Publishing’s ‘imagination police’: are sensitivity readers ruining literature?

Cancel that cancellation. The teacher and author Kate Clanchy is to rewrite parts of her Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, removing racist and ableist tropes she used in describing some of her former pupils.

If she’s lucky, that will draw a line under a furore that has seen her criticised for her offensive language, then criticised for misleadingly claiming her book contained no such language, and then criticised for failing to apologise for it. The online conduct of the debate has deteriorated into the standard spiral of spite, with reasonable criticisms of Clanchy being succeeded by death threats aimed at her, followed in turn by racist abuse and further death threats directed at some of her critics.

One thing’s for sure: Clanchy’s publishers will be poring over her revised manuscript with all the minute attention of 19th-Century Egyptologists reading the Rosetta Stone. I suspect that, for this particular manuscript, Picador will be commissioning enough sensitivity readers to fill a bus.

For those wondering whether a "sensitivity reader" might be a new-fangled device your dentist is going to start waving at your teeth, let me enlighten you. Freelance sensitivity readers have worked in US publishing for some time, their task being to vet manuscripts for problematic language or stereotypes. It was in the field of US children’s books and YA fiction that they first began to be used extensively, and they are now widely used in the same area over here.

Over the past couple of years, sensitivity readers have been commissioned in increasing numbers to work on UK adult fiction and non-fiction titles too. Sometimes they are hired at the suggestion of the publisher, and sometimes at the request of the author; many authors who haven’t yet secured a publisher choose to commission a sensitivity reader before they send their manuscripts off for consideration.

This is not a case of every manuscript ever published having to be run through the sensitivity-o-meter. Sensitivity readers are commissioned when an author is writing in-depth about people from a culture or background different from their own; they will come from a background similar to that of the characters depicted, and their job is to point out anything that might ring false or perpetuate a stereotype.

It seems fair enough. Most British authors are white and middle-class. As one fiction publisher put it to me, UK publishers are only really at the beginning of the process of seriously seeking out more authors from diverse backgrounds, and they certainly don’t want to discourage their existing authors from writing about characters who come from backgrounds under-represented in fiction. Hence, a sensitivity reader can be called in to help prevent a white or non-disabled author from dropping a Clanchy-esque clanger when writing about people of colour or disabled people.

Sensitivity readers may also be necessary because, in terms of its staff, UK publishing is overwhelmingly white, middle-class and London-centric - not least because you have to have the resources to schlep around London doing endless unpaid internships if you want to secure a job in the industry.

Here is an argument I have heard publishers use to defend books that have offended people of colour: we have people of colour on our staff and none of them raised any objections during the publication process, so the book can’t really be that offensive. But this argument is based on the facile assumption that any one person of colour can speak on behalf of all people of colour as to what they find offensive. (And that’s before you consider the obvious reasons why people of colour may feel it’s wiser not to speak out, even if they are offended by the content of a book published by their employer.)

Anyway, it hardly seems fair that people of colour or disabled people who have been hired for their editorial or marketing abilities should have to shoulder the additional unpaid responsibility for spotting offensive material in manuscripts and saving their firm from embarrassment. So, better to farm out the task of vetting books for solecisms to the professional sensitivity readers.

I asked the British YA writer Melvin Burgess about using sensitivity readers when I interviewed him a few weeks ago; his experiences were entirely benign. His new novel Three Bullets features a mixed-race, trans heroine, but although his sensitivity readers gave him advice on accurate representation, they did not ask him to tone down her spiky unpleasantness - or her penchant for rape jokes, which is bound to leave some readers fizzing with offence. The object of the exercise, reasonably enough, was not to remove anything offensive but to flag unintentional instances of offensiveness.

With all that said, I’m not sure any writer can look on the rise of sensitivity readers with complete equanimity. There are always going to be questions to ask about how qualified they really are to offer impartial advice on manuscripts, and whether they might be given too much power; whether the use of them is the thin end of the wedge of censorship, or whether they contribute to an intellectual climate in which writers feel compelled to self-censor.

