Last week, the long lists for the National Book Awards were announced. Among the 20 authors in the fiction and nonfiction categories, nearly all are straight white males. Most are also on the political right, some even on the far right. Remarkably, mainstream media outlets haven’t reported this, perhaps because they don’t think it’s noteworthy. It’s as if we were living in 1956 rather than 2026.

If you’re scratching your head at this “news,” well, it’s because I made it up. Or rather, I inverted the particulars about the authors’ identities and their political views to make a point: If today, as a reader, you recoil at the thought of a time in which minorities were systematically marginalized when it came to the literary world’s public honors (and so much else), shouldn’t you also recoil now that the tables have been almost completely turned? And if you object to the right’s efforts to politicize the arts, won’t you also object when the efforts come from the left?

For a sense of what I mean, let’s walk through the National Book Foundation’s announcement of the long list for fiction, 10 books selected out of 451 titles submitted by publishers.

Hannah Lillith Assadi’s novel, “Paradiso 17,” is “inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father.” Kimberly Blaeser, a poet, is the “founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets.” Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American writer whose novel “Dèy” reflects on “the many forms of mourning experienced through immigration, gentrification and diasporic identity.” Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You,” set in 1990s Bogotá, “explores Colombia’s queer underground community.” Louise Erdrich, the highly acclaimed author of “Python’s Kiss,” is identified in her NBF biography as “a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.” Marlon James’ novel “The Disappearers” is a “queer epic” set in Kingston, Jamaica. Valeria Luiselli is a writer born in Mexico whose “Beginning Middle End” spans “continents, languages and four generations.” Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer; his first novel, “The Renovation,” is a story about a family migrating from Istanbul to Italy. Morgan Thomas’ book “Mad Eden” is about “a trans healthcare worker” who has been diagnosed with autism.

Oh, there’s also Alexander Maksik’s novel “Passengers,” a father-daughter story set in an airport. Maksik, who is Jewish, is, to my knowledge, white, male and straight — details that, in a sane world, should have no bearing on whether his book deserves to make the long list. In this world, sadly, it makes him the lucky token.

Then there’s the long list for nonfiction. Much of the same in terms of subject matter: There’s a book about “the rise of Islamophobia in America.” Another about “an experiment in queer parenthood.” A third that’s “an argument against white paint.” (Really.) Last year’s nonfiction winner was a screed about the war in the Gaza Strip born of a viral anti-Israel social media post written weeks after Oct. 7.

That book aside, one needn’t get into an argument about the quality of many of these works — at least a few of which, like James’ “The Disappearers,” are first-rate works of literature. But there’s no mistaking the identitarian drift and ideological leanings in the prize’s elevation of the authors and their themes.

This isn’t new. By my count, in the past decade, nine of the 10 winners of the National Book Award for fiction belonged to a minority group. In the nonfiction category, 10 of 10. Bluntly, the National Book Award has become a diversity, equity and inclusion checklist: Only authors with preferred identities, preferred topics and preferred politics stand any realistic chance of winning.

Much the same goes for the Pulitzer Prizes. Of the past 10 years’ worth of winners for music and drama, nearly all have been minorities. Whether the winners are themselves minorities, they almost invariably win for work about minorities. For the prize in history, Kathleen DuVal won in 2025 for her history of Native American nations; Jacqueline Jones in 2024 for her account of Black workers in Boston during the Civil War; Jefferson Cowie in 2023 for his examination of white supremacy in an Alabama county in the 19th and 20th centuries; W. Caleb McDaniel in 2020 for his story of a former slave’s fight for justice in post-Civil War America; David Blight in 2019 for his biography of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

These are undoubtedly fine books. Are there no other subjects?

One common retort is that until recently, the prizes tended to neglect the experiences of minority groups. In fact, that hasn’t been true for decades; what makes the last decade different is the obsessiveness when it comes to matters of race. A second is that since, for so many years, relatively few minority writers won major literary prizes, the more recent spate of accolades amounts to a form of reparations.

Maybe. But as an old friend of mine liked to say, turning the tables isn’t the same thing as achieving justice. And the bald politicization of the nation’s highest literary prizes is achieving several forms of injustice at once.

It is devaluing the prizes themselves. The National Book Awards are no longer national in any meaningful sense; at best, they represent the recondite tastes of that fraction of the country for whom white paint really might be problematic. The Pulitzers, too, will rapidly lose altitude if they can find no other subjects worth honoring beyond race.

It is deforming and hollowing out literary culture in America. Writers or scholars whose subjects or views don’t fit the preferences of prize givers will pay a price for their intellectual independence — the very thing a healthy literary culture ought to reward, not penalize. Others, as The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper noted this year, will twist themselves into ideological knots for the sake of currying favor and funding. Still others, not keen on careers of penury and oblivion, will never become writers or scholars in the first place.

And it is turning off a generation of readers hungry for literature judged only on the merits of the work itself, regardless of the identity of the author and free from the tedium of political orthodoxy. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” I found that quotation, attributed to Ray Bradbury, on the Pulitzers’ webpage. The arbiters of today’s literary culture should think that one over carefully.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.