Posted on 12/24/2017 3:44:11 AM PST by reaganaut1
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In today’s hair-trigger, hyperreactive social media landscape, where a tweet can set off a cascade of outrage and prompt calls for a book’s cancellation, children’s book authors and publishers are taking precautions to identify potential pitfalls in a novel’s premise or execution. Many are turning to sensitivity readers, who provide feedback on issues like race, religion, gender, sexuality, chronic illness and physical disabilities. The role that readers play in shaping children’s books has become a flash point in a fractious debate about diversity, cultural appropriation and representation, with some arguing that the reliance on sensitivity readers amounts to censorship.
Continue reading the main story Behind the scenes, these readers are having a profound impact on children’s literature, reshaping stories in big and small ways before they reach impressionable young audiences. Like fact checkers or copy editors, sensitivity readers can provide a quality-control backstop to avoid embarrassing mistakes, but they specialize in the more fraught and subjective realm of guarding against potentially offensive portrayals of minority groups, in everything from picture books to science fiction and fantasy novels.
“There is a newfound fervor in children’s publishing to be authentic and get the story right,” said David Levithan, vice president and publisher of Scholastic Press, which regularly seeks advice from sensitivity readers. “When any author is writing outside their own experience, we want to make sure they’ve done their homework.”
Some see a downside to publishers’ growing reliance on sensitivity readers, and warn that it could lead to sanitized books that tiptoe around difficult topics. Skeptics say the heightened scrutiny discourages authors from writing about cultures other than their own, resulting in more homogenized literature. “Can we no longer read ‘Othello’ because Shakespeare wasn’t black?” the novelist Francine Prose wrote recently in an essay about sensitivity readers and censorship
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No problem with johnny has two daddys or mary has two mommys
“sensitivity readers” ,are censorship zealots.
One wonders who long this can go on before too many oxen are gored and everyone realizes it was all a sham.
Commercial publishers have always turned down most of the stuff that's thrown their way and are under no obligation to publish anything they don't like.
The issue is standards, reasonable versus cockamamie.
Are you trying to justify MSM?
That would be assuming they know how to read.
I have discovered many families get sensitive when you uncover old secrets—children out of wedlock, criminal activity, that kind of thing. I say, let it all hang out.
Good summary.
This is censorship with a different name. Also, there is no free speech in this country.
Liberals can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality, and so they force fiction to depict the reality that they are forcing on others.
Short books..... “Black Classics Authors” “African Epic Sagas” “A tour of African Cathedrals”
“African inventions”
Goot LAWD amighty!!!
Sometimes I'm so embarrassed for my country.
Communism is good
Perversion is good
God is bad
Rinse and repeat
Trying to anticipate the next trigger of the perpetually offended is a dead end game.
It just feeds the disease.
It’s like trying to appease democrats ,
There is no end to their demands because their objective is control - not a better world.
I say let them go pound salt.
This is why current children’s books are so vapid. Or else they go overboard trying to normalize what distinctly is not normal (e.g. pretending that men are really women if they say they are).
I’m thinking that the classic “Where the Wild Things Are” could not have been published in today’s world. The horror, Max had normal parents who enforced proper behavior. How offensive to SJW sensibilities!
And the book “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” is just horrible in how it represents competition and people working hard to outdo others. Why, that kind of portrayal of inequality as desirable completely undermines the efforts of today’s leftists to spread their enlightened views of forced equality.
And so on.
“authentic and get the story right,”
Newspeak for bowlderizing.
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