At the moment UK publishers are being fairly robust in standing up for freedom of expression: not dropping the Philip Roth biography by Blake Bailey (as its US publisher did) after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct were directed at Bailey; standing by JK Rowling despite complaints from younger staff members about her sexual politics.

But senior figures in publishing are currently largely drawn from what might be termed the pre-woke generation; young people with different values will soon be in the ascendant. That is one reason why undue weight may in the future be given to sensitivity readers’ advice and suggestions. Another is that publishers may start to take the view that anything flagged as even vaguely potentially problematic should be excised rather than risk a flood of excoriation on Twitter.

Could the remit of sensitivity readers be widened, to have them advise on whether a book is suitable for publication? One thinks of the US writer Kosoko Jackson, who withdrew his YA novel A Place for Wolves from sale in 2019 after it was attacked on social media before it had been published.

This was a story about two African-American boys falling in love against the backdrop of the Kosovo War. Although Jackson is black and gay, he fell down, according to his furious critics, in his stereotypical depiction of Muslim characters and in his failure to centre a story involving the Kosovo War on people from the ethnic groups at the heart of the conflict - martial appropriation, you might call it.

One could see how a publisher surveying that debacle might be seduced into dangerous thinking: since the book was destined to be binned anyway, it might have saved a lot of bother if a sensitivity reader had advised against publication in the first place.

The great irony is that Kosoko Jackson was himself a professional sensitivity reader, and very vocal on social media about the insensitivities of other authors. This raises the obvious point about what qualifies somebody to be a sensitivity reader, and what their remit is.

Are they supposed to point out what they personally find offensive - or what the majority of people of a similar background might find offensive - or what a small minority from that background might possibly find offensive? And how do publishers measure their sensitivity readers’ ability to second-guess what others will find offensive? To some extent, you are always taking your sensitivity reader’s qualifications on trust.

I can’t help thinking about what happened when the magnificent Irish writer John Boyne published a YA novel called My Brother’s Name Is Jessica (2019), about a boy coming to terms with his brother becoming trans. Since Boyne was drawing on his imagination rather than direct experience, there were howls of protest on social media.

Some people complained that it was “othering” not to tell the story from the viewpoint of the transsexual character; that the title was misgendering; and it was wrong to have the character’s parents react in anger and confusion when they discovered that their son wanted to change gender, as this could be upsetting for somebody yet to come out as trans, or triggering for somebody who had a similar experience.

What would happen if a novelist who wrote a similar book hired a sensitivity reader? The reader in question might not find the content offensive, but would be failing in their duty if they didn’t warn that a few trans people might. And would any writer, or publisher, dare ignore that warning in such a minefield?

And so one sees how easily a book might be censored and reshaped in deference to the very prescriptive ideas of a small minority. And where would this leave a trans teenager who had a hard time with their parents and would take more comfort in a book that reflects their experiences than in something unrelatably sunny and optimistic?

In the US the starting rate for a sensitivity reader is $250 a manuscript. One US manuscript reading service offers the services of 50-odd sensitivity readers, each of whom provides a list of topics they offer expert advice on - they include people of various ethnic backgrounds, trans people, autistic people, disabled people. Other experiences that this company’s readers can advise on include Pansexuality, PTSD, Death of a Parent, Single Parenting, Ageism, Depression, Abusive Relationships, Alcoholism and Dating While Fat.

Are there any life experiences left that authors can write about without benefit of consultation? Will there come a point when every English author who wants to write a Scottish character have to hire a Scottish sensitivity reader? Will every man who wants to write about a woman have to pay a woman to read his book?

Of course, the unchallenged perpetuation of stereotypes can cause great harm. But if you want to write a sensitive novel about the societal factors that drive a black teenager to join a gang, or about an autistic child who is the victim of bullying, you will have characters who could be denounced as negative stereotypes - even though your books address important truths.

