From Vulture:
For a novelist, Dhonielle Clayton has a lot of unhappy memories of reading. There was the time a teacher made the class read Huck Finnout loud, and Clayton, the only black kid in the room, sat there sweating while her classmates snickered over the prolific use of the N-word. There was her realization in fifth grade that all the black and brown characters in Middle Earth and Narnia were evil. She wanted to read about magic, about outer space, but the only characters she could find who looked like her were in books about slavery and civil rights. “I was reading everything, looking for myself,” she said. “I didn’t get it.”
Clayton, now 34, is one of the chief executives of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit founded in 2014 to support writers from marginalized groups and to advocate for more diversity in publishing. She’s the co-founder of a book development company, Cake Literary, that specializes in books about diverse characters, and she’s got a fantasy novel of her own, The Belles, coming out next month. She’s also working in the booming business of sensitivity reading.
. . . .
As a sensitivity reader, Clayton’s job is to help nonblack authors avoid portraying black characters in a way that feels inauthentic or uninformed. She herself relies on sensitivity readers to improve her writing — for her first book, she hired 12 different readers to review aspects of the story that she and her writing partner didn’t base on firsthand experience.
The way she sees it, the job of a sensitivity reader is first and foremost to improve the literary quality of a book by steering the author away from one-dimensional portraits and clichés. But some have likened the readers to “censors,” and the press coverage of the industry has often reflected this attitude. Most recently, a Times headline pondered whether sensitivity readers “result in better books, or censorship”?
Link to the rest at Vulture and thanks to The Digital Reader for the tip.
Here’s a wild and wacky idea – just write the dang story. If readers don’t like it, they’ll stop buying you until you figure out how to do a better job. If they like your work, then who the hell cares what a “sensitivity reader” says?
Pretty much this. I can see where any writer would want to make sure they didn’t have stereotypes as characters (all Japanese are super smart, or else were involved in Pearl Harbor, all Germans were Nazis, all Native Americans are noble savages, all women are weak, conniving gold diggers, on and on…).
But I also know that we can write about those who are different from us. We can understand the experiences of those who have been abused, denied and ignored. In some part of all of us, we have experiences that are similar, if not the same. Part of the best of human nature is the ability to feel for our fellow man.
I dare say that any one of us can write a book and be rejected because the publishing house has already acquired too many other books on a similar topic. It happens all the time, and will always continue to happen.
Maybe these authors would be benefited if they tried to publish themselves. I see all the time where readers are thirsting for diversity. Why not give it to them? Stop complaining about the problem, and be the solution.
If you want to change the world and eliminate racism, you don’t write books where young black kids need to bend over backwards to have a good reason to go camping. You write books where it’s perfectly natural for black kids to go camping. That’s what young black people need to read. They don’t need to read about the struggle. They know about the struggle. They need to read books that encourage them. That show them a world where no one gives a second thought to black people going to parks. That erase those kinds of stupid outdated stereotypes.
This is exactly the reason I don’t read so much of the fantasy that’s being published these days–only replace ‘blacks’ with ‘women’. Fantasy is my favorite genre, but so much of it (coming from tradpubs especially, though a lot of indies do it too) is about focusing on all the terrible misogyny in the world (real or fantastic). I don’t want to read about female characters facing horrible persecution and then sticking it to the man. I want to read about worlds where gender equality is the unquestioned, unremarked-upon norm. Where a woman’s life is not defined by the hardship she faces because she’s a woman, but where she’s allowed to be her own person with her own dreams, desires, goals, and challenges irrespective of her gender. If I had kids, that’s the sort of thing I’d want them to read, too.
for her first book, she hired 12 different readers to review aspects of the story that she and her writing partner didn’t base on firsthand experience.
Putting the politics of the whole sensitivity reader business aside, how on earth can you do this and make money? It must have cost a small fortune, unless these particular sensitivity readers were doing it for Hot Pockets.
That’s what I was wondering. What did she pay the sensitives?
I’ll do an Irish-American sensitivity analysis for $3 per Amazon calculated Kindle page. Books that pass get to display the handsome green Shamrock Of Sensitivity.
I see this kind of ‘watcher’ as a self annointed, self positioned person who does indeed play to a certain segment of culture.
