First, I should say that this column is deeply offensive, because it mentions a character who engaged in criminal sexual activity with a minor (as a — real — survivor of childhood sexual abuse, it's simply too painful for me to repeat his name, but his initials are H.H). Therefore, I demand that the NYT remove it. /s
Re Jackson's comment, “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”
It's "hard to get" because it's based on the execrably totalitarian idea that imagination can and should be Balkanized into "spaces" reserved for writers based solely on their race, culture, sexuality, ability, gender identification etc.
So, Faulkner shouldn't have written in complex, challenging ways about race in the South, on his way to exploring truly universal themes? Ursula K. Le Guin should not have dared to explore anarchy in "The Dispossessed" because she had no experience of it? And Jeffrey Eugenides was "out of his lane" when he wrote his groundbreaking novel "Middlesex," featuring an intersex protagonist?
It's appalling that a Twitter mob pressured Jackson to withdraw his novel. But it was, seemingly, his choice. Why not stand up to the mob and take on its silly purity face-to-face?
Jesse Singal has written good stuff about this YA mess: jessesingal.substack.com
11
“Jackson himself more or less articulated them: ‘Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?’”
What a profoundly ignorant statement. Artists should feel free to tackle any subject that interests them. Their work may succeed, or it may fail, but freedom of expression is a sacrosanct right. (This doesn’t mean publication or exposure is a guaranteed right, of course.) Mr. Jackson, and the Twitter YA police, are proposing nothing less than censorship.
And the idea of a “sensitivity reader” is an abomination.
17
"Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”
I don't know about anyone else. But this quote really disgusted me. And who in the name of everything that's holy thought of "sensitivity readers"?!
13
Even SJWs are falling afoul of SJW rules. Now imagine how this Twitter mob would respond to a YA book written by and supporting Christians or Conservatives! :-)
4
"... a reader who’d written an intemperate, if highly impassioned, review ..."
That "review" is insincere, trite, and illiterate. Review the reviewers and see how well they do ...
1
Live by the politically correct sword, die by the politically correct sword. He gets no sympathy from me
11
Maybe don't make an islamophobic book next time
1
So it's now true that “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people."
Well, of course. Because Viola Liuzzo should be written out of history. Because Goodman and Schwerner didn't exist.
It's a good thing these censorious types didn't exist in the days of Shakespeare, or we wouldn't have Othello.
13
"“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”
Seriously? That is incomprehensible insanity that reveals everything wrong with this generation, or at least the intolerant, narrow-minded, far left.
10
Ah, choking on the irony...am I the only one who wants to point out to Mr. Jackson that you have to be stunningly ethnocentric to think of AIDS as a gay male disease (how Eurocentric is that?) when most victims globally aren’t gay or male? The world is not better because he got hoist on his own petard, but it’s hard to feel bad for him.
12
Great article. I hope none of these "censors" ever read Flannery O'Connor. It would shake them to pieces.
7
Wait a minute! If only blacks can write stories about blacks, and only gays can write stories about gays for fear of misappropriation, then shouldn't only teenagers be able to write YA fiction? But we know they're all written by old people pretenting to be young.
15
"He was Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine."
The guillotine had a collar, not a "cradle". And comparing Jackson to a totalitarian revolutionary is offensive.
1
Sorry- truly, as I hate censorship- that he got a taste of his own medicine. But according to his logic, only Latin studios should make movies about immigration, only Black studios should make movies about Blacks, and so on.
4
The Purity Test Trolls reminds me of the prissy matron in the “Music Man” who lists the ills of modern culture befalling River City, among which was the reading of Balzac.
My grandnephew, a teen, and I were watching “Moby Dick” and when mention was made of “Your dark skinned” friend, my grandnephew said, “ That’s racially insensitive.”. Yes, but let’s use that as a way of discussing why something unacceptable today might have been tolerated 150 years ago.
Rather than eliminate the book, put a warning on it, give it a R rating or X rating like we do for movies.
As for making a Kosovar a villain during that cruel war, as long as book gets the historical context right, it is poetic license.
1
The Y.A. corner of the Twitterverse seems to be populated by demagogic tots. It is unfortunate, not to mention ironic, that Mr. Jackson, one of the pedagogues in this literary kindergarten, has become their latest target.
7
“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”
This whole story is horrifying (at least for those of us that understand that people will always be a bigger threat to their own freedom than the government ever could), but as the author himself seems to be just as deluded, just as ignorant to the nature of creativity (so ironic for a writer), not to mention just as lacking in respect for freedom of expression, as the moronic and mindless Twitter mob that he allowed to take him down, I don't have a lot of sympathy for him.
To paraphrase Renee Zellweger's character in Cold Mountain, he made the weather and then stands in the rain and complains that it's raining.
7
To quote Lady Gaga:
"Social media is the cesspool of the internet."
I love Lady Gaga.
4
Close the city and tell the people that something's coming to call
Death and darkness are rushing forward to take a bite from the wall, oh
You've nothing to say
They're breaking away
If you listen to fools
The mob rules
The mob rules
Kill the spirit and you'll be blinded, the end is always the same
Play with fire, you burn your fingers and lose your hold of the flame, oh
It's over, it's done
The end is begun
If you listen to fools
The mob rules
You've nothing to say
Oh, they're breaking away
If you listen to fools
Break the circle and stop the movement, the wheel is thrown to the ground
Just remember it might start rolling and take you right back around
You're all fools
The mob rules
Dio
3
So only a Dane should have written about Hamlet?
8
Bill Maher was right last night: the SJW crowd just want to moan and complain.
7
To grow a child's intellectual capacity to do right the child must be exposed to a broad set of ideas including morally repugnant ones. Shielding children from thoughts that are "offensive" simply avoids preparing them with the critical thinking necessary to rebut these ideas when they are grown adults.
I do think this author got exactly what he deserved, per this sentence in the article: In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”
5
It is absurd to say that an author can write about only those people whose race, color, ethnicity, gender, orientation, he or she shares. Let's consider that proposition further - where does it end? Is a black woman limited to writing about black women? Is a black lesbian limited further to writing only about black lesbians? Is a black liberal lesbian to be barred from writing about black conservative lesbians? Where does this insanity stop?
7
I’m a bookseller and a book lover, and this current rampant Twitter mob rule is infuriating me. That review on Goodreads was so stupid and officious. Fortunately, Ernest Hemingway isn’t trying to publish “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in this day and age. He’d be “cancelled” for centering his novel on an American in the Spanish Civil War. Jeeeeesh.
4
"...a dreary monoculture that admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors."
The same applies to the comments section here in the NYT. It is equally scary to witness how the censors here are imposing their own tinted world view on what they let pass and what not.
My comments are often taking the antithetical position to the article. Which more often than not means that I am discussing positions that that may challenge the rosy world view of an uncritically liberal censor who feels his or her primary job is to protect the sensitivities of some special interest group. As a result, ~ 50% of my comments are getting censored these days. Let's see if this is one of them.
Eventually, this "identity politics run amok" will be the undoing of our democracy. It is taking on increasingly Stalinistic features already.
I would never have thought that would be possible in America, but here we are!
1
This millennial author was hoist on his own petard. It is just crazy that a black, gay man born in the US should be limited to writing in the voice of a black, gay male character also born in the US is absurd. Carry this absurdity out to the secondary characters and you aren't allowed to write about anyone who doesn't look like you and have the identical experience that you have. Apart from twitter cancel culture -- imagine if in academe you were only allowed to research and publish about people who look like you and share your experience?
4
Banning obvious next step considering soft, trigger warning demanding, safe space, millennial fragility.
1
Cultural cancer.
Agreement with the opinion author is here; however, Mr. Jackson's novel sounds like a woefully boring read period.
Thank you for this breath of sanity in this increasingly insane world of the "Twitterverse" and its mobs.
1
This should surprise no-one, but the SJW’s are eating their own children.
1
We shame with careless ease, flinging sharpened spears,
While Hester Prynne walks the land, shedding scarlet tears.
1
DId the writer of Gilgamesh have the "agency" to describe that original "person of color", Enkidu?
Was Homer gay enough to cover homosexual relationships?
How about Shakespeare and that "moor"? And who told James Joyce he could write a woman's monologue?
What exactly would make the administrators happy?
5
I wish Kosoko Jackson had hung in there -- a Booklist starred review is a huge thumbs up from a professional publication. On the other hand, being harassed by an anonymous mob may be more than he wants to face in his life -- you have to respect that.
2
If I'm reading this article right, what the Twitter mob did was not censorship. It was an attempt at censorship. The author then censored himself.
1
The PC Police never seem to think about the other side of their argument, but it cuts both ways. If black people are the only ones who can write about black experiences, that also means black people can ONLY write about black experiences.
A black woman wants to write a biography of Jeff Bezos? Nope. A black man wants to write a screenplay about the Klan? Nope. (Sorry Spike Lee.)
I mean, if we're all staying in our own lanes, those are the rules right?
3
This is "Banned in Boston" all over again.
1
"Book Burning" is so much easier now.
:(
2
If some right wing hate group spent millions on the development of Twitter bots to automatically generate silly faux outrage at the most inconsequential "identity fouls", they couldn't possibly help the racists, misogynists, and xenophobes more than these self-appointed censors, including Mr. Jackson, are doing for free.
Trump couldn't buy this kind of reelection help even if he really was as rich as he says. Heck, the Fox News business model practically requires this kind of silly thought police overreach to feed THEIR outrage machine.
Progress on serious issues of discrimination and hate is tough enough without a group of "useful idiots" effectively playing for the other side.
2
Poor guy, hoist by his own petard!
So--why did he withdraw the book? He had the publisher...it's because he appears to believe in the same thing of which he complains.
I have no sympathy-- he is snared in the very trap he set for others.
1
Mr. Jackson, please release your novel. You have the right to create and publish whatever you want. No one owns your mind and power to generate art. No one owns historical fiction. No one owns an ethnicity nor gender nor sexual identity in the world's of fiction.
Maybe this is your karma for any of the novels you may have prevented from being published. Despite that, you have the right to your creative expression and if the means exist to publish it.
Don't be afraid of your critics. Stand up to them. If you do not, your voice will be silenced and your talents lost. You, and all authors, have to resist the censure of the mob. If you don't, our freedoms will evaporate one by one.
1
A perfect example of the toxic nature of these guardians of intersectionality, and against “cultural appropriation” and “privilege”, and other top ten hits. They are now eating their own, which I whole-heartedly applaud. Similarly, a few weeks ago the NYT editorial writer Jennifer Finney Boylan identified “Silence of the Lambs” as “transphobic” because the antagonist was trans. If that excellent film had been released in the Twitter era, we would not have been allowed to watch it.
Even though the intersectional views of this young author is part of the problem, I hope his book succeeds! Maybe he and other cultural leftists in this country will realize that by their own ridiculous standard, the rest of the world sees their American privilege as the most glaring example of “inequality”.
2
I’m missing the mechanism where the “twitterverse” forced anyone to do anything. Apparently this author feared public disapprobation so much he cancelled his work rather than let it compete in the market. What prevented him from standing up for his work? Unless of course he realized his work’s conception was infantile and insensitive ...
1
To quote from my youth "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." At least he didn't get a bad review in the NYT because we now how that can sink a book, see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/books/scathing-reviews-classic-books.html
The powerful can lie all they want on Twitter. Where are the gangs of censors then? Anyway who are these gangs? We don't even know their names or anything. Mobs. And now the likes of Facebook are setting up gangs in-house too.
1
This reads like Tom Wolfe satire. You can't make this kind of stuff up. By succumbing to the censorship of a band of wackos, and actually hiring some of said wackos as authors and editors, the Young Adult publishing industry has lost all credibility. Parents should not buy these books for their kids.
Purity cults always end up consuming their own, and I admit to being less than sympathetic seeing the arrogant get hoisted upon their own petards. Its always funny to watch for anyone who has any understanding of the inevitability of human nature and weakness.
Why do people still pay attention to Twitter?
Whenever I am forced to encounter it, it seems to be full of petty people eager to crucify others for some violation or slight of some inane set of rules that changes every week. Toxic worthless site.
Would there have been anything wrong with the book surviving on its own merit after publication instead of a non-book buying online mob going after it with pitchforks and torches?
Culture of "Gate keeping". People get to decide via the mob if you are worthy.
1
The online mob is an unfortunate reality of life these days, but the irony of this situation is delicious. He clearly made the grave error of believing that being gay and a visible minority would shield him from the purity police, whoops!
I can imagine his reaction, Goodreads is one thing, but “et tu, Twitter? Then fall, sensitivity reader!”
I'll be honest, I have trouble conjuring up much sympathy for Jackson, having witnessed him lead or participate countless torch mobs himself- most notably against Amelie Wen Zhao, whose treatment was tragic.
2
I’m not entirely comfortable with the classification of “YA” literature. It steers young readers in a direction someone else has mapped out for them and is a very subtle form of censorship. Let people decide for themselves what they like.
Was Shakespeare a Danish prince? No! He was an Englishman. So what business did he have writing Hamlet? Was Melville a white whale? He was a white man, true, but it’s just so un p/c that he thought he could write about a whale, no matter the color.
But seriously, of course we should be sensitive to other cultures, genders, orientations, and not portray them in derogatory, ignorant ways - but isn’t art about trying to empathize w/ others? It’s like unions - the p/c police started out with good intentions, but now they are bullies.
K. Willcox
1
Outrage Industry eating their own.
Who could have predicted that? Hm.
1
Cripes,
So from now on, complex books will only be written by conservatives?
1
I had the same seething, righteous anger that the Goodreads reviewer of "A Place for Wolves" had when I read "Little Men". How dare Alcott characterize the lives of characters she has no possibility of understanding? Didn't she know the damage she could cause to male adolescents trying to make sense of the world when confronted with Alcott's monstrous misrepresentation? All these books should be boycotted and we should work to ban them. #ownvoices
1
Let’s keep it simple...
Art for Art’s sake.
Ciao
1
It's a novel. It's not real. It's not supposed to be an academic commentary on the times, it's supposed to be make-believe that is, in reality, a make-think.
But the first thing one has to do is to read it, THEN one can think about it.
1
This is really depressing. I cringed when reading that only people who have lived something are able to write about it. What in the world happened to empathy, research, and imagination? Why are people so overly sensitive that we need to look at everything through our own guardrails and don't allow for discomfort?
8
I'm always saddened by articles like these, as it seems like people are becoming more and more afraid of diversity. On the right there is a fear of those who look different, and on the left there is a fear of those who think differently.
An artist may choose a limited palette of only a few colors, but if he or she is only allowed that palette, it becomes a prison rather than a choice.
We choose the prisons in which we're confined. A lack of forgiveness does more harm to the "unforgiver," than to the unforgiven.
The very existence of something called a sensitivity reader, evokes the kind of paternalistic condescension that is so often decried in other contexts.
Once we only allow a narrow range of ideas and points of view to have exposure, we have created the environment that breeds suppressed rage, and leads to the sort of surprises we received on election night 2016.
When I first heard of cultural appropriation, I thought it was a satire. When I found it was a real thing, that people could support and defend, I thought it was a tragedy. Now that I am seeing the devastation it is causing among young authors I weep for the future of literature.
But perhaps the future of literature will be limited to 280 characters.
7
Twitter like social media in general brings out the worst in us. Designed for emotional impulsiveness and complicit in bullying behavior it is an echo chamber of snark and nastiness best represented by Donald Trumps Twitter feed. Only social media can hijack something as innocuous as Teen Fiction and turn it into a judgemental form of hazing
8
My daughter was a voracious reader and the best fiction was probably what might be considered early middle school. Think Holes, Maniac McGee, The Giver, Bridge to Terabithia - fabulous reads as an adult as well. Most young adult fiction is just not worth reading - endless dystopia, backstapping teens, romance, and trilogies, sequels. Add to it now the "microaggression" of trying to write outside of your lived existence. This is up there with the intended shaming of Dana Shutz's Emmett Till painting. A sorry day for the imagination.
7
@skiddoo The middle grade books you mention are award winners. Might I suggest you try some YA award winners as well, instead of just referring to the cliches of the genre? The Printz award winners are all excellent literature. (This year's winner, The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo is a stunning novel in verse about a budding Dominican-American poet in Harlem.) And there are a lot of titles that don't win awards that are worth reading. Your gross generalization doesn't seem to be based on a deep familiarity with YA literature and does nothing to forward the discussion.
Since there's a lot of junk published after being vetted by the publishing experts, the fact that "A Place For Wolves may not be considered "elevated" literature probably should not have have impacted the author's decision.
In fact, as Mark Twain greeted the barrage of invective against Huckleberry Finn with glee noting it would increase sales, so the author might have publicized the outrage stimulated by his book to increase sales.
