It’s easier to give Charles Yu a National Book Award for “Interior Chinatown,” a hilarious and scathing critique of Hollywood’s racist representations of Asian-Americans, than it is to actually transform Hollywood. It’s also easier for the publishing industry to give marginalized writers awards than to change its hiring practices. James Baldwin wrote in 1953 that this “world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,” but a publishing industry whose editorial staff is 85 percent white, and whose fiction list is 95 percent white, is still quite white.

In the Biden era, will the publishing industry do more than feel bad about that and commit to hiring a diverse group of editors and interns and building a pipeline for future diverse leadership?

“Diversity” itself, unless it occurs at every level of an industry, and unless it meaningfully changes an aesthetic practice, is a fairly empty form of politics. This is one of the big critiques of the Obama presidency. For all that one can blame Republican intransigence, Mr. Obama was fairly moderate, someone who tinkered with the military-industrial complex rather than transformed it.

That much of the literary world was willing to give Mr. Obama’s drone strike and deportation policies a pass, partly because he was such a literary, empathetic president, indicates some of the hollowness of liberalism and multiculturalism. Empathy, their emotional signature, is perfectly compatible with killing people overseas — many of them innocent — and backing up a police and carceral system that disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous and other people of color and the poor. It turns out that a president can have a taste for both drone strikes and annual reading lists heavy on multicultural literature.

And here, marginalized writers who tell stories about marginalized populations do not get a pass. Take immigrant literature. During the xenophobic Trump years, when immigrants and refugees were demonized, simply standing up for immigrants became a politically worthwhile cause. But so much of immigrant literature, despite bringing attention to the racial, cultural and economic difficulties that immigrants face, also ultimately affirms an American dream that is sometimes lofty and aspirational, and at other times a mask for the structural inequities of a settler colonial state. Most Americans have never heard of settler colonialism, much less used it to describe their country. That’s because Americans prefer to call settler colonialism the American dream.

Too much of immigrant and multicultural literature fails to rip off that mask. Yet the politicization of these populations does pose a threat to the white nation that Mr. Trump represents. White identity politics has always been the dominant politics of this country, but so long as it was ascendant and unthreatened, it was never explicitly white. It was simply normative, and most white writers (and white people) never questioned the normativity of whiteness. But the long, incomplete march toward racial equality from 1865 to the present has slowly eroded white dominance, with the most significant rupture occurring during the war in Vietnam.

Writers not only marched against the war, they wrote against it. Among white American writers, poets like Robert Lowell were the first to protest, along with prose writers like Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer.