Book Twitter Activism Part 1 (The Bad)
In theory, and perhaps in a society unlike our own, the ability of readers to interact directly with authors and other authority figures in the book industry via Twitter would be a wonderful thing. Think of the dialogue! The Q&A. Maybe readers could even help have a positive influence on the book industry which is admittedly flawed.
Aw, but we don’t live in theory, we live in 2016-2018 real world, unfortunately, where being (or at least appearing) woke (read: class-conscious) is far ore important than forming one’s own opinions after some actual thought.
Enter the Case of The Black Witch, a novel that, before it was even released, recieved a vicios review by a book blogger, and then was essentially executed for unthink via Twitter and Goodreads “activism”. The whole story can be read here, but these quotes should suffice to explain the situation:
YA Twitter, [...] regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading. And while not every callout escalates into a full-scale dragging, in the case of The Black Witch — a book by a newcomer with a minimal presence online — the backlash was immediate and intense.
the novel became the object of sustained, aggressive opposition in the weeks leading up its release. [...] The Black Witch’s Goodreads rating dropped to an abysmal 1.71 thanks to a mass coordinated campaign of one-star reviews, mostly from people who admitted to not having read it (emphasis mine). Twitter threads damning the novel made the rounds, while a Tumblr post instructing users to “be an ally” and signal boost the outrage racked up nearly 6,000 notes. Sinyard kept a running tally of her review’s circulation; “11,714 views on my review of THE BLACK WITCH and .@HarlequinTEEN and .@laurieannforest have not commented,” she tweeted. (That number eventually swelled to 20,000.)
I admit that I have never read the book myself, but if everyone else who hasn’t read it get’s an opinion, why shouldn’t I? I went to Goodreads and read those one star reviews, which were just chock full of quotes, and I was confused. Could people really be this... dumb? Did they really not understand the big picture? Maybe the quotes were much more problematic in context, but from what I gathered, the book was clearly, if ham-fistedly, anti-racist. The quotes about mixed-races and blood purity and yadda yadda yadda were clearly put in the mouths of villains or in the main character, who changes her mind about race over the course of the story! It even seemed to hit the reader over the head with it’s message, from the quotes I read. IMO, people who find the book racist are not understanding the point of the story, similar to people who think that To Kill a Mockingbird is racist for including the N-word, never mind that it is coming from the mouth of an antagonist. I’ll even be so bold as to say that people who think Black Witch is racist have about the same reading comprehension level as Christians who think Harry Potter is Satanic because of the quote “There is no good or evil, only power”.
And that is my issue with this sort of “activism”; it comes very, very close to censorship. Now, I’m all for people voting with their wallets; if people want to boycott the publishing house for daring to publish a certain kind of book, that’s ok... except that most of these activists never read the book. Honestly, one could take any book and pull quotes out to make it seem problematic. If one is going to rally against something, perhaps it would be best to have the whole story?
Thankfully, all this nonsense did not seem to stick, though I’m sure it did initially hurt Black Witch’s sales. The book now has 3.8 stars on Goodreads, 4.4 on Amazon. I do wonder, however, how other books might fair--especially those from smaller publishing houses or self-published authors. As the article noted, “YA Twitter, [...] regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic”, so this is not a one-time thing. And it doesn’t just hurt authors. Next time we’ll examine the effect of this sort of thing within the book blogger community, but for now, I’ll leave you with one final quote, from a much better book:
They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.
[...]
You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right?
[...]
Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.
[...]
Fire is bright and fire is clean."
― Ray Bradbury
