Big In March 2026, my article in Publisher’s Weekly entitled Randi Pink on the YA Black Renaissance published. It covered the rise of Black young adult literature post-Walter Dean Myers’ New York Times op-ed, Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?, and signs of today’s impending contraction. I cited year-to-year numbers of Black books decreasing after a peak in 2020, and argued, for history’s sake, the importance of naming that record-breaking cohort the authors of YA’s Black Renaissance. Since the article’s publications, I’ve noticed a welcomed uptick in online discussion about the decline in traditionally published novels authored by and about Black people, and how to stop it.

While I am immensely proud of that article, the following line bothered me. “I’m not sure where we’re headed from here, but I hope that Black characters don’t slip back to a tiny sliver on traditional publishing’s pie chart.”

My wording nagged at me for weeks. I fixated on it, as I tend to do, since I loathe the word hope in this context. Hope is passive. It does not seek solution, instead it leaves results to fate. Meanwhile, the careers of some of the most brilliant, Black writers alive hang in the balance. Hope simply isn’t, and has never been, a motivating force for me. Slowly, and deliberately transforming research into historical precedent is.

So, here, I’m following up my previous article with usable data to further support that uptick in online chatter. That is, after all, what led to the ignition and sustaining of YA’s Black Renaissance in the first place—Black writers making noise in whichever medium they feel safest to do so. My own medium has never been social media. It is, I’m realizing, an unrelenting fixation on carving a place for us in the historical record and seeking ways to prevent the industry from forgetting our contributions. Therefore, my goal in this phase of research is to figure out why the meteoric rise of Black authors, and Black authored books in 2020, has waned in recent years. Of course, I acknowledge I have skin in the game. I’ll state the fact up front; I am a biased researcher who personally benefits from YA’s Black Renaissance’s numbers rising again. My singular goal here is to support that rise. Therefore, if your goals run counter, create your own fucking corpus.

To collect usable, linguistic data, I chose Voyant Tools as the main corpus builder to create and analyze the shifts in the media’s word frequencies concerning Black literature. Having lived through all periods represented in the corpus as a published Black YA author, I hypothesized the literary activism of 2020 caught the media off-guard. Further, media was pushed to respond to the unrest and demands without sanitization. The immediacy of the reaction garnered blunt support and higher frequencies of the use of the word Blackness in print. To prove my hypothesis, in a small sample size of relevant articles, I tracked the words Black, diversity, representation, and inclusivity to trace media’s softening from 2020, the height of YA’s Black literary publication, to 2022.

The most frequent words in the five relevant articles making up the 2020 corpus include—black (59), publishing (53), said (39), book (36) and industry (35). The fact that Black is the top word shows 2020’s shift toward concrete racial focus. Unlike the earlier corpuses where language is vaguer such as diversity and diverse in the 2016-17 data, the 2020 articles name Blackness directly and without flinching. The industry, and media surrounding it, is confronting anti-Blackness head-on, not just inclusion. This data aligns with the impact of 2020’s George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement’s frontward activism making its way to the literary world.

By 2021, the urgency of 2020 begins to fold into corporate, public-relations-approved language centered on equity and accountability. However, by 2022, media moves away from the immediacy from the year prior. Diversity discourse becomes sanitized and adopts legal linguistic characteristics. HR-style diversity reports highlight ongoing efforts, and target metrics, shifting from crisis-oriented to seemingly stamped, approved, and carefully managed, soulless rhetoric.

I’ll admit, I expected linguistic backlash, but that isn’t what is found in my small corpus creation and analysis. I found a shift toward corporate speak. The most frequent words in the 2021-22 corpus are as follows—percent (28), workforce (24), report (18), ProPublica (18), and 2021 (18). The word with the top frequency, percent, is a clean symbol of this collective corporatism. Quantifying diversity provides measurable, usable numbers that confuse customer complaints. The language trends more bureaucratic than it was in prior sub-corpuses. “Bureaucracy… once fully developed, is among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy” (Weber, 1978).

The corpus results show that once clarity is replaced with metrics and corporate language, urgency begins to dissipate. So, how can this information support the online conversation about the decline of Black books? It encourages those authors whose desired mediums are social media to keep it simple.

To those authors: Your Goliath dons thousand-dollar business suits and is protected by teams of lawyers and corporate professionals with unlimited budgets. They shift the conversation away from activism and toward confusion, but there’s no need to fight metrics with metrics. Follow the lead of #PublishingPaidMe, #BlackoutBestSellerLists etc. Their missions are in the title for a reason. Power is in the simplicity.

Real Impact.