In the publishing industry, people of colour are underrepresented. Despite a century of fighting the gatekeepers, our books only make up fewer than 6% of the titles that are published each year. We are also excluded from the national discussion, beginning in elementary school, as a result of this systematic exclusion, which is obvious in its effects. People who reside here are taught to view US life as being almost entirely white by textbooks, libraries, schools, TV, and movies. Literature and intellectual life are undoubtedly designed to obscure us, and that goal contributes to the promotion of the racist white hegemony that is currently evolving towards white nationalist fascism.

I struggle with the effects of this omission in various circumstances as a Mexican American author who works both for children and adults. The view of the future that the publishing industry has created in science fiction is one of the most heartbreaking for me. The vast majority of the corpus projects the current injustices of white fundamentalist capitalism forward in time, making our current erasure permanent and neoliberal homogeneity (despite the superficial racial diversity that is occasionally espoused) firmly white.

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