Poor Unfortunate Souls

For those who may not know, a "sensitivity reader" is a person hired by an author or publisher to review a manuscript for portrayals of people, cultures, identities, or experiences that the reader believes may be inaccurate, harmful, or offensive. The role is advisory rather than editorial in the traditional sense. The sensitivity reader does not focus on prose quality, structure, or storytelling craft, but on how specific representations might be received by particular social or identity groups.

There is no agreed standard on what the role entails. If the individual happens to be a black person, Asian, or a woman, or transgendered, or native, or of any established cultural minority, they need only state that they are one and they are, if they can get themselves hired. There is no formal definition, no training, no credentialing, no shared methodology; in addition, there is no stated, clear, inherent consequence attached to the judgments they make. The reader bears no responsibility for the artistic, commercial or cultural outcome of the work; it the work still provokes criticism after their review, presumably, the penalty is that they might lose their job. This of course does not attach to the correctness of any specific judgment they might have made. Rather, the reading is evaluated on whether their feedback aligns with the expectations and risk posture of the institution employing them. If a publisher wants aggressive flagging, a reader who flags aggressively is doing the job "well," regardless of whether the flags are defensible, coherent or mutually compatible across projects.

I've tried to explain the above without sentiment or judgment and I'm not going to indulge in it. What would be the point? If this is the economic model that modern publishers want to embrace, they're welcome to it. I can't see how it affects my life as a writer, unless blogger.com wants to start employing one to look at my work.

What fascinates me is an exchange like this that took place on a podcast last August. The podcaster, Hughes, is talking about writing a Lebanese character into a book:

"When I'm writing the scene and they're around the kitchen table, what am I having them eat? Am I googling Lebanese American food? Because will that give me enough cultural knowledge to actually paint that picture authentically? What might a Lebanese mom say? What's a little saying that, you know, would create authenticity?"

This part is fascinating for me, because the two conversants go on to discuss creating characters in books, describing the importation of black people into books, stereotypes, the employment of American diversity to portray in stories and picture books various persons who have this background or that leaning or what not. Both are utterly blind to the racism going on in their own discussion, and how discussions like this reaching back into the 1950s inevitably led to issues of cultural appropriation in American literature.

As these two persons engage in the conversation (one of whom appears in the video I posted a few days ago about writing on campuses), the assumption is this: as a writer, I am making a character in a book, and my first tag for that character's personality is their race.  I'm not writing a scene where people sit around a kitchen table having dinner, where the food itself is irrelevant because I can describe any food I want, no. I'm writing a scene where Lebanese people are sitting around a kitchen table, and that makes it necessary for the food to be thought of in terms of its authenticity to the arbitrary naming of the character's ethnicity.

This defines the racism taking place in authorship.

The counterargument is that the characters must have names. If I do not say that the family is Lebanese, and still say, "Karim, Rami and Nadine sat at the table, where steaming bowls of falafel and rice awaited them," then I'm still saying Lebanese without using the term, correct?

No, not correct. Because if I never state the ethnicity, I'm first not beholden to having the characters self-define as Lebanese. These are names that people have, regardless of where they happen to have come from. What they talk about around the table defines their characters, their motivations, their interests and experiences... not that they have an ethnic background. If, as a writer, I ignore the ethnicity, if I never mention it per se, but only discuss the characters as people, and the story as a structure of events, then it does not matter if the people depicted happen not to be white. I'm not committing cultural appropriation because I'm not hinging the value or direction of my story upon a specific culture, but rather the one we all actually live in.

Post colonial writing, however, discovered in the 1950s, however, that writing about a specific culture was a terrific way to sell books. If I am Guatemalan, and able to write well, then I have a ready market of Guatamalans if I write about specifically Guatemalan culture, because so little is actually written about that culture. The appropriation complaint arises out of American people writing about Guatemalan culture and accessing that ready market without having "earned" the market by being actually Guatemalan. That in turn comes from the assumption that if I'm Guatemalan, I can't write a book that Americans will buy, because I don't know America and therefore don't know how to write work that will appeal to that culture which I do not know. What's "stolen" is the culture itself, but the willingness of Western publishing concerns to sweep in and market specific cultural books to specific cultural people, which it would like to do without outsiders to those cultures muddying a very lucrative and beneficial market (to publishers, that is, not to writers, who usually get exploited).

