Do I need to say representation and misrepresentation are two different things?
Kids deserve the first, but the latter can be character-building.
The estates of two famous authors—Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming—created some amount of heartburn last month when they announced they would pass their famous catalog titles through “sensitivity editors.”
“Sensitivity readers” or “authenticity editors” are a recent phenomenon: they’re proofreaders assigned to make certain a work does not misrepresent historically marginalized people.
Publishing houses will replace Fleming’s 1950s-era use of the n-word with capital-B “Black men,” and Dahl’s narrative will point out that the bald witches in The Witches are not evil because they are bald, lest a young girl suffering cancer or alopecia feel “othered.”
Arguments against such re-writes are sometimes difficult to make: how can anybody advocate for the n-word to remain in print, for example? At the same time, retroactive editing feels dystopian.
Social media erupted last year when a woman published a list of “problematic authors.”
“Problematic” is a 21st-century catch-all term for anything a modern progressive might find offensive: racism, sexism, ableism, jokes about fat people, jokes about femme men, jokes about sex work, transphobia—jokes about women who lost an eye to a stray golf ball at the Ryder Cup.
“Problematic” is pretty much my entire comic repertoire when I have a few drinks in me and only my friends are listening.
She published her list as a table. Here’s an excerpt:
Readers have a right to give their opinions about books and what they find troublesome and delightful. They have a right to share those opinions and call bad opinions into question.
I have unsavory questions, however.
The author of this list is a 20-year-old woman who came of age when people build social capital online by calling out injustice. Not only might she feel Emily Duncan is a racist who dismisses incest survivors, but it isn’t a stretch to suggest she wants other 20-something authors to notice the person she is: someone who calls out injustice and won’t sit quietly while Duncan goes about her craft.
While perhaps her goal in creating this list was altruistic, I can’t imagine she’d have done it if she thought nobody would give her some measure of credit, authority, or power.
Two different thoughts often confused
There are two concepts I see circulating in discussions about representation in literature, especially in the realm of Young Adult and children's fiction. People speak of them as one.
The first is that marginalized kids don’t see themselves represented in books, and we need more books about marginalized kids, ideally written by marginalized writers.
The second is that some writers are toxic and misrepresent marginalized kids who, in turn, see themselves as a misrepresentation. Such writers should be shamed, called out, and, if not corrected, shunned—definitely not promoted. People beholden to this line of thinking may feel William Shakespeare, mysogynoir, is not someone teachers should force Black students to read.
I’m a fan of increased representation. I enjoy reading different stories from different people and cultures. I like authentic stories the same way I like authentic food. Just as South American food is better from a South American restaurant with a South American staff, stories of South America are better from South Americans.
I find the second concept, misrepresentation, more complex. History is full of misrepresentations and gross caricatures. If books simply spelled out truths, I might fight about misrepresentations. But, they’re also a reflection of the author and their world—their time, their location, and their prejudices, thoughts and feelings. I read a book like I might read an opinion. Every story is a perspective.
I don’t get twisted in knots about Joseph Conrad’s representation of Africa in Heart of Darkness. I don’t read it as an authentic depiction of Africa, but as the perspective of Africa from a colonial Englishman at a certain period of time. A woman indoctrinated with Lost Cause ideology wrote Gone with the Wind. Ayn Rand’s childhood made her mentally unstable.
I’m not sure we can fight harmful representation any more than we can keep people from having feelings or opinions, but the attempt has turned into a million-dollar cottage industry of proofreaders who offer to view an author’s work through the prism of their own “lived experience” with an eye toward what a marginalized reader might consider a misrepresentation capable of damage.
There's no degree needed to be an authenticity reader, but it's easier and cheaper for publishers to hire them than to staff their upper ranks with marginalized people. It suits the industry to pretend sensitivity is important. They can pretend they've done due diligence without having an actual marginalized person giving them any pushback at meetings or threatening to take their corner offices.
Behind closed doors, many people acknowledge the whole system is bonkers. Kids book publishing is left-coded, though, and wrapped in identity. People are afraid to challenge anything promoted as a step forward. Publicly call into question sensitivity readers, and by extension you're calling into question a marginalized person’s pain, centering the dominant caste, perpetuating hegemony, and erasing lived experience.
I once read from a prominent YA agent who suggested a conference compensate her extra for the “emotional labor” of reading a book she found problematic before speaking about it on a panel. That's where we are.
Sticks and Stones
Representation is the key to progress. I like to say I can fall in love with any character with a compelling story, and when you're in love with someone, you'll stop at nothing to assure they have a better life.
Fighting misrepresentation is a bit more complex. The depiction of Black people in Live and Let Die isn’t the same thing as a pancake syrup named after a minstrel character. An argument to maintain the original is not the same as a silly argument to preserve a statue of Jefferson Davis so we can “learn from our mistakes.”
Instead, books are perspectives: good, bad, troublesome, and everything in between. Just as the Hays Code from 1934 to 1968 stifled filmmakers’ voices in pursuit of a brand of uniform moral purity, so, too, does editing books past and present to insure innocuousness—albeit for a liberal rather than a conservative audience.
Perhaps we’d be better off teaching kids resilience. Throughout their lives they’ll encounter bad opinions and bad ideas, and there won’t always be an adult to make injurious material go away. There is some value in tropes about sticks-and-stones.
I hope that out of this morass a popular story breaks through that is so vulgar and heretical (and profitable) it breaks the system and begs for competition, much like foreign film did to the domestic market in the ‘60s.
As long as popular publishing remains tangled in left-leaning identity politics, however, we won’t see change on its own. People convince themselves they’re doing the righteous work of social justice by editing and curating rather than examining who has power, who deserves it, and why.
Well said. I WISH I had been taught resilience as a child ;)