My first facetious thought when I read the sensitivity readers’ lists of experiences and afflictions was that I could make a bob or two by joining their ranks and offering my expertise on being a journalist: I can think of many authors who could do with being told that not all journalists are unprincipled, unscrupulous, lazy, lying drunks. The range of experience encompassed by all 50-plus of these sensitivity readers was in some ways quite narrow. None of them listed being a Trump voter in their bios, for example - but aren’t Trump voters constantly portrayed using negative stereotypes?

Brexit voters, fox-hunting enthusiasts, clergymen, police officers - aren’t these groups caricatured just as frequently as single mothers? Inevitably, there aren’t going to be many people holding right-of-centre views who want to sign up as sensitivity readers - which does suggest that among sensitivity readers as a body there will be a slightly worrying homogeneity of thought.

There are many things that publishers can do to improve representation of people from under-represented groups. They can put money and effort into finding unpublished writers from these backgrounds; and if such writers don’t already exist - and you can see why anybody who is not white or middle-class, say, is likely to feel that publishers don’t seem very interested in people like them - then they need to institute schemes to encourage them. Publishers also have a tendency to pigeonhole writers from under-represented groups and insist that they write in certain ways and about certain subjects - perhaps more diversity training is needed.

Such solutions to the under-representation problem are about preventing unconscious censorship. The use of sensitivity readers, on the other hand, is a form of censorship. It would be silly to say that censorship must necessarily always be entirely malign, or pretend that writers have not always censored themselves, or been censored by their publishers, for various good reasons. But mild censorship does have a tendency to flower into major censorship, especially when carried out on moral grounds.

Look at right-of-centre censors such as Mrs Mary Whitehouse, who started out making fair points about the damaging effect on young people of sex and violence on television, and ended up an increasingly batty and draconian opponent of freedom of expression. Today it’s often those who are left of centre who want to extirpate offensive material, many of them with a zeal, rigidity and disregard for nuance that one can only describe as Whitehousian.

On Twitter recently, Philip Pullman referred to a checklist of things to consider when writing about minorities as an example of "policing the imagination". He was widely criticised for dismissing what many people now see as due diligence or basic ethics for writers. But people who were surprised can't have paid much attention to his books, which celebrate the freedom of people to say and think what they like in the teeth of moral orthodoxy. I don't think we should be amazed that some writers think their first duty is to their imagination rather than ethics, and want to speak up for their right to let it roam untrammelled.

Two further negative consequences of the mild censorship (as it currently stands) of the sensitivity readers spring to mind. The first is that today’s younger generation of readers are going to increasingly expect new books to have undergone this weeding process. The consequence will be that older books - the vast, glorious back catalogue of literature - will seem ever more starkly out of line with 21st-century values. There will be a segregation between the literature of the past, which has not been purified of offensive material, and the literature of the present.

We are already seeing this happening, with books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men dropped from curricula because they commit the sins of white saviourism or racist language. But to sow the seed in the minds of young people that the literature of the past is better left unread runs the risk of leaving them desperately impoverished, culturally and intellectually.

Here is the second unintended consequence. When I read Kate Clanchy’s book a couple of years ago, I didn’t find her relentless, othering scrutiny of the children she taught made for easy reading exactly. Many people of colour or autistic people who read the book must have found her use of language deeply distressing.

But I did feel that she was being honest about her own prejudices and failings. If her mind reached for racist tropes and clichés when she encountered children from ethnic minorities - as would not be all that unusual for somebody of her age and background - she felt, I assumed, that she should tell the truth, and set that down in print, however bad that made her look.

Perhaps it would be more edifying if we could read memoirs by those saintly teachers who berated Clanchy for admitting she sometimes found autistic children exhausting. The revised version of her book will no doubt read more like one of those. But I can’t help feeling that the more it passes muster with the sensitivity readers, the less honest it will be - the more divorced from the ugly, messy truth of human nature.