That fucking thing Ray Bradbury was talking about
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/vetting-for-stereotypes-meet-publishings-sensitivity-readers
“Vetting for stereotypes: meet publishing's 'sensitivity readers'
Publishers hoping to avoid offence are increasingly turning to sensitivity readers. But is this good practice, censorship, or just another way of maintaining privilege?
When reviewers first saw Keira Drake’s The Continent, this story of a teenager trapped by a war between two “native” tribes quickly found attention on social media – though not much of it was good. This young adult novel was attacked for its “white saviour narrative” and its stereotypical portrayal of people with “reddish-brown skin” or “almond-shaped eyes”. The author Justina Ireland called it a “racist garbage fire”.
Drake apologised, said she would “address concerns about the novel”, and delayed the release. Her publisher, Harlequin Teen, sent the book out to two “sensitivity readers”, who vetted the manuscript for stereotypes, biases and problematic language. Armed with a list of potential problems and possible solutions, Drake went back to the drawing board.
It’s a story that has become all too familiar in recent years as publishers and writers struggle to adapt to a new world where cultural appropriation and racial stereotyping are called out online, and where campaigns such as We Need Diverse Books push for a corrective to the lack of books featuring people of colour (POC).
According to Debbie Reese, an academic who focuses on the representation of Native Americans in children’s books, many authors aren’t as receptive as Hecker. Reese dabbled in being a sensitivity reader in 2016, charging $100 an hour, but stopped.
“I quit doing them because they were exhausting and sometimes authors wanted to argue with me,” she says. “They weren’t open to the feedback. They weren’t trying to understand the feedback. They were insisting on the rightness of what they were writing.”
Sometimes, she’d find herself highlighting problematic words or phrases such as “low man on the totem pole” – a term which is sometimes used to describe people with little status. “I’d say that was a misrepresentation of an item originating with a specific nation. That hierarchy isn’t applicable. The phrase is used a lot but it is what generally gets called ‘a
And now, Bradbury’s Coda.
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