New book likely to offend? Try the sensitivity police
WHEN JK Rowling published a History of Magic in North America as a bonus read for Harry Potter fans, she was criticised by Native Americans for writing about something she did not understand.
If only Rowling had employed a “sensitivity reader”, she could have avoided the controversy. A new industry is springing up in the US, in which authors can hire “experts” to scan their manuscripts for content that might of- fend on the grounds of race, sex or religion.
One agency set up for the purpose, Writing in the Margins, promises to weed out “internalised bias and negatively charged language”. It has a database of readers who list their areas of expertise: gay relationships, gender fluidity, the immigrant experience, specific racial backgrounds (JapaneseAmerican, Filipina-Canadian).
“Sensitivity readers can help you identify problematic language and internalised bias on the page when writing outside of your experiences,” the agency says. “This is not a guarantee that others will not have issues with your work. But it is a way to attempt to catch and correct high level issues prior to submission or publication.” The starting price for a read-through is $250 (£200).
The database was started by Justina Ireland, an author of young adult novels. “Even if authors mean well, even if the intention is good, it doesn’t change the impact,” Ireland told the Washington Post. “It’s nice to be that line of defence before it gets to readers, especially since the bulk of people who come to me write for children.”
Rowling’s History of Magic in North America was a four-part series published on her Pottermore website last year, exploring myths and beliefs from the 14th to 17th centuries.
However, her writing about “the legend of the Native American ‘skinwalker’ ” upset a number of people, including Adrienne Keene, a postdoctoral fellow in Native American studies at Brown University.
“The belief of these things… has a deep and powerful place in understandings of the world,” she said in a blog post. “It is connected to many other concepts and many other ceremonial understandings and lifeways. It is not just a scary story, or something to tell kids to get them to behave, it’s much deeper than that.” One fan on Twitter told Rowling: “My ancestors didn’t survive colonisation so you could use our culture as a convenient prop.”
The author Jodi Picoult employed several sensitivity readers when writing Small Great Things, about a black nurse who encounters a white supremacist couple. Picoult is white. “I should not and would not have written the book without women of colour guiding me,” she said.