7
Well, live by the sword, die by sword. He bought into this PC culture of scolding and virtue signaling. It was only a matter of time before he found himself on the receiving end of a "problematic" opinion. No sympathy. He contributed to his own demise.
14
The way that Amelie Zhou's work was attacked on Twitter seems especially pernicious. "Haters gonna hate" seems to apply to this crowd. I am all for sensitivity readers and flagging books that perpetuate harmful stereotypes, but the mob mentality apparently at work here (100s of one star reviews on Goodreads, etc), seems all too reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. There has to be a way to strike a balance - but right now callout culture is way too toxic.
8
Hopefully the YA/children’s lit community will develop some guidelines concerning cultural sensitivity and publishing to which everyone agrees. This situation is still fairly new. Our mores are undergoing a profound shift and it will take time to settle at the new normal.
YA and children’s book cancellations due to Twitter buzz have happened to more than a few books over the past couple of years. Some of those books absolutely did not deserve to see the light of day (google “The Suicide Bomber in the Library” by Jack Gantos for a prime example).
Those of us who work with literature and young people want to provide literature that reflects our diverse student body. We want our students to see writers who look like them writing about them. Again, this is a cultural shift which will take time to complete. There will be awkward unfair moments along the way.
5
@Jeanine So refreshing to read a level-headed comment by someone who actually knows what they're talking about!
1
Since when do we institutionalize rules for literature, whether young adult or otherwise? When I hear someone say that we need to agree on a set of rules for any type of book, what I see in my mind’s eye are Nazis throwing books on bonfires. There are no good rules for literature. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.
I don't do twitter but have read numerous twitter screeds in articles about sports, politics, culture, etc. What struck me as interesting about this article was the preponderance of emotional extremes that move the dial on Twitter. After 300 years of the Enlightenment and it's morphing into a hyper-rational mentality devoid of life, heart and even reason, I am not surprised at how the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction–emotional extremism.
How else to explain the rise (fall) of Trump and the rabid 'love affair' his base has with his word salad chattering and outrageous lies just to con and manipulate them.
The Truth suffers the most through hyper-rationality and emotional extremism. Those of us who value Truth above all else still yearn for, well, the Truth above all else, and not the Scylla and Charybdis listed above.
4
Have any "cancel culture" candidates announced yet? We need a Non-Offender In Chief who shuffles diplomacy floor-gazing with averted eye. I'm told the UN Non-Offend High Commission, currently chaired by China, Syria, and Denmark, are drafting a report highly critical of the US in this regard. Leading US universities added their signatures to the brief. There is growing support for creating a language void of offensive terms, but, it is admitted, nothing can done under the current administration. A mortal crisis of highest magnitude.
3
If the book is as bad as Ms. Senior says it is, I would speculate that this is because being a "sensitivity reader" is probably the worst possible training for being a writer. Good Fiction requires a willingness to let your muse run wild, without constantly judging the political implications of what it says. I would think that after years of politically judging other people's work, it would be very difficult to do that.
16
I hope Jackson digs in, gets whatever value there is in the mob's pile-on, and publishes the book. Perhaps rewritten, but to his standards, not the mob's. Debut works are delicate beginnings. They will never be perfect. The publishing industry already has a tendency to project future sales from the results of the first book, and deny writers a chance to develop. This seems like yet another barrier to, yes, diverse voices, and leaps of transformative imagination.
The moment literature tries to reach for a consensus, it dies. The whole idea of having « sensitivity readers » at publishing houses is an insult to writers and readers alike.
We can see today the consequence of the gradual « sanitization » of art and ideas: more young people today show symptoms of anxiety than ever before. No wonder: they’ve been raised, for the most part, in a bubble where conflict and debate should be avoided at all cost. By trying to give them a « safe space », society has made them unable to deal with the real world.
11
At a time that the world bore ISIS, corrupted the idea of democracy enough to turn it into oligarchy, condemned future generations to a hot earth, continued with honor killings, child labour and human trafficking, returned to protectionism and xenophobia, the truly privileged chose fights that ensured they would not be denied the comfort of their home and anonymity.
Indeed, intolerance should not be tolerated. But be fully aware of what freedom of speech really means and weigh the importance of your hurt sensitivities against the immense suffering of people you haven't met. It may help you evaluate your instinctive response from a different perspective and perhaps choose a more meaningful fight next time.
2
Dracula, written by a non-Transylvanian who had not personally experienced death, and could not even turn into a bat. See what happens when you let other people define who you are? I see Frankenstein over there, nodding in agreement. Ghost stories should be written by the dead, stories about the living dead should be written by the living dead. Without that kind of authenticity, how can we trust that the fiction we are reading is true?
35
Books should never be cancelled because someone doesn't like it. It limits the ability for people to have discussions. Books are gateways to discussion. Some books we will love others we won't and a few we will hate. But in so doing we are engaging in the conversation around art, written language and people's varied perspective.
10
Good article. Once again, we see that nothing healthy comes from social media. In fact, it is a cancer in our culture. We subscribe to none of them, and never will.
....and yet, at the end of this fine and enlightening article is this:
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
17
It's not just a fringe culture. Many review sites, from the AVClub to science fiction blogs to some young Guardian journalists, are not concerned anymore abut artistic quality, and they are only interested in sensitivity issues: does this work offend anyone? Since I'm a GenX-er, this millennial reviewers remind me of the 80s Moral Majority, deciding who has the right to exist and who has to be cancelled.
23
This comment section is filled with lazy logical fallacies that imagine slippery slopes of book burnings and the purging of literary canons for fear of offending people. Perhaps if you actually reached out to young people you would see that this case is an extreme example - and a minority case given the hundreds of thousands of books published each year - that everyone here has taken to be indicative of the entirety of literature. Dial down the histrionics, folks.
20
@Harry Lewis, while I don't disagree with you on the effect of this on the entirety of literature or that the slippery slope argument is a trope whose time desperately needs to end I don't think you get the point. There are genres of art and literature that are more susceptible to this kind of behavior. This is especially true of social media orientated young adults and teens. They are deeply connected today to a social environment that many of us are clueless about. The opportunity for bullying and mob behavior is exasperated by that close connection. The histrionics may be unnecessary but the elevated level of concern is not. So I must disagree that this is an extreme example & yes I do have connections to young people. That's not a defense about anything or do you think that reaching out is the same thing as being connected?
17
@Harry Lewis Speaking of lazy logical fallacies, claiming that this is an extreme example when a.) sensitivity readers are now routinely employed to prevent things like this from happening, and b.) it's not the first time that an author has pulled a book in the face of online outage--well, that argument is itself illogical.
"Dial down the histrionics, folks." That's great advice for the online mob. Life's too short. Go swear and scream at people who actually deserve it.
14
@Harry Lewis, it’s not ”histrionics” by any means. Have you failed to notice how easily and regularly people mock and deride those of differing political and social philosophies? It’s intellectual fascism, is what it is and it should be resisted wherever it is found.
6
Let's give this another go:
"...a dreary monoculture that admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors."
The same applies to the comments section here in the NYT. It is equally scary to witness how the censors here are imposing their own tinted world view on what they let pass and what not.
My comments are often taking the antithetical position to the article. Which more often than not means that I am discussing positions that that may challenge the rosy world view of an uncritically liberal censor who feels his or her primary job is to protect the sensitivities of some special interest group. As a result, ~ 50% of my comments are getting censored these days. Let's see if this is one of them.
Eventually, this "identity politics run amok" will be the undoing of our democracy. It is taking on increasingly Stalinistic features already.
I would never have thought that would be possible in America, but here we are!
8
I’m not too upset to see a PC writer fall victim to his own PC culture. But Jennifer is right — this sort of thing is inimical to creativity and culture
19
Back in about 1993 - I was browsing in the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City -
I came across a book titled - "A World Lit Only by Fire" by William Manchester - and opened to the very first page - which reads as follows -
"The Medieval Mind:
The DENSEST of the medieval centuries—the six
hundred years between, roughly, A.D. 400 and
A.D. 1000—are still widely known as the Dark Ages. Modern historians have abandoned that phrase, one of them writes, “Because of the unacceptable value judgment it implies.” - Yet there are no survivors to be offended."
After reading that paragraph, I walked over to the counter and purchased the book - which is still in print today.
Good thing Manchester was able to publish it before the digital age of Social Media --
Also - here are a few opening lines from other books -
"They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them."
- "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."
- "Breakfast of Champions", by Kurt Vonnegut
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
- "Pride and Prejudice", by Jane Austen
"They shoot the white girl first."
- "Paradise", by Toni Morrison -
The Cancel Crowd better get busy...
7
Should we allow Trump and his racist policy makers in our shop or restaurant? Should we just ignore their immoral transgressions? The sensitivity police are extreme but they are a reaction to a blasé response to evil in this world. When child rapists like Michael Jackson are celebrated and admitted molesters like Trump are elected president we do nothing. So in the sphere of literature they might have some power to defend the oppressed through Twitter etc. Thus the revolution begins.
1
@Cary Mom: I get your point, but suppressing a book by an obscure author is certainly much easier to do than persuading people not to celebrate Michael Jackson and elect Trump. So you have to wonder if the powerless and poor are simply more convenient targets. After all, it's pretty hard to bring down a guy protected by an army of lawyers and a fortress of money.
6
Well, could the irony be any richer? The schadenfreude any more delightful? It won’t be too many years before they’re burning books rather than just banning them. That’s how dangerous ideas are to these — is mental deficients too soft a term? As the last generations to enjoy comfortable weekends and carefree retirement, we pity these losers-to-be. When they get steamrolled by the unpampered and hungry kids from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Israel, their parents’ “golden years” will be anything but. Don’t say we didn’t warn you, kiddies. Oh, by the way. We’re leaving our assets to the ASPCA as an irrevocable trust.
8
What do they read? The overarching question this raised for me is why I would want to read an author who lacks the intuition, interest, imagination and craft to write about cultures other than her or his own. Could a black man take enough interest in someone like me (an older white woman) to add me to a story; to get to know someone like me through his own humanity? It’s some sort of cultural protectionism for me to deny the writer the freedom. That a writer would advocate censoring others tells me he has censored himself, that his imagination isn’t free. Who would want to read writers who are that compromised. Thank heavens Kazuo Ishiguro never got that memo.
13
For some reason this reminds me of book burning.
8
Sad, but ironic, the auhtor seemed to be advocating for the restrictions in authorship that did him in. I do not believe that “pedigree” should limit what one can try to write about.
7
The outrage is over the claim that the "villan" in the book is Muslim
and it's set in a time and place where Muslims were subject to
genocide. First of all, the KLA was an active terrorist group
in that region at that time. Also, since the book was never
released we don't know if the claim that "the villan is a Muslim"
is true. Since it got dozens of positive blurbs from people who
are extremely sensitive about social justice issues I am going
to guess that this claim is untrue.
On the other hand, a book of poems by a black woman that portray Jews in a Protocols of Zion-like way won the Laura Wilders Ingram award
the year before the award was given a new name due to insensitivity
Ingram showed to blacks in her writing half a century ago. The double standards when it comes to whose feelings matter and whose don't is beyond belief.
10
I didn't understand this article at all. By this I mean I don't understand at all how any person can take seriously the "theory of literature" here: "What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for writing Y.A. literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”.
It appears a theory of literature before a person has learned anything about literature or a theory existing in a non reading age/society or a theory which exists by device of totalitarian regime. It appears to me entirely solipsistic, that I can write about myself but not about anything not to mention anyone else before the eye, and you are confined to the same, so essentially it's a theory of people choking on themselves, emoting yet carefully confining their emotion and consciousness to a narrow description of self and what's safe to touch upon apart from themselves.
It's the theory of literature of English classrooms, weak personalities, the terrified under totalitarian regimes. You are always careful and fearful of what you can or cannot say, always forced back on only yourself, choking on your words, always on the lookout for what's safe to describe and avoiding the rest.
12
Let’s hope Twitter never discovers Mark Twain.
6
I remember the days of yore when a writer would get eviscerated for poorly representing a character or group in their book, along the lines of "this book is horrible because the author writes all women as two-dimensional bimbos" or something similar.
It seems nowadays people are proudly pre-judging authors without considering their work.
3
If the "marketplace of ideas" exists at all, surely it includes social media. If "cancel culture" exists, surely it extends back to the time when libraries shunned Nabokov for teen readers. I sense a different kind of gatekeeping here, one that prefers the older systems of the last century, rather than adapt to the possibilities, multiple voices, and advantages (and, yes, disadvantages) of this one.
1
Literature is problematic or it is not literature. The ideal of any kind of correctness--exemplified here by the terror of an author who pulls his book because certain self-appointed judges deem it unacceptable--is contrary to what literature does, which is to question, violate expectations, parody, question, thrill, transgress, horrify, insult, deride, arouse, as well as affirm and inspire. Literature written according to a program of do's and don'ts has never survived, and today is no different from before. Literature written today according to the demands of the twitterati will disappear without a trace.
5
Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is supported by our institutions of higher learning, not just the twitter mob. In 2015 at Yale University, the wife of one of the Deans of the residential college wrote an email about the issues around cultural offensiveness of Halloween costumes, essentially asking the student body to consider what is really considered offensive. Well the Yale identity politics student mob attacked her, and her husband (the Dean) who defended her. Yale acquiesced to his resignation as the Dean of the residential college (though he kept his professorship though the student mob demanded them both out). My point is that even the higher institutions of learning don't protect free speech anymore if the voice of the mob gets loud enough. These twitter mobsters want to say what they want to say, and demand that those who disagree with them can't say what they want to say. That is an authoritarian mob rule, and anti-democratic. You can be sadly under-privileged but also hold authoritarian anti-democratic attitudes at the same time.
9
So now we’re facing flameless book burning I guess. We should remember who burns books. It ain’t the "good guys"!
9
And why is anyone surprised? The hits just keep on coming.
This censorship is wrong. Keep an open dialogue and discuss and learn tolerance. Ignorance occurs when a society is closed to information. Nothing to fear.
1
It’s been twitter banned! Banned books are big sellers. Publish it.
3
Sounds like the YA market is ripe for a totally offensive, morally questionable book to burn its way to the top of the bestseller list.
Once they get a taste of it, there will be no sating those kids.
5
I'm reminded of reading stories about what it's like to live in a small, conservative town, where everyone knows your business and everyone has something to say about it. We are all in that tiny town now, and the hellfire and brimstone preacher has installed a deacon in each of our homes.
5
There is something particularly creepy about true adults -- like Mr. Jackson and his Twitter censor, Tamera Cook -- using their publishing product to politically and socially indoctrinate "Young Adults," who are actually adolescents. (The industry defines YA as fiction for 12-18 years old.) This is akin to "grooming," especially since so much of the YA content focuses on sexuality.
2
The mob (Twitter or any other) only has power when we cede it. As a society, we are still adjusting to this new age of “instant mob” that can only form because of the internet and social media, but I can certainly remember being intrigued by and wanting to get my hands on any book deemed inappropriate or worthy of being banned by armies of concerned parents! It seems to me that an author sure of her/himself and the merits of their work might be able to turn the mob response into a buzz that could lead to increased book sales.
The fact that "major publishing houses" employ "sensitivity readers" shows that the problem isn't Twitter. It's the authoritarian mentality that appears on Twitter, in major publishing houses, on college campuses, etc.
17
Imagine if James Joyce's "Ulysses" had been vetted prepublication by a sensitivity reader. Presumably, Joyce, as a Catholic, would have been deemed unqualified to write about the thoughts and feelings of the Jewish character, Leopold Bloom, and as a man, about the thoughts and feelings of the female character, Molly Bloom. Joyce might then have felt compelled to withdraw the book, and the Western world would have lost one of the masterpieces of modern literature. And speaking more personally, I would have lost the pleasure of occasionally rereading Molly Bloom's life-affirming soliloquy that ends the book or listening to Siobhan McKenna's beautiful recording of it.
Shame on those whose constricted view of the life of the imagination, and of life itself, does great harm to us all.
16
Who knew that 1984 would be constructed by anonymous people wandering, apparently interminably, in cyber space?
Four legs good, two legs bad comes to mind. But is Animal Farm acceptable given it’s demonization of some farm animals?
7
Here's a thought, boycott Twitter, and while we're at it, Fac ebook too. What value do they add to life? They are like guns and ammo— they can be used by any malicious or unthinking or self-righteous person to be judge and jury at a given moment, and have effects that can far outweigh and overreach the motives and intents of their users. The courts say they are both protected by the Bill of Rights, so we can't outlaw or meaningfully regulate them. Therefore, boycott them, and end this nonsense where thumbs spread St. Vitus' dance.
Also, I did not hear anyone complaining about Anthony Marra's beautiful novels about Chechnia. Outsiders can observe and write beautifully about other cultures, and often are better equipped to do so.
