Publishers are cynically using ‘sensitivity readers’ to protect their bottom lines
The news that many of Roald Dahl’s books had been edited by the publisher Puffin to excise “offensive references to gender and race” has unleashed a brouhaha among the literary establishment, anti-woke crusaders and just about everyone online.
The revisions brought simmering debates about censorship in the name of creating a more genteel, accepting society to their head. An added valence, that the books are for children, seemed to weigh in favor of those who believed references to women as “hags” or to a “weird African language the monkeys spoke” should be scrubbed so that future generations can be shielded from prejudiced thoughts.
I’m skeptical of the motives of those desperate for works of fiction for children to remain hateful – even Dahl himself, a known racist and antisemite, changed his Oompa Loompas from Black to orange when it seemed expedient – but I’m equally wary of a publishing and film industry that hides behind humane ends in order to safeguard the value of blockbuster intellectual properties.
It feels like no coincidence that the Dahl IP was sanitized just before a massive sale to Netflix, nor that Ian Fleming’s estate should, as reported, bring in sensitivity readers to sanitize the James Bond novels in what seems like a last-ditch attempt to save a franchise whose relevance is on the wane and offends contemporary sensibilities. As books become assets, publishers become asset managers trying to future-proof their toxic investments, like BP investing in green energies.
The head honchos of the culture industry say that they’re interested in making sure their titles can be “enjoyed by all today”. If that were true, wouldn’t the most natural thing be to leave books as they are, perhaps with explanatory warnings as introductions, and let them recede from cultural memory, like so many offensive stories already have, making space for new works that deserve to be amplified? Of course, that would be a much riskier financial proposition than pumping out remakes and reprints of evergreen bestsellers.
The argument for revising Dahl was to protect children; but it appears, with Bond, that adult fiction is also getting the sensitivity treatment. Fleming’s estate decided to remove material that could be “considered offensive”, but news reports paint a strange picture of what was deemed acceptable. A visit to a strip club has been deleted, but 007 still muses that all women secretly “love semi-rape”, and Bond is excited by “the sweet tang of rape”. Fleming’s many uses of the N-word are gone, but Bond alludes to Koreans as “rather lower than apes”.
Who is Bond but a misogynistic relic of imperial decline? And why should he and Fleming escape our judgment? Perhaps it is possible to make a lethal spy woke; after all, the CIA made a recruitment video calling on “intersectional” people to enlist.
As for Dahl, he wasn’t a victim of cancel culture run amok; he was unapologetically antisemitic throughout his life. In a 1983 interview, Dahl said “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity … even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Dahl’s antisemitism in his personal life infects his work. The edits to The Witchesrevise some mentions of the book’s big-nosed, wig-wearing antagonists, but central to the book’s plot is that evil bald women wearing wigs print their own money and secretly control the world. Dahl even gives the “grand high witch” an eastern European (read: Yiddish) accent, and has her say that “money is not a prrroblem to us vitches as you know very vell”. You’d have to totally rewrite the novel to remove the antisemitic attitudes that undergird the plot.
The publishing industry’s willingness to safeguard Dahl’s longevity is particularly perplexing in an age when they have begun to silence living authors whose personal lives they deem unacceptable. In 2021, when Philip Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey, was accused of sexual assault, WW Norton pulled his biography. Similarly, Hachette refused to publish Woody Allen’s autobiography the year before.
But it was the personal conduct of those authors, not the content of their work, that the industry took issue with. If we are told to separate the art from the artist, why does Dahl – whose art andlife both fail the social acceptability test – get a pass?
Though the current furore is about reprints, sensitivity reading has become popular with new books as well. When I first reported on sensitivity readers, in 2021, the phenomenon was still relatively unknown. Since then coverage has exploded. Most of the discussion revolves around the sensationalist prospect of woke censorship stripping art of nuance, but far less attention has been paid to the readers who vet these books.
The Dahl edits were facilitated by an outside firm, Inclusive Minds, that bills itself as a “network of experts by experience”. Readers tend to work freelance and most of them are under 30.
In 2021 I interviewed a freelance sensitivity reader who gave me a glimpse of the industry’s workings. This reader, who was mixed race and nonbinary, was paid 0.009 cents per word to check that books’ content fit with the reality of their lived experience. This compensation was impossible to live on, meaning they were trading on their otherness for a precarious foothold in publishing.
Meanwhile, the reader found it incredibly difficult, when employed as an assistant at a major publishing firm, to actually address the racial elephant in the room: they were the “darkest person there”, they told me, but their outlook on race was “not a welcome addition”.
What the rise in sensitivity readers suggests is a publishing industry imperiled by its own homogeneity. Much in the way corporate culture has adopted diversity officers so that execs can adjust staffs just enough to cancel-proof themselves without having to materially change their businesses, sensitivity readers offer a quick fix for an industry whose “big four” houses, according to a 2019 study, are made of 85% white editors and 89% white authors.
So it makes sense, given their overwhelming whiteness, that publishers would need racial sensitivity readers. They can farm out the labor to a precarious freelance labor pool, avoiding having to hire more minority editors and extracting value from a group that by its own definition needs protection and support.
As a fiction writer myself, I actually have a different problem with sensitivity readers. Authors have always sent drafts to friends for feedback, but hedging the impact of your writing by the use of paid sensitivity readers seems like yet another instance of the confused financialization of art.
Authors need to take responsibility for their work. Why, for the low price of a fraction of a cent per word, should we be allowed to outsource our capacity for understanding the world? If authors are so desperate to depict characters dissimilar to themselves, shouldn’t we have met people similar to those characters? And if we haven’t, shouldn’t we do research, or at least have people to call on to ask if what we’re writing is inaccurate or offensive?
My novel would only cost a couple of hundred dollars to get the official stamp of approval of a sensitivity reader. That price sounds too cheap for a clear conscience.
Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She has just finished her first novel
engagement.
Rightful concern in the US – on issues ranging from China’s increasingly forceful foreign policy to industrial espionage, and from the treatment of Uyghurs to the future of Taiwan – is mixed at times with nationalism and even racism. That China is closing the economic, industrial and technological gap with the US is unnerving Washington, but the real issues are surely how it has done so and how it plans to use its capabilities.
And while one committee member said it does not want to encourage xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment, not everyone criticising China is scrupulous in discriminating between government and people or making sure others do so. A bill in the Texas senate would make it illegal for Chinese citizens to buy any property, including homes. The pandemic has already led to growing anti-Asian hate. Shrill, unfocused alarmism also makes it harder to concentrate on the issues that really matter and how to handle them. Under Mr Xi, it is increasingly hard to read China’s leadership accurately, and harder still to sway it. The US could at least determine its own priorities and values more clearly.