Ever think you should just keep your mouth shut? Any writer on the left that resists woke orthodoxy is confronted with this thought often, but artistic freedom is a hill to fight on. This is a story about creeping literary censorship and an argument for why we must resist — to borrow a phrase from cultural appropriator and Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro — the “imagination police.”

As is so often the case with thorny issues, two things are true at once. The first is that the publishing industry is commencing a justified push to find more diverse writers and professionals. Because for the longest time, the industry has been dominated by expensively educated whites, and the barriers to those without friends in high places and the means to do unpaid internships have been immense. Now the winds are changing; anyone with even a passing acquaintance with contemporary literary culture knows agents and publishers everywhere are trawling slush piles and updating their bios in search of underrepresented voices to redress the historic deficit. This is great. But it is being unfortunately — and in my view erroneously — conflated with and used as justification for a move toward the second true thing: a creeping culture-by-number tendency and a deeply regressive literalism that, if it succeeds, will make dolts of writers and readers. Moral panics about harm to fiction readers, through inclusion or “incorrect” representation of minorities or controversial topics (the sort of panics that used to be confined to the religious right), are becoming ever more common — usually when a writer steps outside their “lived experience.” Up until recently said transgressors had to be white, but as we will see, writers of color are no longer immune.

There are an increasing number of insufficiently-woke-author witch trials with which to illustrate this point, but I’ll go with the most recent one. It has been skilfully reported and dissected by Jesse Singal and Kat Rosenfield already, so here’s the boilerplate version. An immigrant writer named Amélie Wen Zhao wrote a Young Adult (YA) fantasy novel called Blood Heir. The story riffs on the smash hit Anastasia and takes aim at human trafficking and indentured labor, which incidentally is pretty rife in Asia, where Zhao is from. Blood Heir was not due out until June and so all but a tiny number of reviewers with advance copies had read it. Nonetheless, fueled by a few shade-throwing tweets from YA influencers, a bunch of people, many of whom had not read the book, began accusing Zhao (with little evidence that Singal and Rosenfield could find) of: plagiarism (all that is presently known for sure is that she included a Lord of the Rings quote); presenting a safety risk to reviewers (one tweeter had “heard on the whisper network” that the writer was “screen-capping” tweets and raised the alarm so that readers could “protect themselves”); and, most devastatingly of all, racism.

Why racism? Firstly, because the book depicted slavery and some folks — again, many of whom had not read the book — decided that such an inclusion must be a riff on the horrors of slavery suffered by African Americans in the past, despite the fact that the phenomenon of slavery remains current and global. Secondly, because the oppression depicted in Zhao’s fantasy novel was, according to the blurb “blind to skin color” (when any sensible person knows that in the real world, it often isn’t). Thirdly, because some people decided that a slave that dies in the book was “coded black”— despite the fact that she is described as having “bronze” skin (hardly conclusive) and blue eyes. As points of prosecution, said racism accusations seem to contradict each other somewhat. But apparently that mattered little. In depicting fantasy slavery in a fantasy world, Zhao had transgressed or, to use woke-speak, “stepped out of her lane.”

People began leaving one-star reviews on GoodReads. Book bloggers announced they would not read Blood Heir. In a tweetstorm by a successful Asian-American YA writer who’d read the novel, Zhao was scolded in-all-but-name:

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…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 reaching.

Singal corresponded with this writer but says he could determine no extra “evidence” of what, specifically, was so dangerous about Blood Heir.

Unverifiable accusations of plagiarism and screen-capping aside, we don’t know how Zhao handled these thorny topics in her novel because the culture-copping wore her down. Within a few days she had pulled the book, released an apology, and announced an agreement with her publisher. This, after a high six-figure three-book deal, which in fiction terms is struck-by-lightning money. Her withdrawal statement was met by praise from some in the YA Twitter community, including those who’d been pushing for it, welcoming the decision of a writer to shelve what was likely years of arduous typing while toiling in a day job. Meanwhile, present-day slavery and human trafficking, that Zhao claims to have been fabling — and which by the way is thriving in every part of the world — goes undiscussed.

The New Banned Books

In the 20th century we had Banned Books — now we have Backed Down On Books. It’s a less catchy phrase, but whichever way you slice it, the effect is the same: intimidation, muzzling, and an impoverished creative landscape. I wrote about this phenomenon a year ago, when white author and concerned citizen Laura Moriarty penned the YA dystopia American Heart, a Trump-inspired fable about Muslim internment and the battle for the soul of the U.S. The details of this affair are equally chilling; a splenetic campaign against a “white savior narrative,” waged mostly by people who had not read the book. The controversy ultimately resulted in limited marketing of American Heart and, ironically, the censoring by Kirkus editors of a Muslim woman of color reviewer who looked favorably on the novel.

