Say you're walking down the produce aisle at the grocery store and the only fruit you

can buy are apples.

The people who stock the shelves have decided that you want apples, even if that's not true.

But you're hungry, so you buy them anyway, hoping that one day the store might sell something

you genuinely like, like mangoes or raspberries.

It's basically how book publishing has worked for the past century.

For the most part, you get to buy what publishers decide they want you to read.

And historically, most of those publishers in America were white.

A bit a few years ago that started to change, in some interesting ways.

And I wrote about it for the New York Times magazine.

My name is Marcello Valdez.

I'm a staff writer at the magazine.

But I also worked in and around book publishing for almost two decades.

Of course, not every book that somebody writes shows up in a bookstore.

There's a narrowing process.

And there are people who decide which books go out into the world with significant promotion

and distribution.

And those people, namely those who work in major near publishing houses, essentially

decided over and over again through the years that publishing books aimed at black readers

just wasn't worth it.

They subscribed consciously or not to the vulgar idea that black people don't read.

Obviously, this idea is offensive.

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