“It doesn’t work,” I was told. “She’s not believable as a character. She doesn’t work.” “Damn white readers,” I jokingly said to my friends. But once I got over myself, I took apart that section piece by piece. I rewrote and failed and rewrote and failed. As much as this character had begun as an indictment of all the hypocrisies of my childhood, she was not going to come out on the page that way, not without a lot of work. I was struck by an awful realization. I would have to love this monster into existence. The voice of this character had been full of scorn and condescension. I rewrote it with those elements in place, but covered with the treacly, grasping attempts at affection of a broken and desperately lonely woman.

Five years or so after I came to that realization, I wrote to Bill Cheng after reading the novelist Lionel Shriver’s keynote on “Fiction and Identity Politics” at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival. Wearing a sombrero, Ms. Shriver spoke out against “cultural appropriation” as a valid critique, arguing that it censored her work as a writer, that she would not have free rein to fully imagine others’ perspectives and widen her world of characters. “Did you hear about this?” I typed into our chat window, and Bill wrote back, “Hold on …” Then his answer pinged.

“Why do they want our approval so badly?” Bill typed back to me.

This is the question, of course. It’s the wish not so much to be able to write a character of another race, but to do so without criticism. And at the heart of that rather ludicrous request is a question of power. There is the power of rendering another’s perspective, which is not your own. There is the adage “Don’t punch down,” which sits like the shiny red lever of a fire alarm, irresistible for some writers who wish to pull it.

We writers, in the United States at least, have a peculiar, tortured relationship with power. We want it both ways. We talk about the power of the written word to shift whole levels of consciousness while constantly lamenting the death of publishing, the death of the novel, the death of the reader. Those first concerns are valid, but the last become questionable, especially in the face of numerous studies to the contrary that say that people are reading at similar rates as a few years ago. Readership has also grown in certain groups — according to analysis of recent data, the demographic group most likely to have read a book in the last year is college-educated black women.

The anxiety about a shrinking audience is accompanied by a dull realization that writing from the perspectives of those who have traditionally been silenced in “great literature” — the queer, the colored, the poor, the stateless — is being bought, being sold, and most important to writers obsessed with status (and we are all obsessed with status), winning awards and acclaim.

Claudia Rankine, when awarded the MacArthur genius grant this past week, noted that the prize was “the culture saying: We have an investment in dismantling white dominance in our culture. If you’re trying to do that, we’re going to help you.” For some, this sounds exciting. For others, this reads as a threat — at best, a suggestion to catch up and engage with a subject, race, that for a long time has been thought of as not “universal,” not “deep” enough for fiction. The panic around all of this is driving these outbursts.

It must feel like a reversal of fate to those who have not been paying attention. The other, who has been relegated to the background character, wise outcast, dash of magic, or terror or cool or symbolism, or more simply emotional or physical whore, is expected to be the main event, and some writers suspect that they may not be up for that challenge.