As I argued back then, though these are often referred to as cultural appropriation controversies, the animus driving them goes much further, reflecting a wider trend I call the memoirification of literature. Increasingly, culture cops want non-fictional legitimacy for fictional stories; for example, who should we “allow” to write fiction about sexual abuse, and how must they write about it if they dare? This biographical vampirism has even pushed journalists reporting on issues of public interest to qualify themselves.

Do publishers want to increase awareness and inclusion? I’m sure they do, and that’s noble. But a significant factor in what drives all this for them is also the bottom line, not only in risk-averse climb-downs. Books increasingly rely on social media for marketing. The book business is ever more convinced that to sell their products they must find authors who are willing to talk about themselves, and hashtaggable issues, a lot. Reaching into the tightest spots of writers’ private lives and personal histories, social media marketing imperatives, decreased fiction sales, and a buoyant non-fiction market are demanding ever more particularized voices prepared to share their particularized testimonies under the banner of written forms that are not, by definition, supposed to be testimony — fiction and even journalism.

Publishing is trying to do a kind of wokonomics, but woke narratives appear to be something of a Loch Ness monster, since as we’ve seen, nobody can reliably say what they do think an insufficiently woke fiction author should have written.

One thing is certain: there are those who don’t want fiction full of flawed, three-dimensional characters; they want what amounts to socialist realism — mascots commissioned by committee. A successful (and hugely talented) novelist I know was recently forced to push back against her editors when they suggested she rewrite a PoC character in her book who was “not very nice.” Not one to be pushed around, she retorted that none of the book’s characters were very nice.

The reply to free expression concerns is always some version of the belief that the ends justify the means. If we can create an enlightened society free of racism and all the other terrible isms by policing the speech of even compassion-inspired leftie writers, shouldn’t we? The problem, to paraphrase Coelho, is that in practice there are no ends here, only means. As we’ve already seen, the limits of permissible imagination continue to shrink.

Last year American Heart was for the chopping block when a white YA writer portrayed a real-life minority. This year, in the words of Singal: “We’re debating whether a fantasy character in a fantasy universe fits already-fuzzy racial categories here in the real world.” When literalism has gone so far that fantasy novels can’t do ambiguity or symbolism, our literary landscape is in danger. Although it must be said; it is fascinating that when middle class and/or privately educated writers of color “appropriate” the experiences of PoC of more humble means (as they frequently do), woke warriors rarely mention this. But perhaps that’s because statistically, most woke warriors (and the most voracious readers) are upper middle class themselves.

Who’s Being Protected?

Besides harm, the other argument for this stay-in-your-laneism is that it promotes publishing inclusion because no one is taking anyone else’s space. There are a number of problems with this argument. The first is that it effectively ghettoizes minority authors into writing “native” all the time. As Zhao herself remarked on Twitter: “I’ve been asked several times why I didn’t write a Chinese #ownvoices novel. I don’t want to be boxed into the permanent ‘Other;’ I want diverse books written by PoC to become part of the mainstream.” Amen.

The other issue, and one that tends to go unnoticed, is that an insistence upon woke orthodoxy itself is a barrier to entry for many people from marginalized communities. This is because, as research indicates, the culture-copping of self-appointed super-woke minority protectors is overwhelmingly disliked within minority communities themselves. Consider 2018 research conducted by scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon, encompassing a representative survey of 8,000 Americans, as well as hour-long interviews and in-depth focus groups. The study found a massive majority of Native Americans (88 percent), Asian Americans (82 percent), African Americans (75 percent), and Hispanics (87 percent) agreed with the statement “political correctness is a problem in our country.”

In fact, with only the exception of African Americans (who were still only four percentage points below whites on this question) whites were the least likely to think PC culture was a problem. Indeed, the group least likely to dislike political correctness was overwhelmingly monied and white. In the words of Harvard professor Yascha Mounk: “With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, ‘progressive activists’ are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.” How’s that for checking your privilege? But if anyone is concluding that everyone, including peoples of color, must be Nazis, the same study found that 82 percent of Americans were concerned about hate speech. So there you have it. It would appear that the majority of people don’t like bigots and they don’t like being constantly nit-picked by the hyper-woke.

We should resist culture-copping not only because it stifles creativity, wages war on symbolism, reduces what might be complex characters into mascots, and hinders our ability to think. But because it actually fails on its own terms, by insisting upon a way of seeing that tends to be deeply unpopular with statistically everyone except a small group of mostly elite whites. Need we be reminded that some of the greatest fiction of the last few decades has been written by writers who refused to stay in their lane, many of them black and ethnically underrepresented — Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Marlon James? If we truly want to increase inclusion, we must resist the imagination police.