Thanks for writing about this important problem. However, unfortunately your 1.9% figure tells us nothing because you did not mention what percentage of stories are by authors whose race is known to you. Is the assumption that any story you can’t easily identify as being by a black author is written by a non-black author? If so, I’m very dubious about this approach.

People tend to focus on numbers and forget the limitations of those numbers. It would be especially helpful to have more meaningful figures. The danger otherwise is of people saying “Look at this terrible figure,” and then there being an uproar (which is good, we need an uproar on this issue), and then someone objecting that the figures being used are fundamentally flawed, which deflates and undermines what might otherwise have been meaningful discussion.