Author of young-adult book gets vilified and censored by the mob

Tablet almost single-handedly exposed the perfidies, financial irregularities and anti-Semitism of the Women’s March Inc., and now that that group—but, thankfully, not the idea of women’s marches—lies in tatters, discredited, vilified, and with its hypocritical leaders still proclaiming loudly how much they love Jews.  Now Tablet has taken on young-adult fiction, or at least the Twitter mob that polices that genre for ideological purityz; “YA Twitter” (YAT). Is Tablet becoming a new source of trenchant investigative journalism?

You can read YAT’s horrifying story of mob justice by clicking on the screenshot below.

If your attention span is limited today, there’s a somewhat shorter version at Vulture (click on screenshot):

I won’t go into detail about the story, as it’s thoroughly recounted in both of these sources. In short, author Amélie Wen Zhao, who moved to the U.S. from China at age 18, inked a deal with Penguin/Random House (my own publishers) to publish a trio of young adult novels beginning with one called Blood Heir (a précis is here). Her advance was at least half a million bucks, a goodly sum for a first-time author.

That’s when the mob took over. YAT is particularly toxic, and though its intent is usually good, its performance, and hard-nosed policing of novels to assure they conform to the strictest notions of social justice, is lame. (See my earlier post on YAT here.) In this case, even though Zhao is a person of color, the fact that she even mentioned pigmentation (though not of any defined ethnic group) made YAT go nuts.

Most of the critics hadn’t read the novel, but got inflamed by brief summaries or pull quotes from the book. In Tablet, Singal describes how this works:

I mentioned the whisper campaign [against Blood Heir] on Twitter without naming names, thinking it might fizzle out, and then forgot about it. But by the time I again dipped a toe into YA Twitter a few days later, on Tuesday night, things had exploded: YA Twitter was attacking Zhao’s still unpublished Blood Heir on multiple fronts. As usual, the standards of argument appeared rather strange and lacking, at least to an outsider. L.L. McKinney, a YA author who recently published her own debut novel, highlighted for her 10,000-plus Twitter followers the fact that one of Blood Heir’s blurbs read, in part, “In a world where the princess is the monster, oppression is blind to skin color, and good and evil exists in shades of gray….” “….someone explain this to me. EXPLAIN IT RIGHT THE FUQ NOW,” she tweeted. “I don’t give a good god damn that this is an author of color,” she said later in the tweetstorm. “Internalized racism and anti-blackness is a thing and I…no.” The argument, such as it is, appears to be that because in our world, oppression isn’t blind to skin color, to write about a fantasy world in which it is is an act of “anti-blackness.” (McKinney didn’t respond to a request for comment submitted via her agent.)

I think that could charitably be described as “hysterical overreaction.” But wait—there’s more! The loudest voice in this pile-on was another Asian author Ellen Oh:

But perhaps the most damaging, drawn-out broadside came from Ellen Oh, an established YA writer who is herself of Asian descent, and who co-founded We Need Diverse Books. Oh published an extended tweetstorm to her 11,000-plus Twitter followers in which she noted that “colorblindness is extremely tone deaf.” Then she proceeded to address Zhao without mentioning her by name. “Now I’m going to talk directly to Asian writers,” she wrote, particularly “Asian writers who did not grow up in western countries” like Zhao. “Your lack of awareness may not be your fault given your lack of cultural context, but it IS your fault if you do not educate yourself when it is expressly brought up to you.” The admonishment continued, “And if you have the luxury of getting this important criticism before your book is actually published, it is YOUR responsibility to make it right. Do right by the audience that your book will be reading. Do right by the kids who will be reading your book.”

Jebus

Ms. Oh, who did have an advance copy of the book, went after Zhao because of her character named May, who is described as having skin “the bronze of their sands at sunset.” (There’s no evidence that Zhao intended May to be black.) That set Oh off and launched her tirade, as well as Oh’s interpretation (wrong!) that the book was about slavery of blacks in America. But there was no evidence that the book is about “chattel slavery of blacks”, and Oh adduced none. In fact, in her post of apology to the “book community” (yes, a mob-forced apology, which is de rigueur in these cases), Zhao said that Blood Heir was about “indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia”, an area that she presumably knows something about:

Yes, and there were charges of plagiarism, too, resting on one sentence that one of Zhao’s characters said: “Don’t go where I can’t follow.” Horrors! That was in Lord of the Rings! Blatant theft! Well, no it isn’t; it could well be an homage to Tolkien, and one sentence of six words isn’t plagiarism.

After the onslaught, Zhao withdrew her proposal, presumably returning the money she got, and the mob won. Singal characterizes the whole episode in this tweet:

If a confused friend ever asks you to sum up the culture of YA Twitter in one sentence, "Imagine a white woman explaining that she is spreading unverifiable rumors about a first-time author of color in order to protect people of color" will do nicely.https://t.co/PLItKfuRMw

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) January 31, 2019

You may have noticed that the odious Ms. Oh, who has no case against Zhao, said above that “color blindness is extremely tone deaf.” To show that nobody is immune from the callout culture of YAT, she herself was inundated with opprobrium for that sentence. Guess why? Because she said “tone deaf”. And so Oh herself had to undergo the ritual public humiliation and issuance of an apology. Have a gander at this:

Wokeception. pic.twitter.com/uXAzUxmaAk

— Phetasy (@BridgetPhetasy) February 1, 2019

Now that the phrse “tone deaf” has become verboten, will someone please tell Huffpost? They love that phrase:

There are many others; I’ll give just one more:

Matt Damon issues lame apology for tone-deaf diversity comments http://t.co/fGLjuFgAwO pic.twitter.com/WS9z5YJ3T9

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) September 19, 2015

In the end, I feel truly sorry for the ordeal that Ms. Zhao had to endure, and am appalled that the mob was powerful enough to make her withdraw her books (her publisher didn’t even object!). I hope she and Penguin Random House rethink this whole thing and publish the books. After all, my publisher deemed the first one good enough to publish, and gave Zhao a lot of money for the other two unwritten novels.

And I’m glad I don’t write young adult fiction.

My last thought: is this onslaught of morality police here to stay? Social media surely is, and, as Pinker notes, morality is getting better. Does it necessarily follow that this kind of authoritarianism is here for keeps?

_________

UPDATE: An article in the January 31 New York Times notes this:

Ms. Zhao’s publisher, Delacorte Press, supported her choice to cancel the book’s June release, but did not urge her to. Delacorte still plans to publish the three books she is under contract for, including “Blood Heir” if Ms. Zhao decides she wants to release it at a later time, according to a company spokeswoman.

I hope they do release it, and I hope that Ms. Zhao doesn’t truckle too much to the mob if she rewrites it.

 

h/t: Grania