4
I've read about this particular controversy elsewhere and it seems to be a horrid atmosphere in publishing. But if it happens, it's wonderful payback for it to happen to Jackson, whose views are not only hateful and ridiculous, but would wipe out most of great literature. How dare the blind human Homer tell the story of the sighted demigod Achilles!
6
How boring literature would be if authors only drew upon their own narrow experiences for stories. Nobody could write about time travel, or even space travel, for that matter. There would be no historical novels, no Game of Thrones, no Lord of the Rings, no fairy tales, no Shrek, no Harry Potter (and hence - maybe worst of all for young folks - no cosplay). No books about ghosts, ogres, or sorcerers. Neither Frankenstein nor Dracula would exist. You couldn't "reimagine" the life of Jesus and write The DaVinci Code (not that I liked that book, but plenty of people did). For goodness' sake, fiction is not reality! It is about the imagination, and the creatures and characters that populate our internal landscapes. If a gay Englishman from the 1930s pops up at the center of a story by an American woman in the 2010s, should she not write the story? Or should she perhaps read as much as she can about gay men in the 1930s, and try to imagine what it might be like to be in his shoes? Because that's what many fiction writers do: they use their minds to imagine what it would be like to be someone else, which is essentially practicing empathy for others in a highly sophisticated manner. Those who think that people should just "write what they know" probably have barren imaginations, and want other people to be as unimaginative, tedious, and uncreative as they are. Sorry for the diatribe. This kind of thing makes me mad.
15
"It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first."
No. The author did not have the backbone to stick by his work. If he lacks that then maybe the work should not be published. He pulled it, not the mob.
6
I guess he didn't think very highly of his own work if he was that easily cowed.
5
I doubt that he was easily cowed. Although the exact extent of the blowback was not stated, typically these Twitter-bombings involve various threats: physical harm, loss of position, picketing outside one's house and shunning from public places. (I note that you, wisely, do not use your last name or address in your post. Who exactly is cowed?)
The most effective way to deal with those things is to yourself develop a major sense of grievance, i.e. anger and self-righteousness (and then watch your back carefully). Life is too short for that stuff. I have no problem with him pulling the book.
2
On this general topic of writers creating and inhabiting a character of a different background than him or herself, and of what we are to make of art and artists who falter in their creation or who soar, and what the role of art can be for a people struggling with corruption, lies, ignorance, fear, racism, xenophobia: I highly recommend this beautiful article by Stephen Greenblatt in the New Yorker. I don’t believe I’ve read anything more beautiful since we entered our current era of trumpist xenophobia and incuriosity.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/shakespeares-cure-for-xenophobia
2
Jackson and Amelie Zhao should never have pulled their books. (Zhao also pulled a book in response to a twitter mob, because of ridiculous claims that she shouldn't write about slavery in a fictitious world because she's French and Chinese, not African American, as if many other people don't have more recent and direct experience of slavery.) Writers should not give in to people for whom self-righteous indignation is such a powerful drug they spend their time making up reasons to be offended. These critics should be ignored.
This culture of people dictating who can write which stories is anathema to the very foundational purposes of fiction: to imagine, to criticize, to explore. Dictating who can and can't write about a topic is dictating that we can ONLY have one perspective on given topics. That's dictating we can have no debate, no critical thought, and no exploration on that topic. That impulse is ultimately authoritarian. Writers need absolutely to challenge and undermine such authoritarianism.
Dictating who can and can't write on something based on their skin color or gender is to enforce an apartheid of letters, and falls into the same errors that racism and sexism do: to dismiss the human and distill people to their category. The answer to exclusion isn't more exclusion.
I'd hope Jackson's next YA novel is about someone who takes on a twitter mob and through wisdom and strength beats them back to the shadows. Now THAT is the kind of YA novel we need now.
7
Orwell's phrase was "orthodoxy sniffing." He coined it for his essay on the death of Gandhi. The Index of the Roman Catholic Church wasn't governmental censorship, but it certainly was effective.
2
Ask: Who will decide the fate of Twitter?
In 1980 you could board a McDonnell-Douglas DC-9, flip open that arm-rest ashtray, and light up a Lucky Strike. You could do the same in a restaurant.
Today, you'd be arrested or socially crucified. Suppose we aspire to transform the act of being on Twitter, in a similar way. The digital diarrhea that flows from Twitter is worse than cigarette smoke. It'd be a better society, if anyone with even a distant aspiration to cultural intelligence were horrified of being seen there.
2
This problem isn't limited to the lowbrow community of YA publishing.
If you recall, the very upscale, and government supported, cultural institution known as WNYC recently fired three radio personalities -- John Hockenberry, Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz for unspecified "harassment" incidents.
None of the subsequently-reveled incidents went beyond the trivial, but the firings were part of a national movement of angry, supposedly marginalized groups railing against white males who are thought to abuse their positions of "power."
Insofar as their "power:" Hockenberry is a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair, and the other two are 78 and 80 years of age. None of them, it turns out, had the power to mount a lawsuit or even a PR campaign in their defense. They remain in media exile.
6
Since the advent of the internet, and especially since "social media" overwhelmed pour discourse, our culture has become mean and dumb. The hostility is thick enough to cut with a knife.
Years ago people kept their ugliest thoughts to themselves. We were all a lot better off that way.
4
I am going to adopt a contarian position here. Any author who is so unsure of his work as to withdraw it over Twitter posts probably did not write anything powerful enough to be worth worrying about.
Can you see Hemingway, Tolstoy, or Wolfe pulling a book because of bad pre-publication reviews? I can not. If Mr. Jackson had written something he truly believed in, he would have gone ahead. If he is that tepid about the work, it is probably better off not being published.
50
Good point.
It also fits Al Franken’s resignation from the Senate over nothing.
I came to pretty much the same conclusion in his case. Very disappointing.
5
@mikecody
That's not the point. If you read to the bottom of the opinion piece, the author's point (which I agree with) is that the marketplace of ideas should sink the book, not the twitter identity politics mob. The book may not be worth worrying about, the but this is mob rule, and we should worry about that.
Look at it this way. Let's say the Catholic Church bans a book 400 years ago for blasphemy. The author is so intimidated by that he burns the book themselves and disavows it. This isn't about that book - it's about what the institution does. That same institution that 400 years ago forced Galileo to stop teaching that the Earth revolves around the Sun and put him under house arrest for 30 years, impeding truth and human knowledge. That same institution murdered and expelled people from countries where they ruled who didn't follow their doctrine. That's the point. Don't fool yourselves into thinking that some minority of the twitterati involved in this won't eventually feel justified in commiting violence on those not in line with their doctrine one day. This is how it starts.
17
@mikecody
Perhaps the best books ever written were pulled exactly for reason like this. How would you know? It’s possible to imagine writers better than Hemingway or Wolfe exist - maybe this is why we don’t know about them.
11
Mixing weaponized social media and grievance culture is leading us to a sterilized arts world. The idea that writers or artists or musicians can only work within their own culture or gender seems so backwards and self-defeating. Are we that limited in our thinking and so reactionary to outrage that we're not allowing people to create and express themselves? Do we want all cultures to only stay in their lane? I weep for the future and long the recent past free of twitter mobs and overwrought identity politics. I write this as a progressive liberal, but one who sees litmus tests on either side as a bad thing.
6
The generation following me seems fine with artistic censorship which I find deeply troubling and wrong. What has happened? It's terrifying.
6
I think the public has every right to pan a bad book. The author and publishers shouldn't have pulled the title though. If the book is bad, let it pan. Sometimes even the worst material eventually receives cultish attention. In cinema at least, the entire martial arts genre fits squarely into this category. You're watching a film so terrible it inevitably becomes good. I think we should offer the same leniency to books.
As a citizen critic, here's my standard for both books and film: Did the author or filmmaker successfully accomplish what they set out to do?
Full stop. That's it.
If your goal was to make a B-rate cult classic, that's great... so long as you make a B-rate cult classic. Think "Donnie Darko" or "Dead Alive". Both feature relative celebrity. If you were trying to create a full length drama in those films though, we have a problem.
That's the problem with the sensitivity police. They are not evaluating content within context. Did Jackson intend to create a story critical of Albanian Muslims? If the answer is no, his story is bad not because readers perceive the judgement as wrong but because the perception was not the author's intention. That's how we need look at things.
1
I started to leave a smart-alecky comment about how it was a good thing that J.K. Rowling didn't heed this advice. And then I realized that was something that perpetually nagged me when my daughter was growing up reading the series: I always thought Hermione would've made a more authentic protagonist.
3
"... I always thought Hermione would've made a more authentic protagonist."
The Harry Potter books are fantasy, so how can they be "authentic"?
2
@BRS
You're taking things too literally. By definition, all fiction is inauthentic. All literature is technically inauthentic. Language is an abstraction of the physical world. Written language is an abstraction of that abstraction. Blue pill or red pill? You're still in the matrix regardless.
I think C Wolfe is trying to highlight how Hermione would have made a more convincing protagonist for the story. I can't say I disagree.
2
@BRS
Because, I disliked the whole "Chosen One" thing with Harry—that he's inherently special and discovers he's entitled to a vault of cash so he never has to worry about having the material things he needs, unlike Ron. He was admitted to Hogwarts as a legacy. Hermione earned her place and didn't come from magical folk. She had to prove she belonged there on her own merit. I thought that was a more interesting narrative conflict (think of that scene in the movie where she punches Malfoy) and that it would've been a better story if the outsider had been the savior of this cloistered elitist world. That, and the scene where the faculty and students lift their wands to the dark sky collectively after the death of Dumbledore, are for me two of the most powerful movie moments, and Harry is central to neither.
Fantasy depends on the conflict the protagonist faces feeling vital to the reader. I always thought the "secretly you're rich and have immense powers" fantasy in Harry Potter was a rather unworthy longing.
Because the author was a woman, I also felt there was something pathetic and perhaps cowardly in her choosing a male protagonist to ensure the popularity of the story—just as she obscured her gender by using her initials as her pen name.
These are calculated choices, but they strike me as inauthentic—not because the author chose a protagonist not of her own gender, but because the choice was made as the path of least resistance.
I implore editors at publishing houses, as well as newspapers, not to cede your role to the mob. Without you we are adrift in a flood of content, much of it meritless. Have the courage and strength to publish worthy works and ignore this nonsense.
If you continue to give way to the mob you will ceases to exist. If you stand your ground you may find that all the sound and fury actually raises awareness of these works and motivates the silent majority to buy a book and judge for themselves.
17
I wonder how all this happened.
Over ten years ago, the British Author Chris Cleave was attacked for writing from a perspective not his own. A very good book, too - 'Little Bee' - as sensitive a book as they come. It's been going on, then, for at least that long. Long before Twitter.
I would be interested in reading a thorough analysis of the evolution of this madness. If there's anyone still alive out there brave enough to do so.
7
The left is quick to point out the dangers of what is written and said on the right. I’d say it’s more dangerous for the left to continue to stop people from writing and speaking.
18
I wrote my first novel, The Reverse Commute, six years ago. The story is about a frustrated NH woman during the Recession who finds herself working at a dead-end job in a cubicle after numerous layoffs and financial ups and downs. I received several bad reviews mostly due to Sophie's liberal politics. Many of these were on Goodreads, a very dangerous place for an author. One reviewer wrote, "Don't get her started on employee at will". Oh, please do. Five years later the NY Times started talking about employees at will. The book's still out there. People are still reading it. A writer, even an Indie like me, has to stand by their work if they believe in what they're writing.
20
"To read too many books is harmful."
Mao Zedong
85
And we wonder why kids and teenagers don’t want to read anymore.
3
In an article a few days ago, "Wolves
A YA sensitivity reader watched his own community kill his debut novel before it was ever released,"
By RUTH GRAHAM for Slate, we find that "In January, another first-time author, Amélie Wen Zhao, asked her publisher to pull her to-be-released fantasy novel, Blood Heir, because of early reader critiques about racial insensitivity . . ." and that ". . . Jackson had participated in that online pile-on."
This is a major pitfall of PC culture taken to the extreme through mob mentality.
Zhao and Jackson are minorities in a field that is heavily dominated by whites, but they're part of what amounts to be an online gossip fence that kills the reputation of minorities now expected to carve out some readership within minority communities first. If found acceptable among their "own," they can then find success in dominant culture as "authentic."
This is how "divide and conquer" actually conquers: let the factions of a fractured culture fight amongst themselves while a dominant group remains solidified enough to hold power.
It is the same process that currently plagues the Democratic Party.
Instead of minority factions banding together to combat a regressive and oppressive bully, like the French did in electing the unpopular Macron to vanquish the deplorable Le Pen, American minority groups of all colors and creeds are suffocating themselves with an over-the-top PC intolerance that the Trumpists will laugh at all the way to reelection in 2020.
7
Woke mob turns on one of their own for not being woke enough.
Now where have I seen this before?
13
"It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance."
And that's kinda the problem: the marketplace. As a former YA librarian I can tell you that books are never read because they have the best things to say, they're read because they were marketed better. And most of these "voices" are people with privilege. Nowadays, it's not as rare of a sight to see a book written by a group that hasn't been well-represented in the past, but it's STILL disproportionate to the already established (priviliged) authors who feel like they can write about everyone simply because they can.
And these books wind up overshadowing everything else. A book with a Muslim villain written by a non-Muslim getting more traction then a book written with a strong Muslim protagonist written by a Muslim is not just everything wrong about publishing and marketing...it's heartbreaking. Or worse, books written by Muslims will then be compared to those written by a non-Muslim ("Sorry kid, you got a good story but you can't sell as well as INSERT ESTABLISHED AUTHOR.")
And to assume that "well it's a good book so OF COURSE it'll get better marketing" is just as myopic. To call it "art" is disingenuous.
3
Its disheartening to see the word ‘privilege’ constantly used to denigrate the work of someone who perhaps did a little better in the birth lottery. The guilt it is supposed to elicit doesn’t exist in my mind. No one has the right to tell another how they should regard themselves.
8
The comparison to Robespierre and the eventual degeneration of the French Revolution into carnage and self-immolation is quite accurate. What angry activists always fail to understand is that anger does not work as a long-term solution. If you're angry about something, fine, change it. But if all you've got is anger and nothing concrete and optimistic to replace the thing you're angry about, then your cause is doomed.
Thus the constantly angry members of the SDS became the Weather Underground. The Black Panthers grew impatient with the non-violence of the civil rights movement and militarized. And Robespierre and the other architects of the Great Terror and the guillotine were themselves tried and executed.
Young people think that saying or doing what they feel at all times makes them authentic. But toddlers do the same thing. And we call them babies.
19
Maybe now that one of the identity-obsessed thought police has been censored by his own pack of wolves (pun intended) the entire “cancel culture” and cult of “sensitivity editors” can crawl back away, never to return.
We need Mark Twain to come back and tell all these folks what they can do with their safe space Twitter feeds.
12
The gatekeepers for children/teen fiction are the publishers and librarians. In this case the author (voluntarily?) chose to withdraw the book, which I would imagine for commercial reasons --perhaps later to re-release it after being reworked. This op-ed really should be aimed at adults directly involved in children's lit like teachers and bookstore owners to not cave in to the fickle twitter and tumblr mob as this author did. The twitterverse will meme and stir up polemics, but like a lousy book, it will be forgotten quickly. Just don't let them get the good books too.
Call it what it is-censorship. They might as well be burning books.
11
This censorship ideology comes directly from the Grievance Studies departments, it penetrated elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, the work place. "Sensitivity readers" started the Dark Ages by burning the ancient "problematic" literature.
19
I knew Rowling was a wizard.
3
There’s a manga called Screaming Lessons, it’s a series of short stories similar to The Twilight Zone. In one of the stories a classroom has a particular chair in it that school legend says will kill anyone who sits in it. One day for a lark the kids switch the killer chair with their teacher’s chair, killing him. The students then use their newfound power to kill the class bully. Then the kid that everyone found creepy. By the time it’s the protagonist’s turn to take a seat the students are killing just for the power trip declaring someone guilty and executing them gives them. Twitter’s activists culture is like that too, it started out trying to punish the guilty, now it has to make guilty people to punish.
12
"... a manga called Screaming Lessons, it’s a series of short stories similar to The Twilight Zone."
Is that the series by Emi Ishikawa? If so, there is a Wikipedia article on it under the title "Zekkyō Gakkyū".
@Cathy Cathy, you've just described our culture to a T.
It’s very simple.
Art for Art’s sake.
Ciao
1
I recently had a reviewer of a work about Odysseus sneer that he was just "a great white hope."
2
If you remain anonymous when delivering criticism your criticism should remain that way too. Very bad precedent for the author to set. This is just another step on march to 1984.