However history is cruel to the ‘culture claimers’ who somehow forget that africans sold africans, african americans held slaves, many many;
MANY, that freed slaves often stayed with the families they’d known for decades, that an upper class of educated blacks existed [by my research] throughout the late 18th, 19th and 20th and 21st centuries, that black entrepreneurs abounded
and yes, there was also for far too many, a hideous life of no say so, no education, no protections of one’s body and family.
The poor whites, the beheaded chinese, the murdered irish miners who dared to lay placer claims, the native people from coast to coast and continent to continent, all had their layers of being sold by their own people,
being enslaved, girls and women held not only as chattel but as sex worker within the ‘family’, men beaten to death, ambushed, murdered for their pitiful belongings, their fishing rivers, their hunting grounds.
There is NO one on the face of the earth insofar as I know, who are not descended from the enslaved by marauders, ‘conquerers’, crusaders, etc…and I can promise that coming from the dirt ourselves, that discriminations run deep across many many people who are in charge,
whether against women, gay men, transgender people, rural farmer people, those deemed not ‘high brown enough’ male or female, religious people, new age people, hill people, persons any nation is currently at war with… back in the time of Grimms, literally french fairytales were cut out of collections because of the german animus and visa versa.
All I can say is I admire those who have the heart and determination for hitting every closed door til it either opens or rots from lack of admitting true talent. As mentioned here before, RH had an imprint for ‘color’ only.
It failed. Why? Likely as Terrance noted. Calling for certain kinds of culturally defined books without being able to harness the readership to truly support the books by buying them. Much made of not being reviewed, not getting pub, etc. Not true with its own imprint. Outcome w or w/o pub: same.
I collect old photos; many of black persons in beautiful white dresses and big white hats with plumes along with gentlemen in their finery at Garden of the Gods, Rocky Mountain National Park, Sand Dunes, elsewhere.
History can be cruel to a narrower view. Been on both ends of it. Better to see the overview of history and the incredible billions of experiences that make up every cultural layer of life, not monolithic
Thank you Usaf.
Something that few people realize is how intertwined we all are. There is a mathematical proof that every person with European blood is a direct descendant of every single person living in Europe in the 13th C. We’re all directly descended from royalty and slaves. If you go back another thousand years, all current humans are direct descendants of every living human at that time.
Seems counter-intuitive, but think of this: if a generation is 50 years (a generously high number), the 13th C was about 160 generations ago. Every person is descended from two persons, so your number of ancestors doubles with each generation. 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and so on.
So, each person alive today had 2 raised to the 160th power direct ancestors in the 13th C. That’s about a 1 with 48 zeros behind it. But the population of Europe in the 13th C was less than, probably much less, 100 million– that’s a 1 with only 8 zeros behind it. Obviously, we must share a lot of ancestors.
We are all one big family.
Oops. My numbers are off. The boy is getting old. The 13th C is about 30 generations ago. 2**30 is over a billion. That’s still 10 times 100 million. Best estimates are that Europe’s population peaked around 80 million before the plagues and famines of the late 13th, early 14th C.
The wonderful thing about indie is that there is no fixed economic pie – that someone else getting published doesn’t mean I can’t be.
As a reader, I’ve never care about the colour of the author’s skin, whether their second chromosome was an X or Y, or what culture they hailed from – I care about the story!
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! You know that editor takes stories like you write, and they liked your story enough to give a reason instead of a form rejection, and yet you refuse to try something else you’ve written because someone else sold their story first?
I’m too lazy to look her up and see if she has anything published with a white girl as a character. People like this don’t understand the reversal of their racism anyway. “Think of the poor, poor white woman whose place you poached with that story!”
I have people of all “races” in my writing. The only thing I have to watch for when writing is to not give all of the cowardly and sexually perverted villains French names…
If there is an unmet demand for any given type of good, we would expect the limited supply of that good to fly off the shelves.
If supply continues to fall short of demand, we generally see prices of that type of good to increase.
We also see competitors jump into the market to take advantage of the demand.
If we don’t see this with a good, it is reasonable to question the assumption that there is an unmet demand.
