Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Mosley

Mosley lands a provocation that sounds like a backhanded compliment until you catch the target: the publishing industry, not Black writers. The line turns on a brutal truth about gatekeeping. For decades, Black authors weren’t competing in the same messy marketplace as everyone else; they were being auditioned as exceptions. To be published was to be “representative,” to carry a whole race on your back, to write with an implied footnote that justified your presence. “One of the best writers in the world” isn’t praise so much as a description of an absurd admissions standard.

The sly brilliance is that Mosley celebrates “mediocre” as progress. That’s not lowering the bar; it’s redistributing who gets to be average, who gets to have an off book, who gets to publish a second-tier novel without it being read as evidence about an entire community. In a healthy culture industry, most work is mid. Most careers include uneven albums, minor films, forgettable novels. The freedom to be merely good is the freedom to be human rather than symbolic.

Context matters: Mosley is a bestselling crime novelist who broke through in a genre that historically policed whose stories counted as “universal.” His comment tracks the slow shift from tokenization to a broader ecosystem - more imprints, more editors, more market categories, more room for Black interiority that isn’t packaged as sociology. It’s also a warning: if you’re only willing to publish Black brilliance, you’re still practicing exclusion, just with nicer adjectives.