YOUNG ADULT NOVEL ABOUT “MOB MENTALITIES” PUNISHED AFTER ONLINE MOB MENTALITY BACKLASH:
When Laura Moriarty decided she wanted to write a dystopian novel about a future America in which Muslims are forcefully corralled into detention centers, she was aware that she should tread carefully. Her protagonist is a white teenager, but one of her main characters, Sadaf, is a Muslim American immigrant from Iran, so Moriarty began by diving into Iranian books and films. Moriarty explained via email that she asked two Iranian immigrant friends to read an early draft and see if Sadaf seemed authentic to them, and whether the language and accent fit with their memories and experiences. A friend of Pakistani and American descent who is a practicing Muslim gave additional feedback. Moriarty asked a senior colleague at the University of Kansas, Giselle Anatol, who writes about Young Adult fiction and has been critical of racist narratives in literature, to read the book with a particular eye toward avoiding another narrative about a “white savior.” And after American Heart was purchased by Harper, the publisher provided several formal “sensitivity reads,” in which a member of a minority group is charged with spotting potentially problematic depictions in a manuscript.
So many, many problematics – why, it’s as if the SJW mob can just pull problematics out of the air at will!
As I noted here last week, the recent review of Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal at the L.A. Review of Books claimed that, “Despite his fondness for ridiculing the religious intensity of the ‘social justice warrior,’ Lilla fails to recognize that a rejection of one’s political expressivism could be experienced as a religious deconversion. For some, the remedy may well be worse than the disease.”
The former is certainly true. The latter is most certainly false, as the above documented freakout demonstrates in spades. Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: “The ultimate endpoint of keeping out mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction,” novelist Lionel Shriver warned last year in a speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival. She put on a sombrero during the speech to demonstrate that novelists were being warned by SJWs that “you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.”
Naturally, she was crucified by the left for telling the truth.