“A good coat of paint can hide a multitude of sins,” a time-tested adage maintains. Unless that paint happens to be white—then, according to Columbia University writing professor Wendy Walters, it might have “figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world.” Walters is so exercised by white paint, for which she professes “a genuine and visceral dislike,” that she has written a 352-page book, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, to be published on October 13.
Lest you think Walters’s book is just another indulgence of American academia’s bizarre notion of scholarship, the five judges enlisted by the National Book Foundation have picked A Dead White as one of ten longlisted titles for this year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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Walters finds herself in impeccable DEI company. Her fellow longlist authors have written books about “queer parenthood,” “the rise of Islamophobia in America,” “how policing and the criminal justice system has impacted music culture,” and the ability of “black radical poetic traditions” to “model an ethical code and overcome entrenched structures of patriarchy and paternalism,” among other topics. The only nonfiction finalist who appears to stand somewhat apart from such concerns is Zayd Ayers Dohrn, a white author whose memoir recounts his troubled childhood with revolutionary leftist parents Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, leaders in the terrorist Weather Underground and former longtime fugitives from justice.
Any of the longlisted authors could be chosen as one of five nonfiction finalists, which brings with it a $1,000 cash prize, but only one can win the category award itself. That distinction comes with a $10,000 prize and a bronze sculpture. The winner also becomes “a permanent member of the National Book Foundation family,” a status that boosts sales and likely opens more doors to commercial opportunity and literary celebrity.
The National Book Foundation’s November 18 gala awards ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street, one of Manhattan’s poshest commercial event spaces. No trace of irony about that choice of location in the capitalist heart of New York seems to have crossed the minds of the organizers or nominees—and why would it? The foundation’s 2025 tax filing reported nearly $2.9 million in revenue. Most of it comes from declared donations, including big ones from major publishers, some of whose chief executives sit on the foundation’s board. A portion also comes from the $135-per title-submission fee that every aspirant’s publisher must pay to have a book considered.
The National Book Foundation disclaims any involvement by its board or administration in how books get selected for awards, though its executive director selects and recruits judges from a list of nominees produced by past award winners and finalists. (The biographies of those judges suggest that they are cut from the same cloth as the finalists.)
Other authors have already held up the National Book Award process to thinly veiled satire. Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure features a frustrated black writer who abandons his conventional idiom to write a parody of the black experience—which, of course, the literary establishment earnestly celebrates. Cord Jefferson adapted Everett’s novel into an even timelier 2022 film, American Fiction.
Waiting for change at the National Book Foundation may seem like watching paint dry, but the foundation would be wise to do some rethinking soon. University humanities departments are imploding due to rapidly shrinking enrollments, while reading itself is in sharp decline among the general public. According to a study released last year, only 16 percent of Americans still read for pleasure as of 2023, compared with a high of 28 percent in 2004, the second year that that study was done. If the National Book Foundation and its well-mocked awards continue valorizing woke absurdity, those numbers won’t improve. At some point, you need people who still want to buy books.