6 days ago
The scourge of the sensitivity reader
'Something strange is happening in the world of children's and YA [young adult] literature,' writes Adam Szetela, and his horrifyingly compelling book certainly bears that out. It offers a sobering report from the front lines of how identity politics and online pile-ons against anyone who sins against the latest pieties actually play out in the world of American publishing. Such is the atmosphere that many of the interviewees, who include presidents of the Big Five companies, senior agents, directors of public library districts and award-winning writers, are almost paranoid about preserving their anonymity.
At the heart of That Book is Dangerous! is the comparatively new figure of the 'sensitivity reader', who often has no accredited expertise but claims that their 'lived experience' enables them to spot 'authentic Latina voices' or determine whether the portrayal of a 'Filipino-American queer' character is accurate. Szetela trenchantly suggests that white authors are now required to
hire tour guides… to help them understand what happens when a black American walks into the kitchen. If one were to ask a black co-worker 'What do blacks eat for dinner?' they might be reported to HR. If they pay a sensitivity reader for an answer, they will be lauded for 'trying to get the story right'.
The book cites the case of a well-known sensitivity reader who wrote to an author that 'going to national parks is not a thing we [black people] do'. Authors and editors, Szetela claims, now feel pressure to abide by 'rules of authenticity' which 'will not permit a black character to enter a national park unless they explain why they want to enter a national park' and 'do not leave room for a novel about six English-speaking Latinas who met at Boston University'.
The very existence of sensitivity readers, Szetela claims, rests on a form of essentialism which implicitly sees Afro-American life, for example, as both so opaque that it needs 'cultural ambassadors' to explain it to white people and so homogeneous that a single person can claim to speak for 'Black/African-American culture' across history.
Stringent demands for inclusivity often have a blind spot about class, Szetela argues, citing writing guides and policy statements for literary festivals which sometimes seem to be 'competing to see who can create the longest identity list that does not mention class'. Yet poor, ill-educated writers miss out because they cannot afford the very well-paid and generally well-educated sensitivity readers that publishers now often insist on. When one unfortunate undergraduate merely stated that she didn't think a particular bestselling YA author's books should feature in her university's Common Read programme, she was savaged by several much more powerful people, including one who called her a 'RAGGEDY ASS fucking bitch'.
The attitudes of what Szetela calls 'the Sensitivity Era' can have a dismal impact on lively writing. One sensitivity reader felt the need to 'add all the other categories of queerness' to a book by a gay man clearly aimed at other gay men because she disapproved of 'the primacy of white gay men at the top of the pyramid'. A recent graduate of a master's in creative writing made it clear that white participants in a workshop would never give their black colleagues honest but useful feedback, such as: 'Maybe you need to tone down the political messaging for the sake of your story.'
In addition, according to Szetela, 'there is no room for even one uncontested thought crime in contemporary literature written for young people'. If a character says something offensive, they have to be challenged immediately and explicitly. Readers are given no chance to work out for themselves that the person is bigoted, or even to accompany them on a journey where they come to see the error of their ways.
There are moments when Szetela is baffled by what he finds. As a former keen wrestler who sometimes got into the ring with concussion or stitches under his eye, he simply 'can't imagine a situation in which I would break down crying, like the employees at Penguin Random House, because somebody wrote a book that I'm not interested in reading'. Yet he urges his fellow progressives to realise that 'there are bigger fish to fry than well-intentioned books written by other progressives'. This applies even within publishing, where commercial houses naturally continue to issue popular and often influential books by conservative authors. As a tool for addressing more serious inequalities, the initiatives he describes are simply non-starters.
Furthermore, he reminds us, 'most Americans think cancel culture is a big problem', while prominent liberals 'deny that it even exists' or 'call you a white supremacist for believing it exists' (even though some occasionally call for 'more cancelling'). This has proved a spectacular own goal, since the politicians now running the show have been able to attract easy and widespread support by criticising cancel culture.
This is hardly the first polemical book to explore the failings of 'woke' cultural crusades. Yet its combination of lively wit and rich detail makes it a particularly rewarding one.
