Cynical Publishing Advice: If you’re a brown writer who’s writing brown characters, you can’t afford to ignore race

I was talking to a friend recently about the curious fact that any book which is by a brown writer and is about brown characters will naturally be read through a racial lens. That is to say: readers will pick it up and read it primarily for what it has to say about race.

On its face, this doesn’t seem like it needs to be true. One can easily imagine a br…