Numerous scholars have dedicated their careers to understanding why it is that people need to see themselves represented in stories, so a format like this one could never adequately address (or even summarize) the complexities of the problem at hand. But these complexities shouldn’t deter us from the conversation, so I want to offer an explanation for one aspect of this problem in the hope that it will help equip anyone in a position to address issues of equity with a cogent reason why we should be actively providing more representation in publishing. This reason is symbolic annihilation.