4
A question for Jennifer Senior: The redeeming qualities of Humbert Humbert were what? Of all the morally ambiguous characters to choose from this was the choice.
2
People rant and rail against Facebook and Google (deservedly so, granted) yet Twitter is often ignored. While perhaps not engaging in the type of privacy invasion of the aforesaid, Twitter is far more toxic, corrosive and dangerous to our society, culture and democracy. It is a cesspool.
Twitter is what people should be abandoning in hordes. I've never been on it and refuse to put credence in stories about the last outrage ignited by this vile tool.
9
I feel sorry for this generation. They are burdened with the impossible task of anticipating what will be deemed offensive in both the present and future by an arbitrary group of people who have limited life experience but extraordinary intolerance for real and legitimate differences and varying perspectives.
464
Brief , to the point, and an excellent observation!
22
Don’t feel sorry for “this generation.” Most of them can see this censorious behavior for what it is and give it the attention it deserves.
9
@BMD, feel sorry for this generation? The judgement of arbitrary groups of people with limited life experiences and extraordinary intolerance"s for real and legitimate differences and varying perspectives infects the internet. The trolls come in all ages, genders, social outlooks and political inclinations. The twitter troll in chief is a baby boomer with a mastery of lies, exaggeration and misdirection. This extends beyond the generation reading Teen Fiction & your sympathy is a little to judgemental and shallow for me.
2
Funny how this never happens to white-male-centric movies, say...
Y.A authors, ignore the tweets and publish!
46
@Seabiscute, this never happens to white male centric cinema? or other forms of art? What newspaper have you been reading?? Cultural appropriation, privilege and other myths all sprung from complaints about anything white male centric.
What makes this article newsworthy is that the left is now eating their own.
Let the intersectional Hunger Games begin !
4
Wait...there's a position entitled "sensitivity reader" at publishing houses?!
Thank goodness that didn't exist when I was a Young Adult. I was a child of privilege apparently, even though I was poor, because I was able to read books that represented a broad viewpoint diversity, as opposed to the hideously boring and stultifying "monoculture" Ms. Senior describes....
Our poor kids.....
21
The Twitter scolds use the same model as Limbaugh - spew bile and hate - rile up the unwashed and advertise patent medicine and scam investments
8
We are heading to witch hunts controlled by fanatics. All on social media where the accusers are faceless.
7
Gosh, these children are frighteningly stupid. I'm dying. One upside--I won't have to live in their canceled world.
10
@trenton I'm so sorry, trenton. I hope you won't give any more of your precious time to fools and foolishness than you can help. And since come to think of it, we're all dying sooner or later, we should all walk away from this. It's what I'm doing. There just doesn't seem to be any way to convince the people determined to police and educate the rest of us, whether on the Left or the Right, to calm down and mind their own business for a change.
1
I am so glad that (a) I'm not on Twitter and (b) I read real literature, not YA
4
@Dr. J.
I only read "real literature" my entire life until about 6 months ago when my avid reader of a twelve year old said, "Instead of you recommending books to me, why don't I recommend one to you?" Thus began my foray into YA literature and it's been very pleasant. Keep an open mind.
10
I completely agree with this opinion writer. Cancel Cancel Culture.
8
what's twitter? Don't people have better things to do?
2
Twitter is only the messenger. The ones to blame for this horrific situation are the radicalized elements who demand conformity to their bizarre principles, among them the requirement that only members of the right ethnic group can write ethnic stories, perform ethnic roles, wear ethnic clothes or even cook ethnic foods.
These radicalized elements ignore liberal society's tradition of free expression in demanding that non-conformers be censored, or even fired.
Don't blame the messenger; blame the people sending the messages!
13
The range of mindsets of humankind have always been similar to what they are now.
Social media has made the difference with its globally omnipotent and instantaneous platform, available for free, 24/7 to whatever those mindsets may be.
Feels like I’m stating the obvious here.
2
@David B. The Trump phenomenon is largely fueled by old media: TV and radio. The anti-Semitism of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin was spread by radio and newspaper. Yes, social media is the method of today's madness, but when you have a message to disseminate, you always use the latest and greatest media mix,
@Peter Blau
None of that bears semblance to cancel culture on Twitter.
Neither Trump nor Ford were an anonymous mob.
No matter what you write, someone will love it and someone will hate it. Authors have to have the guts to put it out there and let people say what they're going to say.
Otherwise, if we keep going down this road, all we'll be left with is memoir, and most people's lives don't make for awesome memoirs. I know mine doesn't.
8
@Diego
It's all in the execution, Diego. I'm sure you could write a very entertaining version of your life.
Stories should be written by whoever wants to write them and read by whoever enjoys them. Authors should feel free to write about whatever characters their imagination produces. I would suggest that people interested in literature delete their "Twitter" accounts.
19
Good comment, made even better because you resisted the urge to use “whomever.” Thank you.
1
The PC culture on campus is fueled by money--surprise! No school is going to risk displeasing its paying customers. For the time being they are the only institutions who have figured out how to monetize it. I have no doubt that social media has made the PC culture a formidiable economic force off-campus, but it seems their only accomplishments are quashing speech and and curbing sales. A negative force, if you will, and no less dangerous than the "fake news" peddlers.
Many of us in the arts fought the Reagan republicans who regularly roll out a defunding the National Endowment for the Arts campaign for their own fund raising. We go to DC, we testify and demonstrate for our right to free speech. Yours too.
That was hard work and also a part of a political game. The dung decorated Virgin Mary painting sold more tickets in Brooklyn after Giuliani, who was running for the U.S. Senate, made point of it; Rudy got new campaign cash, so it was a win for both teams.
This book gets pulled prepublication(!) by an opinionated and possibly violent anonymous mob?
Education in the U.S. must teach true critical thinking and a tolerance for all ideas, especially from artists. This mob is far more dangerous than the Republicans who know they need a foil to do battle in another day.
This mob is content to extinguish thought for its own self worth. These may be the most dangerous folk in America.
9
How exactly did these Twitter mobs "force" the author to cancel his book? By voicing their criticisms of it? Did I somehow get transported into a future where criticisms of published books are no longer permissible? Perhaps we should chastise the author of this article for savaging the downtrodden Twitter-authors and shaming them into cancelling their upcoming tweets?
6
@RP
They didn't criticize the work. They attempted to delegitimize the author's right to write and market it.
13
Growing up, my parents allowed me to read pretty much whatever I wanted to. The same was true of watching movies. As my mother once said, “If I tell you what is good or bad, how will you ever learn that for yourself?” Sound advice.
162
In the greatest English language novel ever written, Leopold Bloom was Jewish. The author, James Joyce, was not. And in the greatest play ever written, Hamlet was a Danish prince. Shakespeare was not. Case closed.
20
We've been here before with Laura Moriarty's "American Heart," furiously criticized as a white savior narrative. That one did make it to the marketplace, and is in some libraries, and is also a very flawed book for reasons in addition to those raised by the Goodreads folks. Several years ago, I wrote a YA novel set on the backstretch of a thoroughbred racetrack. My husband worked for 25 years as a social worker in that setting; my sister and brother-in-law both worked as riders and trainers. Immigrants, legal and illegal, are a large proportion of the workforce (my brother-in-law is one); my husband worked with many of them, and this is a central element in my story. But I am an Anglo woman. While my track connections all read and liked the book, I have given up on the idea of getting it published, and this is precisely why. Unless I disguise my identity (as some authors have done), I doubt agents or publishers will touch it now. Oh, well. Guess I'll have to write some slush about being a boring white middle-aged woman, since nothing else is "appropriate."
23
All the more reason to self publish. Screw the gatekeepers.
8
Thanks to social media, the amateurs have dominated reviews and created volumes of mindless crap for consumption. How will the cream rise to the top if all forms of culture are not allowed into the marketplace of ideas or at least be reviewed by professionals. Snowflakes and trigger responses are calling the shots. How immature. Lighten up people.
14
now the book will become a bestseller among the people who read the NYTimes about the cultural suppression by electronic media "in groups".
I wonder though, if anyone ever would have asked Jack London what his references were when writing about the interior lives of dogs or dropout writers.
9
Looks like what we need is a publishing house that specializes on printing politically incorrect work.
Arguably, that's what is sorely needed these days.
How else are we going to protect our democracy?
8
I think the problem is people are equating Twitter outrage as a representative sample of public outrage. Not everyone is on Twitter, and a lot of those who are just live to be offended.
I took to social media fairly early, so today the dynamics of outrage-ocracy are second nature. This year I came to the conclusion that there were two possible ways to interact on Twitter: 1) carefully curate my feed into a well insulated bubble or 2) daily wade through a slog of self hating ogres in order to find nuggets of wisdom & breaking news
Neither seemed appealing, so I uninstalled that trash, and I suggest their recent user numbers say Im not alone.
36
So my question is...am I allowed to read a book, for example, about a Latino singer. I am not Latino, and I can’t carry a tune. Just saying. The tribalism of the Twitter mob is insatiable.
12
"If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture..."
Well, why did the publisher or the author cave in? I don't get it. I never heard of this book till now. Its also unlikely there would have been much of a dust-up at all.
Twitter users have no real power, till stories like this, till the media infuses the little parking lot dust-devils, that swirl a a tattered plastic shopping bag around for about 10 seconds - with the power of a Cat 4 tornado.
Twitter in and of itself has no inherent power, people can and do Tweet-off all day long and its meaningless - till the Main Stream Media decides to upgrade the nonsense.
Look at nearly every major story that originated on Twitter, or other social media - and most have either been debunked, or disappeared. That a few might create a lasting dopey urban legend, or meme doesnt mean they have real power.
Instead of defending the author here, or elsewhere (which should of course be done - by a brave publisher!) instead spend more energy drilling down and outing the ones who started this dopey tweet tantrum, and demand they justify their issues. And trace their Twitter, Facebook, etc, history and call them out for the hypocrites they likely are...!
We all, esp. the MSM, need to heavily push back on the social media tantrum throwers - and make the "issues" they raise theirs to defend. Not the other way around...
10
Scary. Thought police stuff. Really scary. I see this sort of censorship as driven by the left seeking their view of what is politically correct. The left appears to be succumbing to authoritarian tendencies that Socialism requires. Think deeply before voting and supporting these agendas.
10
@Mark V
What you're describing is the backstretch of the continuum where the left goes so far to the left that it circles around to the right.
11
Mark,
Just a thought. Capitalism can be authoritarian too.
3
@Diego
No. Authoritarianism does not respect the division of left and right. You cleverly seek to make authoritarianism the exclusive tool of the right. Nicolas Maduro would disagree.
1
Conceivably, a Chinese immigrant with the imagination, curiosity and research skills could write about an Amish family illuminatingly. No guarantees, but such things have always happened in the greatest literature. The purity police would prevent such works from ever being written again.
9
I long for the critic that abandons twitter. If your thoughts are worth expressing, use a long form. I long for a politician that masters the art of southern-style political oratory and pledges not to tweet.
As to the liberal mob, well, and let's call it for what it is --- the left of the Democratic Party --- you're doing what we do best, form circular firing squads. Stop it, please. We have bigger issues to confront, and political and artistic purity and identity politics is a contributing cause to Trumpism. So, stop the self-indulgent tweets and the navel gazing, and pick up a book or a newspaper and read, and then read some more. Please, for the sake of democracy.
10
@f The extreme identity politics and purity tests are no longer to the left of the Democratic Party. To my great heart ache, they are becoming the party itself and the NYT is a part of that. This week was the call for racial reparations. When some suggested that such reparations might take the form of economic justice for all and need not be race based, the mob blew a gasget. Not a twitter mob, this was the readers of the NYT. We are doomed.
The first step to fascism is the book "burning." Censorship is dangerous whether it comes form the left or right wing. Sunlight, as the say, "is the best disinfectant."
15
Twitter is horrible, but it's not just Twitter; it's also the "twitter article", now common in the mainstream press. This is when an article is posted by a mainstream news entity that is about how "Twitter" (or "the Internet") is up in arms about something. The article might provide a small amount of context; then it shares a series of tweets. And that's all there is to it.
These articles are super cheap and can probably be written by an intern in the time it took me to write this post. And they are complete trash.
But worse is that they create a false sense of legitimacy for these twitter outrages. If a few thousand people retweet something--in a nation of 330 million--that frankly doesn't count for very much. But the articles make it seem like these are important controversies. Businesses don't want to be perceived as bad guys--ever--and quickly capitulate. Without the twitter article, the impact of twitter outrages would be dramatically less.
30
@MA Exactly. I was retiring from journalism just as this type of "outrage story" was starting to take off among my professional peers -- quoting a bunch of random, angry people on social media as a supposedly useful gauge of public opinion. It seemed like a silly trend then, but with time it's revealed itself as both reality-distorting and dangerous.
Start counting how many newspaper headlines you read (including the NYT) that have the word "outraged" in them -- that tells you all you need to know about how lazy the reportage has gotten. Professional journalism can do better.
10
Quite correct, and the impact goes beyond dissemination of PC outrage. In a media universe in which outlets are hungry for content but don’t want to pay much if anything to content producers, Twitter stories are perfect: One does a search and a copy-and-paste of freely available exists content. There’s no traveling somewhere to cover a story, no phone calls, and even no mail. And because in many cases a limited number of people tweet or follow Twitter on a given topic, a media piece on some Twitter activity will get more exposure and attention than the Twitter activity itself,
2
the reason when my liberal friends denounce the Trump agenda I always offer to take the other side of that debate is, I can't stand this idea of shutting people up because they are too "evil" to just silently nod their head and agree with you.
7
Mob Rules; getting out of hand. Truly awful.
We all need to be more moderate armchair quarterbacks, and hold our beliefs more lightly.
Read it, or not read.
hold judgements, but don't shame, mob, lynch, shut down. So wrong.
We progessives are becoming so so judgmental, so voracious so hungry for punishment and harming others.
6
I'm confused. This isn't about censorship, it is about criticism and the refusal of an author to deal with the type of loud, hateful criticism that flourishes on the internet in general and on Twitter in particular.
The Twits have no power to ban a book. They do have the power to make an author's life pretty miserable for a while. They absolutely have the right to do that as long as they aren't physically threatening anyone.
Tell them to head to Hades, publish the book, publicize the book, and see where it goes while the vicious critics go on to the next book. In this case it wasn't even the publisher who withdrew the book--it was the author. Don't blame the critics for his cowardice.
5
It's not just Twitter, it's the Internet itself. Anybody with an axe to grind can set himself up as a critic and can bash a book or movie. He or she may not understand critical standards or even the work he is criticizing.
Here's an example. On a well-known movie site, I found a "review" complaining that "Hunger Games: Catching Fire" is a "glorification of the male American superhero". Katniss Everdeen is a girl, lives in a post-apocalyptic society, and has no superpowers, unless you count being an expert archer. Another reviewer ( or possibly the same one under a different name) praised the "car chase scene" and the "Filiipino character". The movie has no car chase scene and no Filipino character. When I complained to the movie site that they were hosting utterly inaccurate reviews, they told me to deal with the reviewer; it wasn't their problem. Since then the site has removed their comments page, presumably because they were getting too many complaints that they didn't want to deal with. That's the internet..
3
I've just finished writing a book whose main characters include people who are Spanish (I'm American), gay (I'm straight), in their twenties (not), and...men (also not). Oh well, I think I'll just scrap it and pen the novel I'm allowed to write about a middle-aged, middle class suburban Jewish woman. Can't wait to get my creative juices flowing on that one.
15
One of the main blessings of reading or writing literature is to be able to walk around in someone else's shoes. What does this mean for that?
122
@Boggle
It means that the person who normally wears those shoes is now saying, "Look: If you want to understand me by walking in my shoes, make sure they actually ARE my shoes. Or at least, shoes that were made for me by someone who put care and respect and accuracy into it. If you wear shoes that are supposedly for me but are sloppily made and don't really fit, then you're not wearing my shoes -- or understanding me -- at all."
9
@Jason
The thought process you describe as a condition for writing on a subject becomes merely a test whether the author's views further the left's narrative.
For example, could anyone write about Native Americans not as victims of Anglo culture? Could a white man write a novel about a man who is the subject of a devastating, and false, accusation of rape? Could that novel portray a vicious, mendacious accuser?
15
@Jason--What you're talking about isn't fiction. Fiction comes from the author's imagination. It's not based on history or fact. If an author is writing history, biography, or any other non-fiction then I would agree with you, and I would expect those shoes to fit exactly. But, with fiction, the fit can be loose, but I'm still able to walk around. I can imagine how a tight fit might be. If I want more, I'll move to non-fiction to find the facts. But, imagination goes a long way and empathy can come from just a glimpse into another life.
