Here's hoping book publishers go the way of newspapers, and soon

The children of the NYT hard at work

In: “Sensitivity readers” to vet manuscripts.

It’s a story that has become all too familiar in recent years as publishers and writers struggle to adapt to a new world where cultural appropriation and racial stereotyping are called out online, and where campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books push for a corrective to the lack of books featuring people of colour (POC).

When reviewers first saw Keira Drake’s The Continent, this story of a teenager trapped by a war between two “native” tribes quickly found attention on social media – though not much of it was good. This young adult novel was attacked for its “white saviour narrative” and its stereotypical portrayal of people with “reddish-brown skin” or “almond-shaped eyes”. The author Justina Ireland called it a “racist garbage fire”.

Drake apologised, said she would “address concerns about the novel”, and delayed the release. Her publisher, Harlequin Teen, sent the book out to two “sensitivity readers”, who vetted the manuscript for stereotypes, biases and problematic language. Armed with a list of potential problems and possible solutions, Drake went back to the drawing board.

Here’s one chastened author who hired three separate sensitivity readers to correct her racist manuscript:

I welcomed the opportunity to dig into my creative reserves while still being mindful of hurtful tropes and cliches, such as describing POC hair and skin in terms of food,” says Hecker. “I also feel like these enhanced descriptions made my characters more nuanced and complex. It’s stuff that’s honestly hard to even conceptualise if you haven’t lived it. I think that’s the real value in hiring a sensitivity reader — they have the lived experience, so they can offer perspective on often-overlooked details.”

According to Debbie Reese, an academic who focuses on the representation of Native Americans in children’s books, many authors aren’t as receptive as Hecker. Reese dabbled in being a sensitivity reader in 2016, charging $100 an hour, but stopped.

“I quit doing them because they were exhausting and sometimes authors wanted to argue with me,” she says. “They weren’t open to the feedback. They weren’t trying to understand the feedback. They were insisting on the rightness of what they were writing.”

Sometimes, she find herself highlighting problematic words or phrases such as “low man on the totem pole” – a term which is sometimes used to describe people with little status. “I’d say that was a misrepresentation of an item originating with a specific nation. That hierarchy isn’t applicable. The phrase is used a lot but it is what generally gets called ‘a micro-aggression’.”

But the rise of sensitivity readers has drawn fire elsewhere: Francine Prose asked in the New York Review of Books if we should “dismiss Madame Bovary because Flaubert lacked ‘lived experience’ of what it meant to be a restless provincial housewife”, or if we can “no longer read Othello because Shakespeare wasn’t black”. The author Lionel Shriver believes there is “a thin line between combing through manuscripts for anything potentially objectionable to particular subgroups and overt political censorship”.

“Is it any longer acceptable for characters to be bigoted? Can a character in your novel vote for Brexit?” Shriver wrote in the Guardian, adding: “The day my novels are sent to a sensitivity reader is the day I quit”.

The obvious answer here is to self-publish, but with Amazon’s new “woke” awareness and refusal to list items offensive to BLM and anything labelled racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, how long before self-published books will be censored?

It’s a phenomenon spreading everywhere. Over at one of the few newspapers still standing, the under-40 crowd at The New York Times fresh from their victory in forcing the firing of Op-Ed editor James Bennet last June, is now demanding that the management monitor and censor everything they write. Here’s the latest, from last week, after a colleague wrote an opinion article attacking the 1619 project as a load of bullshit:

50% persons of color by 2025? Hell, the Times could achieve that by the end of this year; all it takes is for an appropriate number of white reporters resign, now.