Professor Philip Nel, an authority on “radical and anti-racist children’s literature,” endorsed removing six Dr. Seuss books from circulation because they use “dangerous” visual tropes or terminology (like “Eskimo”) that were common 70 years ago. “In the 1950s, cars didn’t have seat belts. Now, we recognize that as dangerous—so, cars have seat belts,” Szetela quotes Nel as saying. “In the 1950s, lots of books recycled racist caricature. Now, Random House is recognizing this as dangerous.” Nel and his allies have made it their mission to ensure that such works aren’t “poisoning” young minds.
Szetela quotes novelist Padma Venkatraman, who explained in School Library Journal: “Even if we establish safe environments for discussion, classics privilege white readers . . . If we want to nurture readers of color, we must get rid of racist classics in homes, bookstores, and English classrooms.” Just so there’s no room for doubt, these crusaders make it very clear that their indictment applies to all the “classics” (from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Catcher in the Rye). These books are judged uniformly and immutably racist, due to the misfortune of having originated in a less enlightened age.
Szetela rips into the burgeoning cottage industry of “sensitivity readers” hired by authors, agents, or publishers to review manuscripts to ensure “authenticity.” He notes that their expertise is not about knowledge or skill; it’s about being black, trans, or what-have-you. These readers purport to speak on behalf of whole swaths of humanity, while (by Szetela’s calculation) potentially earning $156,000 to $312,000 a year for their feedback. Szetela quotes the editor who told him, “If a person can be a good set of eyes for, say, Filipino American queer—sometimes they get very, very granular—that’s amazing.”
He also quotes an in-demand sensitivity reader who explains that black people don’t go to national parks. “That it’s not a thing we do, as a group,” she explains. Szetela cites another sensitivity reader who explains that they can tell when a character “reads like a white person, but the author’s painted them brown.” In normal times, such claims would be deemed crude racial caricature; in modern publishing, they pass for enlightened thinking.
Szetela relates that many of his sources see the problems with sensitivity readers but that most are terrified to say anything critical. He quotes the president of one major publishing house who explains how readily things can run off the rails:
We had a book, written by a gay man, for other gay men—very, very explicitly. The sensitivity reader went through it with a flying, fine-toothed comb, and sort of added all the other categories of queerness. Every time he said “gay” or “gay men,” she would add, you know, “LGBTQ,” every other category of queerness and difference into it. In a way, it completely invalidated the book. It lost its point.
This kind of pressure is shaping what gets published. One senior editor at HarperCollins indicated she would only accept submissions from minority authors, while another editor privately conceded they probably wouldn’t publish a talented writer due to “fear of contamination by association.” There’s the gay writer who told Szetela about an editor who told him, “Your stories aren’t gay enough.” In response, the writer recalls promising, “I’ll try to gay it up.” An editor of color lamented, “I’m very left-leaning. I’m very liberal. I’m a feminist. I’m a woman of color. I feel a responsibility in my position to give a voice to everyone . . . But this just feels a bit insane to me now.”