28
Glad I read "The Naked and the Dead"; "Red Badge of Courage"; "A Bridge to Far"; "Guadalcanal Diary" etc, etc, etc; when I was young. Otherwise I'd be just as clueless as todays twits.
4
All written by people who were involved in the wars depicted and/or had near and ready access to people who had been. Huge difference between direct experience and writing about contemporary or near-contemporary people in situations like civil wars you’ve never been anywhere near. Offensive errors are more likely to creep in with the latter.
I quit Twitter because of the mob mentality. I am sorry for what happened to Mr. Jackson, But I do not agree at all with his viewpoint that writers must be of a specific culture or race to write about it. He's had a hand in building that same stupid thinking that cost him the publication of this book.
21
Stephen Crane would have wondered about all this small-mindedness. Would he have pulled “Red Badge of Courage”? Speaking of courage....
6
He was a war correspondent, an experience that left him wanting to write “a psychological portrayal of fear” when the reality of war meets delusional preconceptions of glory. He had seen this, and also was surrounded, in his low life milieu, by physically and psychologically wounded Civil War veterans. In other words, even today readers would have to give him credit for having a clue, which I doubt applies to the experience of Albanians and the Kosovo War on the part of Mr. Jackson
1
I think this is called censorship...heaven help us.
9
“Even if individuality is unique, it does not mean that it cannot be analyzed. Individuality is a welding together of tribal, national, class, temporary and institutional elements and, in fact, it is in the uniqueness of this welding together, in the proportions of this psychochemical mixture, that individuality is expressed. …
“So it can be seen that what serves as a bridge from soul to soul is not the unique, but the common. Only through the common is the unique known; the common is determined in man by the deepest and most persistent conditions which make up his ‘soul’, by the social conditions of education, of existence, of work, and of associations. The social conditions in historic human society are, first of all, the conditions of class affiliation. That is why a class standard is so fruitful in all fields of ideology, including art, and especially in art, because the latter often expresses the deepest and most hidden social aspirations.”
That's Leon Trotsky, writing in Literature and Revolution (1924), rejecting the trendy compartmentalization of experience into categories of identity, something the NYT itself has played a significant role in promoting.
A useful answer can be found in the significant essay, "Should art be judged on the basis of race and gender?" by David Walsh, the link for which I provide below.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/27/sdsu-a27.html
4
@Don Barry Thank you for this!
"He was Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine." what a great analogy -and what an important article!!
6
YA? Perhaps just Y.
2
The fact that there is even such a thing as a "sensitivity reader" makes my skin crawl!
29
What an era we live in. With the right-wing know-nothing but hate everybody on one side and the delirious justice warriors of identity politics on the other, one finds the center singularly depopulated. If civilization somehow manages to survive the coming climate armageddon, I wonder what our descendants will make of our epoch.
7
This is why Goodreads and its ilk are a waste of pixels, a deadly cancer on the face of culture.
Who says only black people can write black people? Only Fortune 500 CEOs divorced from Samoan women and forced to abandon their adopted Asian children can understand there are different kinds, classes, experiences of people?
These undeputized enforcers of personal bias deserve one thing: to be ignored.
The real crime here is that an author chose, under however much duress, to remove his work from the public gaze. If this keeps up, we're finished.
Whatever else @flightofstaz may be he, she, or it is a dreary, not so very bright or wise blight on society.
5
@oogada
I guess in your example, we're supposed to assume that the Fortune 500 CEO is (1) male and (2) white.
I hate the idea of a "sensitivity,reader" and the whole uproar about cultural appropriation generally, but this is the kind of thing that makes women, LGBT and minorities want to scream.
@cupcake
When the left is criticizing corporations, especially for lack of "diversity", they *always* assume the CEO is a white male and that that's the reason for all wrong. I think screaming is premature, kindly put.
I recently deleted my Twitter account. I made the correct decision. Everyone would be better off without theirs. This article is just one more example of why.
4
I almost felt sorry for him until I read more about him. This guy was cannibalized by a the repugnant culture he worked to promote. The behavior all around is disgusting.
22
I would say it was the pot calling the kettle black, but I might get called out for racism.
9
Sometimes books are pulled by their authors, but sometimes it's the publisher. We can talk all we want about the beauty and nobility of literature, but when it comes down to it, the publisher is running a business. The publisher has to judge whether the book is good enough despite its flaws, to sell. Selling well means it's making a connection with an audience. And if the prospect does not look good, the publisher has every right to withdraw it (unless contractually prevented) and the author has every right to seek another publisher who can put that the notoriety to use to stir up another audience.
This is the marketplace. It's not censorship. Censorship is run by the government.
Side note: Humbert Humbert is not a good example of a flawed hero, in my mind. Not really any redeeming qualities.
15
@Alyce - I think you miss Jennifer's point. "A Place for Wolves" never got the chance to make a connection with an audience. No one got to read it; no one got to buy it. It may not be censorship, but it certainly fell victim to an unthinking mob - which is a good definition of Twitter.
71
@Alyce
The publisher didn’t pull it (if I understand correctly). It was the author who pulled it for fear of the mob’s opinion. That’s what the article is objecting to—the fear instilled by the ideologues. It’s not about running the business.
59
@Alyce Thank you for the corrective on Humbert Humbert. I agree.
6
I feel that there needs to be a distinction between criticism and censorship. The "Twitter mob" did not "get to the book" -- it CRITICIZED the book, perhaps prematurely and perhaps unfairly and perhaps vigorously, but it had no power to actually prevent the book from being published. The author himself chose to withdraw the book from publication. Why? Did the Twitterati threaten his life? Threaten to burn down the bookstores that sold it? Or did they merely offer harsh opinions on his writing, which may or may not have been counterbalanced by the opinions of the general reading public (if given the chance to read it)?
If anyone in the "Twitter mob" made real, actionable threats, then they should be held accountable for them. If they merely raised their voices in criticism, well, that's free speech, isn't it? Perhaps authors should believe in their own work more and be brave enough to release it and hope for the best. Enduring the opinions of others is part of the job description of being an artist.
72
It’s also not bowing to censorship to take the criticism into consideration, asking oneself if something came off very badly in an unintended way. Ideally someone would catch it ahead of time but if I really put my foot in it I’d want to know so I could fix it.
14
@Di
Yes, true, that's another way to interpret what he did. Either way, I don't think Twitter's "cancel culture" is censorship. These are often people who feel underrepresented or misrepresented, desperate to see honest and respectful reflections of themselves and their communities in pop culture, trying to hold to account those who have the actual power to make those representations. Their arguments may not always be sound, but to say that they shouldn't passionately raise their voices at all is its own form of silencing.
7
It’s not as simple as that—they’re not merely critics. As you’ll read in the article, in the approval vortex that is Twitter, speech that is more impassioned gets more traction, regardless of (or in spite of) the integrity or veracity of the commentary. And then the shouting down happens, with many others joining in, usually in bad faith. So, no, it is not merely a group of critics; it is a mob.
65
I say let the kids, teens most especially, and everyone else, read the "problematic" books, or all books, any books they want to read. Then, teach them to get off the internet and engage in real, live, thoughtful and sometimes hard discussion about what they've read. That's how one learns to be a discerning reader and to make intelligent decisions for oneself about what is and what isn't good literature, and why. Same principle applies to all kinds of art, in fact. I can't help wondering how many of those people on Twitter had even read the book before they decided it wasn't pc enough for them. We need to be opening minds instead of pre-emptively closing them in the name of "protecting" them from things, whether real or imagined.
90
@TransPoet Critical thinking can produce unpredictable results, therefore we must simply enforce dogma.
7
I hope Jackson will profit from this exposure, but I am confused why he pulled the book. Despite the "Twitter Mob" criticizing it couldn't he have left it to the wider public to decide, against the pressure? I also find the term "sensitivity reader" creepy and reeking of censorship, unfortunately perpetrated by the Left.
8
This is bad. It means all teen novels involving astronauts have to be written by astronauts. Sensitive astronauts.
19
Bravo to Jennifer Senior, and hurrah for the comments.
If you really want your blood to run cold, seek out Jackson's craven, obsequious apology on Twitter in which he kneels before the mob and begs forgiveness while thanking it for re-educating him.
17
So many sad aspects of this phenomenon. This kind of mob becomes the face of an "identity politics" that is then widely condemned and ridiculed. Then the very real anguish and difficulties of many Americans who have been targeted in the real, physical, legal world on the basis of their identities--all the young black men in prison, the Muslims whose mosques are burned down, the Sikhs who are beat up for wearing turbans, the little black boys who are shot for wearing hoodies or playing with toy guns--need I go on?--all that anguish and wrongness, and the pleas for justice, are minimized and dismissed as "identity politics." It's so wrong, and so difficult to address--the only thing to do when piled on by social media is to apologize and withdraw. We lose voices that we need to hear this way.
8
Thank you for this article. This is truly the beginning of totalitarianism when art is censored and taken from the public. We have to take back books and art and imagination from the twitter trolls. Do I have to be diabetic to write about a character who has diabetes? And if so, does my doctor also have to have diabetes to treat me? Is there no roll for learned knowledge, research and empathy and IMAGINATION?
11
Walt Disney was not a mouse, he drew them.
Tolkien was not an orc, he wrote about them.
The sensitivity experts don’t understand the concept of imagination.
Take a class.
27
The only people who care about tweets are those who post them. Twitter was but no longer is important.
7
This article -- and the comments section -- is a balm on my troubled, troubled soul.
13
Thank you for this. We need more pieces on mob censorship, mob judgement, and limits to people's creativity. Soon, fiction and acting will all be suspect as people will only be permitted to create and portray their own stories. Trying to understand another will be a hate crime. Thinking for oneself will be a hate crime. This young author is an example of how our culture is eating itself. America, drop out of the outrage olympics. Whatever happened to the "free to be you and me" ideals I grew up with. This is some sort of sick scary totalitarianism of the mob, and it is NOT progress.
21
It's not only Twitter: I (as a first-generation American myself, but from Germany) wrote in Facebook about the importance of being legal in order to become citizens. Facebook promptly poleaxed me for mentioning Citizenship as "Hate Speech." Three times. The rule of Mob is all too evident in the public media.
This reader certainly sympathizes with struggling writers like Kosoko Jackson who, despite their best efforts, fail to satisfy the shifting demands of the new Puritanism, but sympathizes even more with readers of the future who will never find a new book on the shelves or in their electronic devices that moves them or inspires them or simply shows them another way of looking at the world and the problems they face in their lives. Writing novels takes enormous guts. Writing to satisfy self appointed censors one would soon become not the lost lamb, but the lamb trailing after the lost lamb, as Kafka wrote of himself during an especially dark time.
12
This is intolerant, malicious censorship, plain and simple. Years ago, I opted for a (proud) life as a librarian because I firmly believed that all forms of expression should be available to readers, no matter how much I myself might not support them. And what is fiction, after all, but a writer's attempt to make sense of whatever influences and experiences he/ she has encountered. I understand that my authenticity may not match yours, but when did this become the standard by which I am permitted - or not - to publish. Most disturbing to me is the idea that a faceless online mob of self important "critics" can actually interrupt or perhaps even derail a writer's career. Insanity!
113
@Joyce I applaud you, and your honorable profession. Thank you!
But the writer chose to withdraw the book, apparently of his own accord. If it had been published, perhaps it would have been popular--or a flop. But it's not possible to know that, and the lack of courage on the part of the author is puzzling. Thank goodness that not all writers are afraid of keyboard warriors.
2
@Joyce
Thank you for your views, very thoughtful. I agree, a writer writes to make sense of the world and carry a message. A story is really about the internal change a protagonist makes and this is what compels the reader to read further.
Shaming people into "keeping in their cultural lane" is obscene and short-sighted. I've learned from people of all walks of life and yes, even books by white authors or black authors who tell stories different from their own experiences.
I am very disturbed about this "cancel culture" narrative. If this nonsense identity politics continues then we are truly lost in the chaff.
1
In the context of YA lit I recently enraged the Twitter Mob by calling for more "boy books". Many older boys will not read "girl novels" (which are the great majority of new titles). So why not meet boys where many of them live? High school sports, cars, survival narratives, action-adventure narratives, etc. A gendered approach, yes, but a serious and proven gender gap exists when it comes to youth reading. The Mob went crazy. Rained abuse on me for being "part of the problem," whatever that meant. I politely tried to restate my case but that only enflamed matters. Silence–not looking at Twitter–was my only recourse. When I returned a week later, the Mob had wandered off in search of its next outrage. In the end it might be that a tech solution is needed--a counter "mob" on call to spring into action when the torches draw near.
27
This is sad and scary at the same time. I honestly think the world would be better off without social media.
27
Boy, those Goodreads reviews are . . . something. One of the mob posted this gem: "I'm sick and tired of American authors using other country's cultures and now recent history (that Albanians are still in the process of healing from) to write about more American characters."
Imagine the reception Twitter would have given "A Farewell to Arms," "The Sun Also Rises," "The Portrait of a Lady," "Giovanni's Room," "The Sheltering Sky," "Tender Is the Night." The list goes on and on.
Doubtless the mob would say these are horribly insensitive books that should never have seen the light of day.
37
This essay serves as a parable. The community described in it serves as a microcosm.
"[I]t’s a hothouse subculture — self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure."
"Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power."
"[I]deologues have far more power than moderates…; they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone."
"The die-hards in this army of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite…."
We're still not out of the woods when we've stopped reading Young Adult fiction.
6
It utterly dumbfounds me that so many people nowadays who purportedly want America to be a colorblind society engage in conduct that at its core emphasizes the differences in people's color, race and ethnicity rather than embrace our common humanity; cowtows to the most absurd fringes of political correctness; and seeks to divide people rather than bring us together.
19
@FrizzellNJ I was told (by a 20 year old) at a "diversity training" recently that colorblindness was basically a hate crime. She was serious and scary, Red Guard material.
I kept quiet.
@keith
I was informed at a continuing legal education seminar on "bias"--required by our State Bar--that *the* most pernicious notion keeping minorities down these days is color-blindness. Everyone nodded their heads solemnly. Seriously.
Not only was my respect for the speaker reduced to zero, but I couldn't believe the Bar, to whom I unfortunately have to pay substantial dues, indirectly supports this type of nonsense. But it's a relatively limited indoctrination that's essential to maintaining my ability to practice law, so I roll my eyes and carry on.
(Incidentally, the speaker was from Berkeley, which helps convey tone of discourse on social issues at that place.)
@FrizzellNJ
I think the problem here is that "colorblind" nowadays actually has two meanings, which are often confused. The older meaning is to see each person as an individual human being of worth, regardless of their skin color. This is a good thing. The newer meaning refers to a refusal to recognize that even now racial minorities face obstacles created by systemic discrimination that white people don't have to deal with. It's quite possible for the same person to have both attitudes.
How many great artists has history lost to mob opinion? How many great artists have been censored by the church or by governments? How many great artists will history never know? Courage is but one mark of a great artist.
4
Here is an apparently novel idea in the 21st Century, how about people write, draw, mold, and create whatever they believe is right and gives them pleasure, or sends a message they hope to share and we just, ya' know, let the chips fall where they may.
Your grandparents lived this way. Oh, call them "devil may care" but they, by golly, lived freer than you will ever know the way things are going. Fear is used so pervasively in this society to control people. In the case of this writer, and his peers, he/they can always self-publish what they please. Many musicians do this very model of self-production.
10
“It is always in the power of a small number to make a great clamor. But let us take a cool view of the general state of our affairs, and perhaps the prospect will appear less gloomy than has been imagined.” — Benjamin Franklin, The Internal State of America, c. 1785.
10
Not clear from the article what “pulling” the book means. If there is hard copy already in a warehouse, are they just going to send it to be recycled? Those of us who don’t participate in the “Twitterverse” look at this as just a publicity stunt.
And the opportunities for humor here are endless. Moby Dick should have been written by a whale. E.T. should have been directed by an alien. It’s been done - read “Grendel”, Beowulf from the monster’s point of view - but I think approach really misses what “fiction” means.
5
Welcome to the new cultural revolution. Soon we'll have a story about a kid finding something offensive written in dad's old yearbook or mom's high school journal and "turn them in" to the mob.
In other ways this specific case reminds me of the old Hays code for "self censorship" in Hollywood, which later begat network standards and practices in TV. During the moral hygiene years this gave us everything from separate beds for married couples to a shunning of anything that remotely even seemed "un-American".
Now we have the left-PC version of these functions. It's moved into unpaid gig economy territory. How efficient and "disruptive".
