The touch of malicious joy I expected to feel about this news story didn’t materialize because the whole thing’s so depressing. Kosoko Jackson, who is black and gay, has been freelancing as a “sensitivity reader” at major publishing houses — which means, as you are no doubt aware, working as a member of the imagination police screening manuscripts for things that might trigger offense in any number of identity groups. In what Jennifer Senior in the NYT called a “karmic boomerang,” Jackson’s debut YA novel, A Place for Wolves, has incited the wrath of some of those very groups, who’ve come at him like a torpedo of bees, to the point where he has asked to have the book withdrawn. He has presumably been sent somewhere for regrooving, after which I expect he’ll have a tough time writing a sentence for a long time to come.
It does no good to cite — oh, anyone — E.M. Forster say, how we’d have to ban A Passage to India, if not torch his ancestral home, to satisfy these inquisitors re who gets to imagine what or whom. I’ll just invoke the cry of Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington in 1824, “Publish and be damned,” or I would except I’ve just discovered he was one of the architects of the Raj who wallowed in plunder…. Rats.
Song of the Day: Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Umqombothi