The link to the original article is missing:
What the Job of a Sensitivity Reader Is Really Like
http://www.vulture.com/2018/01/sensitivity-readers-what-the-job-is-really-like.html
I harvested the article, and will read it many times. It looks like her business will be very successful over the coming years as Trad publishing reacts to today’s changing climate in its usual ham-handed way.
I love this quote:
“Did you ask her why she wanted to write a black character in the first place?
I did. The same canned answer always comes back: This character just walked into my head fully formed. If I hear that one more time. I don’t know where this answer comes from, but it’s hilarious to do a read aloud of every single author who has that same exact answer.”
Yikes!
That “canned answer” comment was one of the points that really stood out to me. Looks like she has no clue at all about how a panster goes about their work.
The reference to National Parks was also odd. Black people may have been discouraged from visiting parks but as far as I can tell were never banned; the segregated facilities that existed at one time were there because blacks did visit. Anyway, even if there is no general tradition in the community of visiting parks there is no reason why an individual girl might not develop a passion and no reason why such a passion has to come from her parents. It sounds like she just screwed things up for her author without real justification.
As a member of (more than one) minority, I’ve grown extremely wary of anyone who claims to speak for My People(tm). Usually they’re ignorant of history, and generally even if they’re not, they prefer their narrative to they way it actually was. Sometimes they’re incredibly well informed – for their particular time and place, but not at all for other people, in other times and other places.
Just like reporters who think that anything that happened before they were in high school is Ancient History, certain celebrity authors are prone to believing that All Minorities Conform To This Stereotype, and thus they can claim “I speak for My People”, when they don’t speak for me, my family, my friends, or even my community at all.
One of my two best friends from college (godfather to my first child) was born and raised in the Bronx. Darker than at least 95% of “African-Americans.” Met him in New Hampshire, and he could not resist any opportunity to get out into the woods around the college. I’ve somewhat lost track of him, but the last I knew, he was living in Australia – in the far reaches of the outback.
But he was very definitely what we call an “Odd.” One of maybe two or three people there that grew up in urban environments that had the slightest desire to get away from large groups of people, buildings, and paved walks. Most of them were not particularly happy with the semi-rural nature right around the college. MOST of those people were white, through and through.
That black people do not visit national parks is not a function of their race – it is a function of their urbanized culture. Those who grew up in the same culture have the same aversion. (Probably more urban whites do visit national parks than urban blacks – but more urban whites were not originally from the city, they moved there for opportunities that are not so common outside of the urban areas.)
There are a lot of transplants in the urban area where I live. I visit the local national parks because I grew up in a small rural town. The few black people that I’ve talked to there, for long enough to make the question non-intrusive, have invariably told me that they came from much the same cultural background – small towns, farms, etc. I’ve not met another like my friend from college (yet).
Yeah, I just read this woman’s bio at the We Need Diverse Books website. She’s city born and raised and continues to live in the city. She grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, which is still incredibly urban by the standards of the vast majority of the country. Now she lives in NYC. She has lived an urban life and she has an urban worldview. Which she is probably projecting onto these poor author’s books.
Why is it that people like this who cry “diversity!” never seem to understand how much diversity there is within the experiences of people of color across the country?
One of maybe two or three people there that grew up in urban environments that had the slightest desire to get away from large groups of people, buildings, and paved walks.
What this country needs is a good pair of Jimmy Choo hiking boots.
I have a box of books labeled “One Drop” that is filled with a series of thoughts that I’m still having to think for the various stories that I have in my schedule. These two books may help to understand where she is coming from.
– The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
– Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen
Reading the comments in this thread, and pulling out my “One Drop” box, reminds me that I need to read the books again. Thanks…
I don’t actually mind if an author wants to use a sensitivity reader, after all that’s their business not mine.
Where I draw the line is when people start telling me how I should write my characters, for example, I was once called anti-Semitic for having a wealthy Jew in one of my books.
I get that some people read and look for characters like themselves. I do. On the other hand, once I discovered fantasy and science fiction, I identified with squirrels, dragons, mice, and unicorns. None of which I will ever match either in physical description or temperament. Maybe in background, depending on who wrote and from what perspective.
But I read as much to discover things OUTSIDE my realm of experience.
” I identified with squirrels, dragons, mice, and unicorns.”
I like this gentle way you have of seeing all creatures, as they say, great and small. What heart.