https://reason.com/2022/07/05/rise-of-the-sensitivity-reader/
Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers
Overzealous gatekeeping on race and gender is killing books before they're published—or even written.
KAT ROSENFIELD | FROM THE AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2022 ISSUEShare on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL
Alberto Gullaba Jr. was the type of author that publishers dream of having in their catalogs. A first-generation college grad, a child of working-class immigrants, and the recent recipient of a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious University of California, Irvine, program, Gullaba was a debut novelist with a gift for visceral and vivid prose. His first book, University Thugs, had all the makings of a smash hit. A work of character-driven literary fiction steeped in immersive vernacular, it tells the story of a young black man named Titus who is trying to make his way at an elite university in the wake of a criminal conviction—all while the school is being rocked by racial scandals, not unlike the racial reckoning that consumed so many American institutions in the summer of 2020.
Gullaba's agent knew he had something special, and he was excited for a big submission push. But on the eve of sending the manuscript out to publishers, the agent suggested Gullaba update his bio to emphasize his racial identity. Publishers, he reasoned, would be excited to support a young black writer fresh on the literary scene.
There was a problem: Gullaba is Filipino.
"We had never met in person," he tells me, laughing. "I guess you can't really judge who's black or not based on a name like Alberto, and Gullaba is just ethnically ambiguous enough that it could be from Africa? I don't know."
What was clear, immediately, was that something had changed. The agent wasn't excited anymore. Actually, he seemed downright nervous, and he started asking for significant changes to the manuscript.
"The guy's frightened," Gullaba says. "God bless him, that's the reality of that world."
At first, Gullaba was asked to add an Asian character—east Asian, specifically, perhaps a Pacific Islander. Then it was suggested that Titus' wingman, the biggest secondary character, should also be assigned an Asian identity. And there was one more bizarre twist: Another agency employee, who we'll call Sally, was brought in at the eleventh hour to read the book and provide additional feedback.
"My agent was like, 'I don't want to do this, it makes me very uncomfortable,'" Gullaba says. "But then he says it."
Sally, the agent explained, was black.
Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.
The sensitivity reader's possible areas of expertise are as varied as human existence itself. One representative consultancy boasts a list of experts in the usual racial, ethnic, and religious categories, but also in such areas as "agoraphobia," "Midwestern," "physical disability, arms & legs," and (perhaps most puzzlingly) "gamer geek."
Another one lists individual readers with intersectional qualifications: Depending on the content of your novel, you might hire a white lesbian with generalized anxiety disorder or a bisexual, genderfluid, light-skinned brown Mexican with a self-diagnosis of autism. Every medical condition, every trauma, every form of oppression: Sensitivity readers will cover it all.
Unsurprisingly, the rise of sensitivity readers has proved controversial. Those who support it insist that they're no different from subject matter experts, not unlike the physician who proofreads a medical thriller to make sure the science is right. Critics, on the other hand, balk at the idea that being a member of a given demographic automatically conveys special knowledge about how everyone else in that group thinks or feels. (In Gullaba's case, his sensitivity reader had been born in the Caribbean and raised in the U.K. The idea that she could speak to the "authenticity" of a young, black ex-convict's experience at an American university was comical.) At a moment of ascendant identitarianism in so many institutions, sensitivity reading seems part of a larger, insidious trend in the arts: one that stigmatizes imagination and would, taken to its logical conclusion, make fiction itself categorically impossible.
Whatever else sensitivity readers are, they're a recent development—born in the small but influential corner of the literary world known as young adult (Y.A.) publishing. The Y.A. literary scene has always been a reliable incubator for incoming moral panics, dating back at least as far as 1975's puritanical spasm over sexual content in Judy Blume's Forever…: It's always been easy to get people amped up if you can invoke the specter of a vulnerable young person being harmed by a naughty book. In this case, you can see the seeds of the great media diversity eruption of summer 2020 in a Y.A. controversy from six years earlier.
In 2014, the same year Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri, helped spark the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, a survey by the publisher Lee & Low revealed that just 10 percent of the books published for young readers included multicultural content. The Y.A. community was scandalized, and authors rushed to address the issue.
Suddenly, every other book deal announced that year seemed to involve a multiracial cast of characters repping the whole rainbow of sexual orientations, alternative gender identities, and physical and mental disabilities. But rather than solving the problem, the new enthusiasm for diverse characters fueled a new outrage: No matter how multiracial the characters, the authors were still a bunch of white ladies, as were the editors, the marketing folks, the designers, and the publicists. It was white people all the way down.
Publishing is a longtime bastion of liberalism, but it is also an elite profession, largely inaccessible to all but the independently wealthy (or at least those with the means to live in one of America's most expensive cities on less than $40,000 a year). Between the notoriously low salaries and the limited opportunities for advancement, publishing houses had struggled for decades to attract and retain minority employees, a problem for which they were generally apologetic without ever embarking on the kind of bottom-up industry renovation that might actually fix it. But now they were being scrutinized by a new, young activist cohort—and the demands for change, amplified by social media, were starting to get loud.
Enter the sensitivity reader.