6
Hear, hear. I am aghast at the current attitude toward literature and its creation. I mean, I think that if you're writing outside your experience then it is necessary for you to think and read deeply and widely to bring truth and insight to your imagination, but to wall everybody into only writing about their limited experience is just wrong. Empathy isn't cultural appropriation and if, say, we 'forbid' an African American writer from writing a book about a white or Asian character, and knock their book off the shelves to make sure they don't earn a dime, who's to say that that shelf space should be opened up to some not-so-hot book about a white character by a white author? Good writing is good writing. I If you don't agree, better not ever attend a showing of "Othello." A white guy wrote it.
13
We have truly become narrow in our thinking because of a social media tool geared toward anonymity and shrillness. These authors need to ignore the twits on Twitter and move on. Censorship is ugly. I wonder if Jackson sees the irony in his previous proclamations about who can write what.
3
Why is there such a category "adolescent fiction"? Seems so condescending. Maybe Sherlock Holmes or the three muskateers aren't as captivating as they were to me, although there's a world to be absorbed in. But best guess Fear of Flying would draw readers.
1
I, James Joyce, would like to announce to all my readers that I have today decided to cancel the impending publication of my new novel, Ulysses, after a number of very sensitive readers, many of them highly respected members of the Catholic clergy, publicly pointed out a plethora of instances in which I reached beyond the bounds of my lived experience and, with what I now realize was hideously unthinking artistry, appropriated the lives of, among others, medical students, headmasters, pregnant women, publicans, lame sunbathers, Jewish advertising agents, lovers of organ meats and, yes, erotic soliloquists.
I ask the forgiveness of these communities, and my loyal readers. I vow to contain my talents in the future, and I look forward to the publication of my next work, The Return of Baby Tuckoo, due out in the fall of 1924 from Shakespeare & Co.
17
Poor example. If there was ever an author who never strayed beyond his own experience, it’s Joyce
I’m waiting for the day when people will be forbidden to read anything that doesn’t reflect their own circumscribed identity. It seems like the natural progression from the current standard.
12
We have a centuries old problem of race and class and gender privilege in this world and all the oppressions that accompany those problems. And now we have people feeling empowered to try to fix them, using the tools at hand: their voices and social media. Like all revolutions, it is full of clashes between the "old" ways of thinking and the "new" and as such it is generally messy and scary and sometimes cruel. Yet as with most revolutions, the main question to be asked that almost never is, is: are the methods being used actually going to result in a better world for everyone? Or are we just going to end up with a new set of overlords? It seems to me that Twitter mobs, and all forms of "purity policing", would strongly suggest the latter. Which is disappointing, to say the least.
19
Whenever this happens I see hordes of comments saying the author should not have given in to the twitter mob. But in both this year's examples, the authors were part of the community that was criticizing them, and were faced with the choice between publishing and maintaining their support system. I think it is no fluke that of all the books YA twitter has gone after, the only ones I've seen pulled are those by minority authors.
Yeah, YA twitter appears to be toxic. But it also appears to be some folks' only option, and that is a bigger problem IMO - as well as a problem the rest of the writing community might be able to do something about.
6
Ms. Senior and other readers have already thoroughly analyzed the shortcomings of 'cancel culture' and its harmful effects on our intellectual climate. Trump claims to disdain the passion for 'political correctness' which appears to drive the so-called twitter mobs. In fact, however, no one whines more when critics attack him than does the president. The left owns no monopoly on sensitivity to the sometimes harsh spotlight cast on the human condition by writers.
That said, this sensitivity did not emerge in a vacuum. The rise of social media has created a safe place for individuals to unleash their worst instincts by anonymously attacking anyone who displeases them. When these attacks go viral, the consequences for the victim can be devastating.
The reaction against this cowardly exploitation of the internet has contributed to a greater sense of vulnerability on the part of many people. Social media and the world of literature differ sharply from each other, but both feature evaluations of individuals or entire groups. The targets of these often unflattering portraits cannot strike back at the anonymous tormentors on the internet, but they can attempt to censor literature.
Although these efforts generally debase our culture, occasionally they strike at truly vicious products of twisted minds. Our libertarian laws protect even despicable racist and antisemitic works, writings which deserve widespread denunciation, although not censorship.
10
With all of this free publicity, A Place for Wolves should be re-released. Sales will be brisk.
19
"Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power."
Is this not the most intelligent sentence I've seen/heard lately.(?)
Hats off Jennifer and many thanks.
56
@Jeff Williams
Possibly the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power because that's what it often actually is?
@Jeff Williams
Yes. Torquemada is a perfect example.
There's a reason I don't use my Twitter account, and I don't read book reviews--or reviews of much else, for that matter. In most cases, the tweet or review is a platform for the reviewer, not an honest attempt to inform an audience.
To quote Anton Ego:
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
23
What a wonderful quote from a perfect movie.
3
It would seem that in the depiction of real cultures, accuracy and fairness should be prime considerations, and these cannot be determined simply by the identity and background of the writer. How much self-awareness does the writer have about possible shortcomings of his/her own perceptions of personal experience and the extent to which they represent a larger group of which he/she is a part? Is it not possible that someone who is not part of a group but has deep relationships with those who are could have valuable perspectives to offer, perspectives in which members of the group would readily admit seeing themselves?
13
As long as otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people believe that there is any value at all in engaging in any public discourse on Twitter, there will be Twitter mobs. It comes with the territory when we substitute Twitter's 280 characters for thoughtful reflection and genuine human dialogue.
The problem is Twitter itself. To steal from Marshall McLuhan, the medium IS the message here. And that message is: don't reflect or listen; instead pounce and parry.
There is a solution, however. Stop using Twitter. Stop being an enabler. Reflect, think, listen, engage.
31
@CFXK
And NY Times and others ... stop integrating Twitter screen shots into your stories and, more importantly, stop allowing your journalists to scroll mindlessly through Tweets trolling for material, and make them get up out of their chairs and into the real world and do an honest day's reporting.
2
What's happening with YA lit is really a microcosm of our society, and it's the reason why a majority of Americans profess to dislike "PC culture." The loudest voices are almost always the most extreme--and yes, the notion that only members of X group can write about X is an extremist position--and because they're the loudest, they're received as representative. Which is unfortunate, because in the case of "sensitivity reading," the underlying assumption that readers need to be protected from content, as opposed to learning to think critically about it, is fundamentally wrong. The world is a complex, often terrible, place, and we are not doing ourselves any favors in terms of our ability to deal with our world if we fashion a literature that only shows certain characters or certain situations in the best possible light. (That's propaganda, not art.) And I would think that people who profess to be so concerned about psychological impacts on children would think twice about the impact of saying "you are not allowed to create this way," when the offending action was merely to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes. The race, gender, or sexual orientation of an author should not determine whether that author's work is worth reading. You have to engage with the art. You have to insist on the intelligence of the people receiving it.
65
When I taught English, I dipped into a range of what were then just transitioning from Adolescent Fiction to YA, finding them to examine issues of real experience and the possibility of growth for my students...and me. Many of my colleagues eschewed these wonderful books written by real writers like Chris Crutcher, Judy Bloom, Chaim Potok, and many others, as inferior to the classics we were tasked to teach, although "To Kill a Mockingbird" passed the test while "A Catcher in the Rye," depending on the school, often failed it. Regardless, many otherwise reluctant readers devoured these and other authors and titles avidly, growing their skills and perspectives.
Sadly, our increasingly divided world tells us not to consider alternative viewpoints, denigrating the possibility that those with whom we disagree or who challenge our imaginations can teach us anything useful about the world. The current discussion in Congress concerning the recent resolution regarding ethnicity. Diverse opinions, feelings, understandings, and insights are not welcome in the search for equality. This is a sad realization for me and many others who continue to seek insight and grow in moral strength and wisdom.
12
The quest for purity becomes the quest for power. So true. Our culture war is really about money and prestige and who gets it. But in some ways that is as it it should be. People who know their blood, their turf, should be able to profit from the telling of it if they are able rather than ceding ground to a poser. Jackson as you point out has been the first to define the rules of the road. And I think it is pretty bizarre to think that because he is black and gay his experience extends to the civil war in Kosovo of all things. Yet in the end you say you think he should be free to create and dream because that is what novelists do. Which is exactly what he and many others have disallowed for others. So it also seems reasonable that rather than being deemed a major hypocrite he pulled this particular book. Or do you believe he should be able to have it both ways?
5
In my opinion, Jackson shouldn't have withdrawn his book. Let's hope that this little kerfuffle will enhance his visibility and allow it to achieve more than it would have otherwise.
However, the idea that every work about a topic dealing with victims of some wrong not done by a victim is "appropriation" and therefore inappropriate is absurd. But that's what we've come to. There is a legitimate line to be drawn when determining appropriation, but it's not all the way at that extreme. It should be drawn when, for example, Pepsi airs an ad that appropriates Black Lives Matter for their own profit. Profit was the only thing that mattered to Pepsi. It should not include the work of a legitimate artist like Dana Schutz, who most certainly had something (many things, actually) to say with her painting "Open Casket". In fact, no legitimate artist's main point is profit, no matter how much they need to earn a living to eat; their personal expression is the point, whether the audience agrees with it or not.
So, as with "Open Casket", "A Place for Wolves" needs to be seen and heard. It is not hate speech; it does not advocate or glorify oppression of any group for the author's (or his tribe's) personal gain. We are at the brink of a period of censorship by mobs, and we need to take a good look at what is going on and walk back from that dangerous place.
29
If all this is true, why did he pull the book?
He could have ignored Twitter and toughed it out on the merits. Sometimes you just go ahead and do it.
The problem here is giving in as much as it is uninformed Twitter bullying.
The same is true whether the call to pull it was made by author or publisher.
18
@Mark Thomason
Publishing contracts generally don't allow an author to unilaterally pull a book once it's gotten to the advance-reading-copy stage. Apparently, this author requested that the book be pulled and the publisher agreed.
@Mark Thomason
I'm guessing his "pulling" the book is similar to when people "resign" - the publisher told him to, or else they would do it.
1
Cancel culture has spread beyond literature and into music as well. I hear much discussion about how we should all ban R. Kelly's music, and that anyone who listens to his music is now morally compromised.
Well, here's the thing: Elvis dated a 14-year-old when he was 24. David Bowie dated a 15-year-old when he was 28. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin dated a 14-year-old when he was 28. It wasn't just R. Kelly engaging in this type of behavior. But the rockstars who did the same things get a pass and avoid being "canceled". It takes away from the moral credibility of cancel culture if it's applied only selectively.
9
@Sarah Johnson. Different times, one. More importantly, the love interests of the artists you mentioned aged as they did. R. Kelly's does not see, to jage
1
@Minmin
Harvey Weinstein's "different times" defense was savaged. It's not more palatable because it's used to defend musicians.
@Sarah Johnson . . . from the sixties . . . yes, I remember all of those taled-about relationships . . and they were very open . . .really!
William Wilson dallas press club 1981 dallas texas
They totally miss what literature is about. An author has the right to topics because of his background? That is like the hotdog guy on the corner who wants you to buy his hotdogs, not because they are the best, but because he owns the corner.
What about the passion, the need to express an idea, or just being haunted by a character who wants you to write about him?
I believe the best writers can write about anything as if they were there; isn't that one of the great things about fiction? This also holds for the serious themes.
25
Twitter is a bad idea in all its manifestations and uses. It is the enemy of coherent thought by its very nature. 240 characters, just a sound bite. How easy to dash off some smart-aleck comment on impulse. I wish people would just quit. Maybe celebrities and politicians could be the first to start a trend.
28
It is a tragic thought of the literature that would be lost if it adherence to the rules of political correctness mandating that only those members of a culture could write about it. Mark Twain(not a black man), Lewis Carroll(not a young white girl), Pearl Buck(not Chinese), it’s late and I’m annoyed with myself for not being able to bring more recent examples to mind. But what is literature if not a stretch of the imagination? Why can’t someone write about someone else from another culture and not be accused of exploitation or appropriation? But so sad that mob mentality has shamed an artist(who himself promoted the shame culture in his narrow minded tweets)and caused him to retreat from his own artistic expression. This is a devastating situation and really needs to cease.
35
I am going to bet Mr. Jackson has less experience of Kosovo and Albanian and Albanian History than Twain did of slaves on the Mississippi, Carroll did of Alice (who was a real person, Alice Liddell) and so on. For all we know, Mr. Jackson did create profoundly offensive characters.
And Pearl Buck was writing about women she knew while living in China - is she ethnocentric? Yes, but much less so than any other western writer at the time.
@JWB For a recent example, how about Anthony Doerr - not a blind French girl nor a young Nazi conscript during WW2- but writing from both perspectives so plausibly and beautifully it almost hurt to read.
What stands out here is Ms. Senior's observation that "purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and quest for purity becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power". If Mr. Jackson had his way, I'd never have had a chance to read "Carry Me Home", a highly informative and beautifully written memoir of the civil rights era, a Pulitzer prize winner, and written -yes - by a white woman. Young people would never get to read jane Austin because her characters are white, and mostly "privileged". I'd say he got a well-deserved dose of his own medicine, but not even he deserves to be shouted down by a Twitter mob of self-appointed woker-than-thou purity police.
Maybe Mr. Jackson has learned something.
70
Sensitivity readers. Sounds like something from a dystopian SciFi novel or Orwell.
166
Censorship seems less the issue to me. The issue is that its activism based on a flawed premise. The twitter mob is operating on the notion of #ownvoices and representation not perpetuating oppressive stereotypes. That's negating two very important facts: 1) the power of YA literature as one of the only mediums to transform and advance critical thinking around issues of racism and discrimination - and erasing its existence in literature is not different than taking down a statue or a confederate flag or telling white people they can't say certain words: the problem of diversity, inclusion and equity are not fixed except through dialogue, empathy building, critical thinking - often ONLY in classrooms. This is a step backwards. Building dialogue in classrooms around complex issues often can only happen because of a book. Stripping authors of this power is an ironic hypocrisy. 2) To say writers are limited to writing about experiences within their own life experience and identity assumes an incredible amount of privilege. The book Wonder has evoked a wave of compassion for the experiences of students with disabilities. (The author wrote the book after one experience she witnessed on a street corner). These "rules" have the potential to created less representation for many many groups who are not positioned nor privileged to have their voices heard ore experiences shared.
10
Thanks for this opinion. This is at present a real issue in children’s books. It is an overcorrection to a what is also a very real problem. Both things can be real problems and both can be addressed and corrected. But let’s never another book, or force a debut author to self ban, ever again. Let’s ban twitter and goodreads instead.
24
@Theo Baker
How in the world can you 'force' an author to 'self ban'?
'Self banning'-- did even Orwell dream of than one?
To clarify one misunderstanding I've seen re sensitivity readers: People work as sensitivity readers in their areas of experience; there's no job of "sensitivity reader" where someone is trained to flag *any* potentially problematic content.
3
I'm soooo please to see contemporary book burners aren't running the risk of hurting themselves, getting into trouble with the local fire department or releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
What a relief!
Thank you Twitter!
19
D.H. Lawrence called the novel the "bright book of life," and with good reason; it allows us to enter, for as long or short a time as we wish, an imagined mind -- an imagined congress of minds. Rules that obstruct this are a stifling of art, a forced regimentation, and they lessen our imaginary experience in more ways than we'll ever really know. The imagination's boundaries lie far beyond the skin of any one (or anyone's) body.
27
@Jeezum H. Crowbar
Thank you, well said!
@Jeezum H. Crowbar
So I'm from rural Vermont and I'm a little bummed you got that moniker before me. Jeezum Crow!
Good God! I'm sure of a haranguing for even replying to this foolishness. All the same, I'll type my response.
Please understand it's delivered by a middle-aged, white male who--even worse nowadays--enjoys (suffers?) the consequences of a classical education in Latin, Greek, and classical philology.
At any rate, time to swagger into the culture wars!
As the author of the article correctly reports, novelists (and I’ll add poets, dramatists, librettists, etc.) deal in the other as well as in the familiar. Indeed, conjuring human familiarity (in the grandest sense) from the foreign is a hallmark of the finest writers, sages, and philosophers.
Better still, if writers do so in ways that challenge our beliefs, enlarge our horizons, and maybe—just maybe—throw our worldview off balance enough for us to ask questions, explore, and scrutinize the everyday world we live in, then I say well-done.
We shouldn’t live to read pabulum; rather we should read to scourge our totems.
In this article Senior notes the bleak outcome (monoculture) if we refuse to support an artist’s right to creative otherness. But monoculture will be more than dreary. It would smack of the imperialist. A world that brooks no uncomfortable difference has an iron emperor indeed.
Sadly, Kosoko Jackson has learned this at the cost of a debut novel. I wish him only the best and that he forges ahead with his creativity and his writing.
Thanks for your time.
87
@Sophisma .....and thanks for your time and wise thoughts.
