Sensitivity Readers Review Manuscripts for Thought Crimes Prior to Publication

by Dave Blount | February 20, 2017 4:00 pm

Under totalitarian moonbattery, everything we are supposed to like needs to go by a euphemism. For example, censors who study manuscripts for thought crimes so that books can be revised or rejected prior to publication are called “sensitivity readers.” The Chicago Tribune approvingly defines a sensitivity reader as “a person who, for a nominal fee, will scan the book for racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content.”

“The industry recognizes this is a real concern,” said Cheryl Klein, a children’s and young adult book editor and author of “The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults.” Klein, who works at the publisher Lee & Low, said that she has seen the casual use of specialized readers for many years but that the process has become more standardized and more of a priority, especially in books for young readers.

Rigid control of what young people read is a higher priority, because their opinions are more malleable, still being in the process of forming.

Sensitivity readers have emerged in a climate – fueled in part by social media – in which writers are under increased scrutiny for their portrayals of people from marginalized [i.e., politically favored] groups, especially when the author is not a part of that group.

Dhonielle Clayton of New York works as a censor sensitivity reader.

Clayton reviews two manuscripts per month, going line by line to look at diction, dialogue and plot. Clayton says she analyzes the authenticity [i.e., political obsequiousness] of the characters and scenes, then points writers to where they can do more research to improve their work.

Clayton, who is black, sees her role as a vital one. “Books for me are supposed to be vehicles for pleasure, they’re supposed to be escapist and fun,” she says. They’re not supposed to be a place where readers “encounter harmful versions” and stereotypes of people like them.

Like college campuses, fiction must be a safe space, where political correctness cannot be challenged in any way.

Not even letting her dictate how blacks must be portrayed satisfies Dhonielle:

Clayton said she’s unsettled by the idea that she’s being paid for her expertise, but also is helping white authors write black characters for books from which they reap profit and praise.

“It feels like I’m supplying the seeds and the gems and the jewels from our culture, and it creates cultural thievery,” Clayton said.

If you portray characters in any light that could possibly be construed as reflecting negatively on a politically preferred group like blacks, you are a racist thought criminal; good luck getting published. Avoiding this problem by ignoring blacks is exclusionary and therefore also racist. The only course of action that is not racist is to crowd your work with cartoonishly correct black characters who have been explicitly approved by the thought police. If you do that you are not racist; you are a cultural expropriator.

Since authors can’t win, what do the moonbats like Ms. Clayton want of them? To grovel and crawl as they subordinate their art to race-based leftist ideology.

This illustrates why societies under the thumb of totalitarian ideologies like communism, Islam, and cultural Marxism are creatively stagnant, and produce little if any art of any value.

censored_huckleberry_finn
If Mark Twain had a sensitivity reader.

On a tip from Jester. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/freedom/sensitivity-readers-review-manuscripts-thought-crimes-prior-publication/