”, if I may borrow this expression.
Thanks for the note and you make a great point. It would be helpful to have some suggestions of authors doing interesting work that are diverse and generally fit with the podcast. I also love the party/napkin metaphor. Still, as the host of the party, I’d never run out of booze…never, but being reminded I’m a little light on napkins, even if embarrassing at the time, is still true and helpful.
Interesting reflection, V… Matt’s already commented, but one thing I’ll note for The Essence of Water is that we’ve always wanted more readers (ie – tell your friends! flag us on your Facebook / Instagram page! Tweet link us!) but that hasn’t been the purpose of the site. Rather, the purpose has been to explore ideas, and hope people will find us and find the way in which we explore ideas – especially about our moral place in the world – to be something worth coming back to.
To use your party analogy: The Essence of Water is a party we started four years ago, but it’s never had an invitation list, just an open door and a very strange playlist on the turntable. The drinks are strong and well-mixed, though, which hopefully is to your liking. And note that all of us here also are a bit intimidated by everyone else – this is a party of the unhip, of people who will never score an invite to the cool kids’ parties (well, maybe Matt can, but I sure can’t), but who are still brave enough to hit the dance floor.
Thanks, V, for boogieing with us!