Moreover, thank goodness that, as a species which seems bent on self-destruction, our intellect centers are contained within a vessel that hides their appearance from the view others, thus making it difficult to automatically disqualify one's thoughts based on the mere color of the brain tissue (....which I've heard is basically gray, not unlike a lot of situations in life, or in stories of fiction which someone may want to put on paper for someone else's grey-matter to consume).
There's a lot to appreciate Ms. Senior's article -- not the least of which is that it contains a lot more than 140 characters of text, yet still imparts a simple message, i.e., we all need to take a deep breath before ridiculing others and reducing this beautiful, ugly, complex, world of humans to a few bits and bytes.
15
@Sophisma
"...we should read to scourge our totems".....
D+ for prose!
So glad I graduated from college 49 years ago.
@Sophisma
After reading your opening remarks, I was expecting a juicy jeremiad or inflammatory invective that would stir me and other rational readers to aghast outrage. I'm almost disappointed to report that your musings are neither reactionary nor preposterous; in fact they seem very sensible and lamentably uncontroversial.
8
I kind of don't get it. Why did he pull his book? Why didn't he just publish it and let real readers --and not the virtual pretenders-- judge its merit? I mean, there's all kinds of books out there written on delicate or sensitive subjects. It doesn't mean they're all literary marvels. Nor does it necessarily mean that you're being censored just because publishers aren't publishing your material. Wasn't Rowling rejected eight times before publishing Philosopher's Stone? He should have just published it rather than pulling it. *That* would be the answer to Twitter's empty sensorship.
40
@Alex there is a bit of a meme in publishing culture about "you only get one debut novel" and if it flops, then your career is forever colored by that failure.
1
@Alex Because he is in the social justice movement. And saying "how high" when the self proclaimed oppressed scream "jump" is mandatory. I later found out he was guilty of similar pile-ons towards other writers and I because considerably less sympathetic when I heard that.
7
The Twitter mob is indeed terrifying, but censorship and moral extremism is as old as time. People tend to speak about the "woke" Twitterverse as if the young'uns have all gone mad...but humans on the Internet are simply acting just like humans always have. In fact, compared to what people used to do to those who broke the prevailing moral code, pressuring a writer to pull a book is pretty darned tame.
"Cancel culture" will not be the undoing of literature any more than prohibition was the undoing of alcohol. People will write and read what they want. This was a single instance of a newbie author pulling one not-so-great book from publication, not a harbinger of the literary apocalypse.
7
@Tamara
I'm 71, so I was automatically protected from Twitter. I could never have signed up for something called 'twitter', or sent a 'tweet'.
"I tot I saw a puddy cat!"
I like how this person defends cancel culture by comparing it (positively?) to prohibition.
2
@Tamara Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident: As Senior notes in the introduction, it's at least the second time this has happened in only a few months. See the following: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/books/amelie-wen-zhao-blood-heir-ya-author-pulls-debut-accusations-racism.html
Actually this is "good". Admittedly standing up to "politically correct" culture is not much of a challenge but it provides enough "repression" for someone to "struggle" against
1
These controversies turn on how adults evaluate literary works made for teenagers. Has anyone looked at how teenagers who have grown up in this YA/PC culture are dealing with both the books and the broader "cancel culture"? Are there any teachers out there who are dealing with this? I would love to hear from them.
10
I had a manuscript set in Japan shopped... not sure if cancel culture or whatever they called it was involved. All i can say is that keeping the rights should be much more valuable in the long run. Its a slowly developing “cloud novel” on Medium, which suits fine because you can be sure whatever internet skin you put it on, they will not pay you and you own the rights.
2
It's OK. The mob, like all mobs, will eventually consume itself. The Robespierre reference is spot on for the ravenous anger of the Twitterverse, whether for YA fiction, or literature in general, or life in general. Those dishing it out now will take it soon enough. And culture will move on, and survive, and even thrive.
11
@Larry Covey No, it is NOT "OK". This is bullying, and bullies MUST NOT be allowed to have a success. SJW bullies are gaining in strength, and we normal people must oppose them.
When the American Left adopts purity tests, it boomerangs against it. We've been through this before.Looks like another generation of young self-righteous adults will get to relive 1972.
Sad.
30
This trend of outrage censorship is disturbing. Let each person decide what they wish to read and how they think about a book. This is exactly the same as when the far right tries to censor books, except it’s coming from the left this time. People are not corrupted by reading books that don’t pass a morality, purity, or sensitivity test.
I am completely against any form of censorship.
35
Having finished Jackson's biography, Shirley Jackson's life story by Ruth Franklin, it has left a feeling of void for this reader; a haunted memory of reading at thirteen, SJ's best selling novel 'We have always lived in the castle', when first published in the early 60s. Someone must have visited my parent in the summer where we lived in a village in Spain by the sea.
There were writers in those days, some summer dwellers, some passing by, but no book critics in sight. I was enchanted by the young girl, Merricat, who will never grow older than thirteen, and under Jackson's spell.
Ruth Franklin comes down hard on some of the critics of Jackson's 'Castle' and other writing, and yet when she mentioned Brendan Gill from the New Yorker, I knew having met him on a few occasions, the first time when I was thirteen, that she had captured the tone of this prominent critic of the day.
"For readers who enjoy Alice Hoffman and Virginia Woolf, this new author's debut novel will bedazzle his audience with this publication, reflecting their magical and mysterious tones, with a unique voice of his own". Splendid accolade, but caution advised.
Off to find Shirley Jackson's books for children, and smiling at one reviewer's comment 'She is the Virginia Werewolf of seances-fiction'. Jackson was much more than the above description, and has long outlived the critics.
When this reader has written a short story, yet alone a novel, I hope Mr. Kosoko Jackson has outrun the wolves.
Maybe we should just stop writing literature altogether. I mean, after all, it's so scary. It can hurt people.
Instead, let's just communicate the complexity of our human lives over years and generations through 160-character snippets.
Especially when those thousands of 160-character snippets are so incredibly rich and gratifying to read.
Even though I work in technology myself, and have largely embraced a large part of it, it's stories like these that make me want to build a log cabin in the woods, stock it full of Henry Miller, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Niko Kazatzakis, Herman Hesse, Thomas Wolfe and a half-dozen other scary and offensive writers and toss every phone and laptop I own into the fireplace.
240
@Owen - Rather than suggesting you are in a hard place with little recourse, why not just be wise? Throw out your TV, get & read a lot of books, and pay little or no attention to social media. You can do in right in the middle of a city, you don't need a log cabin. You are not in a tough spot, you are imagining you are in a tough spot and I really don't have the care to determine why for you.
2
@CK
Thanks, CK. Half of this comment was sarcasm and hyperbole to make a point. The other half was that a cabin in the woods is far more preferable and healthy than a home in suburbia.
I don't feel like I'm in a tough spot. I read plenty of books, and watch little TV. I'm suggesting that when an army of Sensitivity Police can kill a book, it's time to take a second look at how we are using the tools we have created.
19
@Owen Jane Austen, too. And Charlotte Bronte and Emily Dickinson. And Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante, Kate Atkinson, and -- why not? -- Dorothy Parker. Just saying...
13
I am a millennial but I often feel like people my age have collectively lost their minds. These literary trends are terrifying, not only because they are promoting censorship but because they dictate what literature ought to be, and what type of people have the right to write on certain topics and perspectives. Everything outside is deemed “problematic.” Pretty soon all of the old cannon will be out because it is too Eurocentric and because white cisgender men dared to write outside their immediate experiences, cue in Anna Karenina and Madam Bovary, etc. People have read literature for centuries because of its unifying humanizing elements, qualities that make readers to understand experience outside their immediate environments. Stating that such experiences or even the imagined simulations of such experiences are by default off limits to certain people because of who they are is some sort of perverted post modern insanity. Successful writers have always written characters who are different from themselves very well. That is why they are good writers and are read and will continue to be read. To say that the experiences of minorities and oppressed groups are inherently completely inaccessible, and unimaginable to other groups is offensive to both the marginalized groups and to any thinking and feeling human beings.
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Tolstoy and Flaubert were not writing outside their experience. They were writing about their own intimately experienced world.
@Anna Base
Tolstoy and Flaubert were closeted transgendered women? Even if so, they were writing the perspective of cisgendered women.
11
@Julia
Why complain? When you say 'cisgender', you have already bought into what you claim to deplore.
Can't have it both ways...
5
The Twitterverse & social media in general have become the scourges of humanity. Unfortunatly the technology has entered the political realm and is beginning to distort the machinery of political parties, why I don't know. Americans for some time have sought to ban certain books from libraries, thus ensuring an illiterate society will form. I hope the political class will not be "tweeting" tweets into laws. That will never do.
27
I find it absurd that one can only write from experience or that cultural appropriation is considered problematic, although I do understand the feelings behind the sense that culture has been stolen, misrepresented, or never fully credited unless it was white and male. Yes, I believe one needs to be sensitive to the concerns of others - I am not advocating for any form of biased literature, although much of the world is just that, biased and bigoted. One can claim the author writes badly when trying to channel other's experience, or doesn't understand the experience of people he is speaking through, but that is a failure of ability more than bias, although it might certainly indicate an ignorance of the culture of one's characters. It's almost like we are denying others the opportunity for empathy and growth.
In many ways, stories do have gravitas and impact when they are written from a place of experience, where people can fully feel empathy for the protagonist, but many of the great novels of our lives were not experienced directly. They were thought pieces, extravagances, and fantasies, often surreal, designed to highlight some problem of existence.
Please feel to enlighten me. You'll be helping me grow...
16
@James Igoe - Nobody is suggesting one must write from experience, they are doing something worse, they are conflating image identity with experience, so you only need the identity. This happens of course when you don't have the experience to know better.
27
I'm old, so what can I say, but I'm getting a little tired of the censorship and pc stuff (and I'm not a Trump supporter!) Can't they just put the stuff out there and let the readers decide. And the same goes for the older stuff. I think it's been said before, but how about having discussions about controversial passages in books -- they often reflect the times, and they also reflect who we are and have been as a country (maybe not Jackson's book, I'm thinking about the Little House books for example.) I think the left is playing a dangerous game, and frankly it has already backfired -- that's how we got Trump. In any case, I'm glad I'm not a writer because I could never be PC enough.
133
So, @Ilona
You assume it's the Left?
1
@Keith Gilbert, yup, it's the Left. It desperately needs to get over itself.
Or maybe it's those left behind by the intersectionalists who desperately need it. We need to end the growing social and Constitutional disaster the Right is threatening us and, via global warming and saber rattling, the planet. We need to be united against threats to our survival. Instead, we're being policed by an intolerant mob nobody voted for.
3
@Ilona
Good writers are never PC. Popular writers might be. You need a strong will and a sense of humor to write anything decent. Critiques will come from all directions. The best stuff is hated by many. When at a garage sale with a number of Danielle Steele books, I seriously (jokingly) mention that I own the complete set in hardbound. Suburbia never gets it. Yes, Humbert and Doris together is totally inappropriate, yet the book is a masterpiece of English wit. Variety is the spice. Freedom is in allowing writing we hate, so we can read that which we like.
Twitter has provided a new pathway for a long-standing culture of book-banning. I used to have my students read “banned books” (see ala.org for details on Banned Books Week) and have them explain why the book was banned by some entity. Always an enlightening endeavor! Twitter has mixed all things into frenzies even faster. Literature of questionable quality makes it to the top often, and great stuff remains a sleeper for long periods. But the marketplace is still a decent judge of what people wish to read. Same with cars and fashion and other items. Sometimes an ‘insensitive’ books opens the best discussions.
23
@Diane’s
"The marketplace" requires the books to be published first. Twitter rage by naive ideologues is hemming in the exchange of ideas.
4
One thing I've learned about sensitivity readers - they more problems they have with a book, the better that book is likely to be.
76
YA Twitter has become the de facto Goskomizdat of children's book publishing, with the ability to sink books prepublication because of what its adherents evidently call "harmful depictions." Harmful depictions are apparently not major errors in fact, but aspects of a fictional (!) story believed to be harmful to children who read it, causing actual trauma in them. Jackson's book is not alone. In the last couple of years, Amelie Zhao's BLOOD HEIR, Keira Drake's THE CONTINENT (revised and released, but apparently still rejected by YA Twitter), E.E. Charlton-Trujillo's WHEN WE WAS FIERCE, and Sharlee Glenn's BEYOND THE GREEN all failed the left-wing intersectional post-modernist scrutiny of the Twitter Goskomizdat, and got scrubbed. The saddest part of their effort is that it deflects attention and energy from what truly harms children, such as physical and emotional abuse in the home, apathetic and absent parenting, addiction in the family, crappy schools, and violence filled environments. Not books before they get published.
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Tolkien really should have known better then to write about orcs without being an orc himself.
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@Alex - Well, he wrote more from the being a victim of orcs - I don't remember him channeling them - but considering what he wrote, he should have a strong familiarity with wizards, elves, and if not a hobbit himself, a strong cultural awareness.
17
@Alex, thanks for expressing this perspective. How bland literature would be if authors could only write about themselves! Those "rules" are a recipe for poor literature.
30
@Alex I largely agree with this opinion piece, but comparisons to orcs (or others I've heard, like "Stephenie Meyer isn't a vampire!") miss the point: This is about how books portray real cultures and identities that are often marginalized, stereotyped, discriminated against, and/or appropriated.
6
Censorship is alive and well, Stay in line!
20
@DavidF How is ranting about (judging just from this article, reasonably well-based) political issues with a book the same as censoring? The author could have opted to go forward with publushing, correct? Frankly I'm inclined to side with the social justice warriers on this one. This book apparently makes a genocide victim into a villain. Muslims are among the most oppressed people in America, look at how Rashida Tlaib get treated for trying to discuss the situation in Palestine. We have Russians actively smearing democratic primary hopefuls and y'all seem more worried about the Twitter users who are defending religious minorities.
@Gavin Bauer
Is it impossible for a genocide victim to be a villain?
Pretty sad day when the Left are the ones burning books.
161
This suggests to me that the terms left and right are not too useful when you look at issues in detail.
41
@Richard: It's the extremists and ideological purists on both sides that are always the book-burners.
10
Surely you know some of the history of communist tyranny and the banning of books? And science? The mass incarceration, the mass murder? The relentless propaganda - enemies of the people and all that?
Would that the fanatic were always those other people. Across human history, this is the default position, whatever the ideology; be it secular or non-secular.
This too human trait is what, for me, makes the First Amendment so extraordinary, so fundamentally radical. So central to the heart of liberalism. So worth defending, especially when it offends.
I hope the author and the publisher both realized that pulling the book would be bad for their reputation, at least in the short term. Yielding to a Twitter mob makes people look weak and too concerned with the opinions of fools.
49
The first victim of the revolution was Laurie Forest, author of The Black Witch. Amelie Wen Zhao was next, and now we have Kosoko Jackson. What these three have in common is that they bought into the very belief system that condemned them. Instead of fighting back, they pulled their works after offering up abject apologies for their transgressions against intersectionality.
This isn't trivial. There are colleges where this ideology reigns. There's a current in the Democratic Party that is flowing in this direction, and God help us liberals if we don't fight it.
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@Kaleberg
Too late. We have Trump and after him a shrewder, less compromised warrior. The rage will no longer be contained and many an erstwhile free thinker will join us.
6
@Kaleberg You are so right, Kaleberg. I find this insistence on uniformity of thought terrifying. I have always been a liberal. A lifelong democrat, I've marched for all sorts of causes over the decades and I despise Trump and everything he stands for. And yet, 2020 may be the first election of my adult life that I sit out. The planet is dying and I'm afraid to vote for the only party that might work to save it because as afraid as I am of a dying planet, I'm equally of afraid of a race war right here and now. I can't believe I'm actually writing about a race war as plausible, but I fear it's a sneeze away and the responsibility for this does not lie soley at the feet of Republicans and FOX news. The Dems and the NYT and other mainstream media have lost their minds (not intended to suggest the other side is thinking clearly, but we're accustomed to their insanity). The old joke about the circular firing squad is no longer a joke. We wake up to it each morning. This is one of my last posts at this paper, because I've cancelled my subscription, which runs for just a few more days. Why? I end up screaming at the insanity and stupidity of it all. We must stop this. Read about the cultural revolution in China. It wasn't pretty and it's not what you want, kids. But it's where we're headed. And yes, get off twitter and facebook. They are junkfood for the soul.
5
@Kaleberg
"Transgressions against intersectionality". Now there's a band name.
6
How many “twits” are we really talking about: 100, 1,000. Even if it were 10,000, that represents approximately .00003% of the US population.
Who cares what any of these people think?
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@Nick
They are noisy though and like to shout down their opponents. Haven't you heard of the use of white noise machines or other means (like chanting ) on campuses to drown out speakers? All it needs is one person with the white noise app on their phone connected to a powered speaker. And they then claim it is speech.
