More Thoughts

I continue musing about the face of Blood Heir and A Place for Wolves, two YA novels on the verge of publication cancelled after online outrage. I offered up a few thoughts about this last week, but want to add some more.

In her discussion of morality clauses (also a hot button topic in publishing lately), Judith Shulevitz points out that writers of color and women and LBGTQ writers are most vulnerable to online outrage, most easily targeted and most viciously attacked. The same issue is at play here. It’s ironic and I don’t think it’s coincidental that the two most high-profile cases of books being withdrawn pre-publication involve two writers of color, one of them an immigrant, one of them gay. When we use the level of outrage to judge whether books should be released, I predict that women and minorities will see their books cancelled first. Supression always hits the most vulnerable the hardest.

You may ask, what about own voices–authors, especially those from marginalized communities, writing directly about their own experiences? Important. Vital. I am all for it. We need black people writing about the African American experience, we need gay people writing about growing up LBGTQ, we need immigrants writing about immigration. Please do so. I am so eager to read what you write. But please use own voices to open up the marketplace of ideas, not to shut it down.

And finally, as writers and as human being, we will blow it sometimes. I’m sorry about that, but we’re flawed and it’s inevitable. Blowing it does not necessarily mean that a book should be cancelled, because that negates the possibility of such a book being flawed but valuable. Can The Merchant of Venice be, perhaps, a work that is disturbing for its anti-Semitism and still interesting for its cry of universal humanity? Does Dorothy L. Sayer’s casual racism mean I can’t remain fascinated by her intimate, heartfelt longing for a companionate marriage of equals between a man and a woman? Isn’t Huckleberry Finn both a sharp, satiric look at the American experience and a tender examination of a cross-racial friendship and an uncomfortable expression of bone-deep racism? Can’t we are as readers be trusted–or even allowed–to see all the sides?