Nothing so surely
kills artistic expression and the free spirit of the imagination as political
dogma. When politics hijacks art the result is propaganda – a blunt instrument
of control instead of a vehicle for transcendance.
The
Chicago Tribune reports that book publishers have begun making
increasing use of so-called “sensitivity readers” to examine manuscripts and to
offer feedback in terms of any racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content.
Such readers sometimes specialize in areas of expertise that an author might
lack, such as “dealing with terminal illness,” “racial dynamics in Muslim
communities within families,” or “transgender issues.”
Last year, for
example, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling was savaged by Native American
readers and scholars for her story called “History of Magic in North America,” which
they claim she portrayed Navajo traditions in a way that “perpetuates colonialist perspectives” and “appropriates
and erases Native American culture,” as
Salon put it. Similarly, young adult author Veronica Roth, author of the
bestselling Divergent, caught heat for her new novel Carve the Mark,
which was called not only racist but “ableist.”
Dhonielle Clayton,
a New York sensitivity reader, told the
Tribune,
“Books for me are
supposed to be vehicles for pleasure, they're supposed to be escapist and fun.
They're not supposed to be a place where readers encounter harmful versions and
stereotypes of people like them… [U]ntil publishing is equitable and people are
still writing cross-culturally, sensitivity reading is going to be another
layer of what's necessary in order to make sure that representation is good.”
Stacy Whitman, an
editorial director at Lee & Low, concurs: “Everyone's goal is a better
book, and better representation contributes to that.”
But does it make a
better book? Is this process shaping better writers or just politically straitjacketed
ones?
Naturally, all
writers want to bring their characters to life as authentic and believable; but
in the past, if characters and the setting in a book didn’t ring true, it
failed as a work of art, and the resulting obscurity was punishment enough for
a writer. Today, thanks to the relentless, unforgiving scrutiny of the PC
police, writers are becoming paralyzed less by the fear of making bad art than
by being smeared as racist/sexist/ableist/colonialist/the-list-never-ends. Their
creativity and imagination are being stifled by the growing cultural
totalitarianism of identity politics, which divides everyone into rigid
categories of racial/gender victimhood and pits them against their supposed oppressor.
Anyone whose art steps outside those boxes risks not mere obscurity but
personal shame and social ostracism.
As the Tribune notes,
“This potential for offense has some writers scared.” Indeed. Young adult
author Susan Dennard, for example, recently hired a transgender fan to review
her portrayal of a transgender character. That’s fine; it’s admirable that she
wanted to get it right. But her motivation was not so much artistic
perfectionism as fear. “I was nervous
to write a character like this to begin with, because what if I get it wrong? I
could do some major damage,” Dennard fretted.
The real damage
would be to her personally, if she is publicly labeled a bigot of some sort for
failing to craft a politically acceptable depiction of a character from an
officially designated victim group outside the bounds of her own experience. Such
a cancerous smear metastasizes all over the internet at the speed of tweet,
potentially destroying one’s career and life.
To show the sad
depth to which identity politics is dragging art: some sensitivity readers actually
worry that they may be contributing to cultural appropriation by helping
white authors write more “authentic” black characters, for example.
“It feels like I'm
supplying the seeds and the gems and the jewels from our culture, and it
creates cultural thievery,” said Dhonielle Clayton, who is black. “Why am I
going to give you all of those little things that make my culture so
interesting so you can go and use it and you don't understand it?”
Besides the fact
that complaints of cultural appropriation reveal a fundamental misunderstanding
of how culture develops, they also expose a wrongheaded collectivist assumption
that all blacks, or all transgenders, or all [fill in the blank] have the same
experience, worldview, and values, and that the imagination has no authority to
cross the racial/gender borders drawn by cultural Marxists as part of their
divide-and-conquer strategy.
Where is this
leading? Will the PC pressure cooker intensify until only black authors are
allowed to write black characters, only Muslims are allowed to imagine Muslim
characters, only lesbians can create lesbian characters, and so on? Gustave Flaubert
once famously declared of his most enduring character, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Today the heated outrage
generated by such a gender-insensitive presumption would incinerate him.
The Tribune
article cited William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner
as an example of problematic cultural appropriation, since Styron was white and
the book was narrated from the slave Turner's perspective. Presumably a
sensitivity reader analyzing Styron’s manuscript today would take serious
objection to his attempt to get inside the mind of a black slave in the 19th
century and authentically represent that experience. The book might not even
get the publisher’s green light.
What the Tribune
neglects to mention is that The Confessions of Nat Turner won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Flaubert’s and Styron’s celebrated novels exemplify
the power of the human imagination to soar above the rigid constraints of
identity politics to create something that touches our common humanity. In the
brave new publishing world we are shaping in which “cultural thievery” is the
ultimate crime, that will no longer be possible.
From Acculturated, 2/19/17