4
No wonder so much YA fiction centers around vampires, werewolves, fairies and other fantasy creatures. Writing about something that no one can credibly claim to be is apparently the only way around the sensitivity police who think only black people can write about civil rights, only gay people can write about AIDS, etc. (Sure, I don't doubt someone out there will claim to be part of the vampire community, but to that I say Prove It.) Let's ignore the fact that true sensitivity involves learning to put yourself, however imperfectly, in someone else's shoes and try to see the world as they see it. This Twitter mob approach is a dead end, one that will leave each of us segregated into our own homogenous community of people who share our ethnicity, gender, experiences, religion, point of view etc....Oh, wait. That has already happened, hasn't it.
89
@Nikki People generally won't claim to be werewolves or vampires or whatnot, but what is realistic is that they will claim that this or that fictitious group are problematic caricatures of real groups, marginalized groups, thus rendering the fiction problematic. Of course, there are definitely plenty of occasions where this sort of criticism might be justified (usually when the author did indeed have a specific group or groups in mind), but in this day and age I fear an over-sensitivity to this kind of thing, where we lose perspective of things like degree and intention.
All of that said, I'll try not to worry too much until the publishers themselves begin pulling their own books in response to the fury of Twitter mobs. In the case of this particular author, he seemingly chose to do so himself. To use the book burning metaphor, he burnt his own book. As long as the publishers themselves don't regularly choose to do so on their own initiative, I reckon there is still hope.
@Nikki agree. And then, even if you write about fantasy creatures, you may be criticized for not making them 'diverse.' Poor authors can't win!
4
@Nikki Paranormal romance was a big trend maybe 7-10 years ago. Right now there are VERY few vampires and werewolves in YA lit. This is a common misconception because of the success of Twilight. Sure, there's a TON of fantasy going on, but most of the characters are human.
Don’t you mean, “Teen Culture: A Fixation With Their Fictions”. Their grim reality will hit home soon enough, precious darlings.
9
Did this happen in Iran or in the US?
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@Fabrice,
America is having a temporary relapse into the graves of the Past and we will notify you when we are up and running again.
5
The biggest irony is the idea that the author was a sensitivity reader. This points to the heart of the issue—if « sensitivity readers » are incapable of recognizing in their own writing scenarios that the « mob » would object to, what good are sensitivity readers? Or rather, what good is the concept of a sensitivity reader? The whole thing feels silly (or worse). One is reminded of Yeats: « The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere; The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. »
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@Chris
Is this really ironic? The very fact that the thwarted author was a sensitivity reader and therefore a proponent and believer of woke YA righteousness made this outcome inevitable. A Robespierre indeed; revolutions always devour revolutionaries. Oh and thanks for the nicely apposite quotation. "The worst are full of passionate intensity"; now there's a fine encapsulation of the Twittersphere.
5
@Chris you should finish the quotation!
It is not entirely coincidental that Twitter has the word "twit" as a base.
Tweeting is nearly evil, although I would place "branding" slightly higher on the dreadful scale.
16
There is simply too much of this everywhere.
21
The tyranny of the far left is just as frightening as the tyranny of the far right. Yet the extreme voices seem to overpower the conversations of those of us between their battle lines. A pox on both their houses.
108
@Jim Kerney
Hm. The latter wants to regulate behavior. The former seeks to control thought. You decide the greater peril; it’s clear the voters’ preference.
6
So the thought police won by many millions of votes in both 2018 and 2016? Not sure your point here....
@Santillian
How and why is any of this about left or right?
Have we gotten to the point at which every single story is about red and blue states?
This is about literature and freedom of speech. It has absolutely nothing to do with Republican/Democrat or Red/Blue.
3
"Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power."
Beautifully said. Thank you!
221
For kids who are out of the ordinary, “abnormal,” their literature necessarily will not be mainstream; what might be too advanced for most kids is just right for them.
4
While Ms. Senior acknowledges the karma present here, it isn't clear that she disapproves of the treatment Mr. Jackson dished out to other aspiring authors. Otherwise she might have felt compelled last May to challenge the "rules" Mr. Jackson unilaterally laid out in his tweet. Her issue seems to be that the woke police went too far, and that it claimed the "wrong" victim - plenty of "legitimate" scalps out there to be hung on its wall.
Ms. Senior sure can write, though. I'd have gone with "live by the sword, die by the sword." But "Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine" is so much more exquisite.
150
Second thought: If I ever wrote a book, i would not have a twitter account nor would I read any twitter comments. My book would be judged on its own merits and the public could buy or not buy, read or not read as they choose.
8
Unfortunately, and especially in YA, your contract will insist upon often updated social media on many platforms :/ John Green played it very well, until recently.
10
@Lexi
If I was a young person, a writer just starting out, most likely I would do what they say. But I'm old and I have had a lifetime of telling people 'no' (that's a lot of practice) I have some insight into the process; my niece is Stephanie Kate Strohm, the YA writer.
1
I would not have a Twitter account, period!
1
It feels like cultural revolution, doesn't it?
19
I’m a ‘sensitivity’ reader, too. I read just about anything placed in front of me. Then I make a value judgment on what I’ve read.
Not a big fan of the designation ‘teen’ fiction or ‘YA’ fiction. If you can reach it on the shelf, read it.
12
So publish the book, already!
4
This article is spot-on on illustrating a troubling trend that is rapidly veering towards Cultural Revolution denounce-others-before-they denounce-you territory.
An added irony: Not mentioned in this article is that Jackson contributed to the pile-on that forced Amelie Wen Zhao to pull her own book because of the perceived sin of exploiting black slavery and using the white savior trope. This is despite the fact that Ms. Zhao says her story was based on the Asian human trafficking and slave trade. That’s right: “Progressives” attacked an author who is a Chinese immigrant and a woman for daring to approach the issue of slavery from an Asian instead of an American lens. Puritanism, mob attacks on a woman of color, America first-ism... What exactly is “progressive” about all of this?
https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/ya-book-scandal-kosoko-jackson-a-place-for-wolves-explained.html
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@Scott
Puritanism and America first-ism was never claimed to be “progressive” in the first place. Where have you seen progressives pushing America first?
4
@left coast finch
Asserting all slavery narratives MUST reflect America’s experience with slavery is still “America First” jingoism. “Cancelling” any story that doesn’t follow your own moral code is just another form of puritanism. The fact that the actions of some progressives are unwittingly reactionary makes it all the more ironic.
7
@left coast finch
Read Scott's last sentence again ... you're saying the same thing. Scott is just noting the irony.
3
This is nothing but caving to mob mentality and literary fascism. Imagine what would have been the fate of Nabakov’s Lolita, most of Phillip Roth’s morally ambiguous or Paul
Auster’s uncomfortable protagonists? Some of life is confronting, infuriating and “triggering.” It’s designed to wake us up! Just as is good writing. We may not always like or agree with what versions of reality literature presents, or understand its people or views, but isn’t that the point? Shame on the publishing houses for pulling books before a broader audience can experience, like/dislike, or otherwise engage. Let the marketplace decide!
49
@SomethingElse
"Imagine what would have been the fate of Nabakov’s Lolita"
I don't have to imagine. I saw an Internet review of LOLITA that presumed that Nabakov was a child molester because the "reviewer" couldn't tell the difference between Humbert's attitudes and the author's. Subtlety is over the heads of some people.i
Thank you. Well done. Authors hear all sorts of voices in their heads and should have the freedom to explore them. Having respect for the voices that you conjure up includes attempting to portray them accurately and sensitively, and it is great that we are focused on that discussion, but at the same time, we don't need to attack people learning that, because writing is just that - writing the voices in your head, and hoping to get better at it every time. Mob rule is not good for anything.
11
Twitter is for idiots.
34
@Greg
Agreed.
1
At my work, I once had a sensitivity reader ding a quote about the fate of Southern blacks during Reconstruction as insufficiently sensitive to race issues. The quote was by W. E. B. Du Bois.
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@MJB
https://www.dailyemerald.com/news/martin-luther-king-jr-quote-in-the-emu-will-return/article_2f21d007-f721-5aa2-a184-ddd0f03cc86d.html
This "article was edited for clarity" but even in the toned down version it is clear that the quote by MLK offended some because it was not gender inclusive.
1
Excellent essay.
Identity politics eating itself. Reap what you sow ...
48
this is actually symptomatic of much that happens on the internet these days -- including the "me too" movement which has become an exercise in trophy hunting. its goes far to explain Trump's popularity -- he gleefully thumbs his nose at the pc crowd, and ordinary people lap it up.
26
I would love to see a counterpoint piece from the NYTimes. The perspective of this columnist is pretty widely accepted outside of the YA industry -- pulling or rewriting books for their offensive material is censorship, and will lead to the end of the world.
I think Times readers could learn more from someone who understands the rationale behind why Kosoko pulled his book. In this case, he chose to do so because he realized that he had played into Muslim stereotypes, and minimalized the genocide of a people in his story. Yes he was pressured, but he also did not want to tell a story that committed those offenses.
My personal stance on YA's excessive woke-culture is that it goes too far. But there is much, much more nuance to the issue than this columnist allows. It is worth fighting to provide children and teens with stories that don't dehumanize them. To not lead young readers to buy into tired stereotypes.
Some protectionism is worthwhile. Some goes too far. I wish that those advocates in the YA Twitter world would be more moderate in their pursuits, and flexible in the conversations they allowed. I also wish that the world outside of YA publishing would reflect a lot more on their own responsibility and failings.
15
@Tara
You're not the first person to come along who to want to censor art because of the children. Somehow this always seem to result all the rich, thorny diversity of life being sanded down into slick, plastic lies. And really, those are just the lies adults want to tell themselves because they're afraid.
Back in the 80s and 90s, the adults wanted to protect the kids from homosexuality and sex and drugs and god only knows what else. Mostly, they just would up making life horrible for gay kids and creating a sex-negative atmosphere that contributed to the spread of HIV. And all the stories about drugs were just scare stories because no one wanted to talk about how sometimes drugs are okay but sometimes they're not, and it can take years to figure out which side you're on.
Adults would do better to let kids learn about life as it is-- good and bad, beautiful and ugly, pleasureful and painful. Teach them why it is the way it is and how to deal with it. Don't underestimate their intelligence or courage. And don't deny them knowledge because of your own fears.
7
@Tara “some protectionism is worthwhile”. This assertion is not true. The ACLU and our Supreme Court thought very little protectionism is worthwhile given the Skokie Illinois Nazis March case. Every lapse over near complete freedom of speech in our countries’ history has been seen as retrospectively wrong. Still now and with each generation attempts to put more ( always worthy) limits on speech arise.
In this type of culture, where people continually need to prove their purity to protect themselves, it's inevitable that the canceller will eventually become the cancelled. I'm not so much worried about the people like Jackson who choose to participate in this culture, but it is very unfortunate and concerning that it is censoring our art and literature. I hope that society eventually comes to its senses as they did in the 1690's and returns to reason again.
38
I was going to say there was a certain schadenfreude joy to the situation of Mr. Jackson (since there is no joy like seeing someone caught by their own words), but I think its bigger than that. I think we are talking cosmic karma here.
All movements eat their young.
93
"He was Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine."
Exquisite. I doubt anyone could have said it better than that.
I think this situation will occur more frequently as various esoteric intersectionalities discover (too late) that their particular intersection is powerless stop the 16-wheeler truck that is hurtling in their direction from an adjoining intersection which obeys its own set of traffic lights and rules.
If you are a misguided idealist who believes that everyone's right to not be offended can (or even should ) be simultaneously protected, this episode might sadden you. But those of us who wish artists and individuals to enjoy the greatest possible freedom of thought and expression will hope that the calm following these inevitable collisions will allow sanity to finally prevail.
180
@Pantagruel,
Re "the 16-wheeler truck that is hurtling in their direction" - see Martina Navratilova.
11
@areader
At some point I was waiting for someone to come up with a ranking of which combination of victimhoods trumps which and therefore who can have the final word.
Then I realized that organized religion had already done it and called it blasphemy. Except organized religion is not so hot in the West.
We are groping towards a new 'woke' religion that wants to impose its infinite sense of righteousness on everyone who believes and everyone who doesn't. Luckily it is trying to be so all-encompassing in its sense of hurt that it will offend itself out of existence.
7
@Pantagruel People who believe that "everyone's right to not be offended can (or even should) be simultaneously protected" are not misguided idealists. They are fanatics, and stupid fanatics at that.
5
"What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for writing Y.A. literature are." It's not just YA lit that has increasingly narrow and untenable rules. "Cancel culture" seems to be everywhere these days (and not just on Twitter), illuminating injustice at times, yes, but also stirring division and intolerance. Great piece, Jennifer.
103
Thank you so much for writing this. I agree 100%.
43
i would liked to have given it a try, but guess it's searching ebay for an inexpensive galley version instead, now. toxic social media (some would say that's redundant, i know) strikes again. still glad i killed my twitter account.
19
Has anything positive ever come from Twitter? There was that rumor (perpetuated by Twitter, I think) that it helped organizers of protests in Iran or something.
But really -- if Twitter just vanished, the world would be a better place. No soapbox for Trump and no megaphone for these silly shamers. No over-sharing by celebrities or stupid unconsidered comments from freshman congresspeople.
Has anything good ever come from Twitter?
438
I give away books to teachers and librarians on Twitter. It’s actually a very good vehicle for that.
3
@John G, that kind of helping won't ever occur again. It helped not because of the features everyone knows so well about twitter storms and virals and so forth, rather because the messages were required to be short, and could thereby evade government detection. Twitter messages are no longer as short, and governments now can track them.
It took a lot more than Twitter anyway, it took TOR, and encryption and a lot of other technologies, too.
1
@John G
Twitter does actually provide a usefull service, it provides people who think Twitter makes them look smart somewhere to spend their time in a way in which I have no change of having to interact with them.
6
This is digital book burning.
I have noticed a pattern in this outrage phenomenon we have been suffering through lately. Rage is not a sustainable emotional state and if the party weathering the storm simply rides it out, eventually it passes and they can continue as planned, unbothered by the experience. In other words, ignore the silent screams of social media and the understandable impulse to do something— anything — in response to it to quiet it.
114
Indeed...See Virginia
2
Writing about this is so important. I am dismayed at the restrictions anonymous censors place on public discourse through swarming, bullying, and boycotting (threatened more than actual). This example in particular is so important because the man who was tasked with being the cultural gatekeeper at a large publishing house could not pass social media muster when it was his time to speak.
129
I find it interesting the authors are “pulling their books”, and there is no mention of pressure from the publishing house to “pull” the books. Is the author making an independent decision, or is the publisher, by having the author “pull the book” saving face....for them?
35
@Molly This story is not complete without knowing whether the author came under pressure from his publisher to withdraw the book, or whether he unilaterally responded to the Twitter mob. If nobody forced him to withdraw the book, then this isn't an example of censorship or a "PC" mob preventing free speech.
7
It's time to cancel these Twitter mobs.
234
Who if anybody has all of the qualities or qualifications to be a sensitivity reader? And why on earth have we all become so sensitive and fragile? If we don’t like the sounds of those with the megaphone, just don’t listen to them.
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@The HouseDog
And that is why the free speech is so important. Every restriction on speech (no matter how well meaning) is equally arbitrary and can potentially be interpreted as unjust. This sense of injustice can then be used (sincerely or cynically) to justify other restrictions.
Reading through some of the comments to the review that "cancelled" the book, I noticed a few people apologized because they liked the book without knowing the background.
This culture of needing permission from some online troll with a big megaphone has to have a chilling effect on creativity.
25
@The HouseDog,
The New York Times published an article on 'The Sensitivity Readers' about a year ago, and they seem to have popped up again which comes as no surprise. No sense, but all a blob of quivering sensitivity, bringing us one closer step to Fascism and '1984'.
The American First Amendment is as close as we are going to get to absolute free speech. (barring of course incitement of violence, slander or putting people in immediate harm's way)
Having said that, there are second tier barriers to said free speech that we must get past every single day. There is the social media (and otherwise) group that will deter things being published (or pulled after the fact) There are purveyors of microaggression (many pertinent stories about that lately in these same pages) that deem certain code words to be not allowed.
Then there's just getting through a comment here.
18
“Then there’s just getting through a comment here.” Hahahaha.
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The American First Amendment is as close as we are going to get to absolute free speech. (barring of course incitement of violence, slander or putting people in immediate harm's way)
Having said that, there are 2nd tier barriers to said free speech that we must get past every single day. There is the social media (and otherwise) mob that will deter things being published (or pulled after the fact) There are purveyors of microaggression (many pertinent stories about that lately in these same pages) that deem certain code words to be verboten.
Then there's just getting through a comment here.
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