Thus, while the individual writer, say me, wants to write a book with "Lebanese" characters sitting at a table, the persons most concerned with this are not youtubers or cancel-culture enthusiasts, but publishers who want to be sure that my depiction of "Lebanese" is accurate to my actually BEING Lebanese... and thus the sensitivity reader. It's not, as most frame it, a desire to reduce backlash, but rather, to monopolise a specific kind of content.

For the would-be writer on the ground, however, not running a publishing house, it looks like avoiding backlash is the agenda. People in business, however, are not so naive as to think backlash won't happen regardless. The benefit of the sensitivity reader isn't that the backlash is reduced; it's that when it occurs, the publishers can argue, "Well, we did all we could. We used a sensitivity reader." This conveys their responsibility and thus sabotages the viability of any real backlash. The backlash that might have worked five years ago, when the "valid" perspective was on the internet, has now been countered by a greater validity. Publishers can now say to the press that comes to ask about the blowback to a book, with a shrug, "The internet is wrong; our research is professionally correct. That matters more than the opinions of a few amateurs." Poof. Internet problem gone.

The mindset of writers who sit around and discuss what culture to make their characters from arises from decades of literary critique that has systematically put all cultural writing, regardless of actual quality, upon a pedestal. As such, most college educated writers, the sort that take part in podcasts because their writing careers are frustrated, automatically think "good book" = "cultural framing." It is impossible for them to think of books in terms of self-identity except in terms of their group identity. It isn't possible for them to imagine novels that talk about the large subjects of a century ago (war, marriage, parenthood, morality, etc.) because they have been taught by university professors that nothing new can be written on those. Such books are still written, but they're eschewed by book prize committees or legitimacy, since academic institutions have decided that the only real life worth now writing about is the one set in the place where one grew up. This conveniently balkanises all writing into your social and ethnic status, while it is expected that as a white second-generation Canadian with distant roots in Russian culture, that I'm limited as a writer because my background was upper middle class suburban big city. I don't have anything worth writing about because I didn't suffer growing up. Besides, all novels about the suburbs were written fifty years ago by other white people who got there first.

We should not be surprised that there are now endless wars about the boundaries between cultures, and that "racism" or "genderism" or "sexism" are the battlegrounds upon which these wars are fought. The point about balkanisation is that there are so many little cultures, each jealousy struggling to defend their little hill, that this opens endless opportunities for accusation of theft, petty jealousies, arguments about validity and authenticity, and of course the perception that a sensitivity writer exists to impose even harsher boundaries against those writers who find their justifiable content narrowed still further. Already stuck in their heads with the assumptions that "books are written about peoples' culture" and that "all other subjects are dead," they find the news that publishers are now increasing their gatekeeping model as abusive and confrontational. Poor them. It chafes when writers without imagination or money find themselves without power also.

The solutions are obvious. What to write about? Well, this landscape to begin with. The novel about a writer who happens to be of one culture choosing to write about another, and then being vilified for doing so, sounds like a pretty good book that could be written at least ten thousand times, given all the boundaries to be crossed. The book about the writer who chooses to pretend to be a different culture, vis a vis the ancient book, Black Like Me, seems pretty obvious also, and is in fact already proliferating if one goes and looks for it. Common framings for this are all over youtube, in the guise of "I changed by sex and then I changed my mind" or "I used to be Maga"... any of these would make a new subject novel for anyone willing to have a spine that can withstand blowback. The problem with most cry-in-their-beer writers is what it has always been. They don't actually want to be writers. They want to be liked. That's almost impossible in the present world. Whereupon I have to repeat, poor them. Poor unfortunate souls. In pain. In need. This one longing not to be white, that one longing to be appreciated. Just like the mermaid who wants to live on land, but hates that it feels like walking on knives.