The hotel was soulless, like all conference hotels. I had arrived a few hours before check-in, hoping to drop off my bags before I met a friend for lunch. The employees were clearly frazzled, overwhelmed by the sudden influx of several hundred impatient academics. When I asked where I could put my luggage, the guy at the front desk simply pointed to a nearby hallway. “Wait over there with her; he’s coming back.”

Who “he” was remained unclear, but I saw the woman he was referring to. She was white and about my age. She had a conference badge and a large suitcase that she was rolling back and forth in obvious exasperation. “Been waiting long?” I asked, taking up a position on the other side of the narrow hallway. “Very,” she replied. For a while, we stood in silence, minding our phones. Eventually, we began chatting.

The conversation was wide-ranging: the papers we were presenting, the bad A/V at the hotel, our favorite things to do in the city. At some point, we began talking about our jobs. She told me that—like so many academics—she was juggling a temporary teaching gig while also looking for a tenure-track position.

“It’s hard,” she said, “too many classes, too many students, too many papers to grade. No time for your own work. Barely any time to apply to real jobs.”

When I nodded sympathetically, she asked about my job and whether it was tenure-track. I admitted, a little sheepishly, that it was.

“I’d love to teach at a small college like that,” she said. “I feel like none of my students wants to learn. It’s exhausting.”

Then, out of nowhere, she said something that caught me completely off guard: “But I shouldn’t be complaining to you about this. I know how hard BIPOC faculty have it. You’re the last person I should be whining to.”

I was taken aback, but I shouldn’t have been. It was the kind of awkward comment I’ve grown used to over the past few years, as “anti-racism” has become the reigning ideology of progressive political culture. Until recently, calling attention to a stranger’s race in such a way would have been considered a social faux pas. That she made the remark without thinking twice—a remark, it should be noted, that assumes being a Black tenure-track professor is worse than being a marginally employed white one—shows how profoundly interracial social etiquette has changed since 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning.” That’s when anti-racism—focused on combating “color-blindness” in both policy and personal conduct—grabbed ahold of the liberal mainstream.

[Wesley Lowery: Why there was no racial reckoning]

Though this “reckoning” brought increased public attention to the deep embeddedness of racism in supposedly color-blind American institutions, it also made instant celebrities of a number of race experts and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) consultants who believe that being anti-racist means undergoing a “journey” of radical personal transformation. In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness of policies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it.

As a Black guy who grew up in a politically purple area—where being a good person meant adhering to the kind of civil-rights-era color-blindness that is now passé—I find this emergent anti-racist culture jarring. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances now seem to believe that being a good person means constantly reminding Black people that you are aware of their Blackness. Difference, no longer to be politely ignored, is insisted upon at all times under the guise of acknowledging “positionality.” Though I am rarely made to feel excessively aware of my race when hanging out with more conservative friends or visiting my hometown, in the more liberal social circles in which I typically travel, my race is constantly invoked—“acknowledged” and “centered”—by well-intentioned anti-racist “allies.”

This “acknowledgement” tends to take one of two forms. The first is the song and dance in which white people not-so-subtly let you know that they know that race and racism exist. This includes finding ways to interject discussion of some (bad) news item about race or racism into casual conversation, apologizing for having problems while white (“You’re the last person I should be whining to”), or inversely, offering “support” by attributing any normal human problem you have to racism.

The second way good white liberals often “center” racial difference in everyday interactions with minorities is by trying, always clumsily, to ensure that their “marginalized” friends and familiars are “culturally” comfortable. My favorite personal experiences of this include an acquaintance who invariably steers dinner or lunch meetups to Black-owned restaurants, and the time that a friend of a friend invited me over to go swimming in their pool before apologizing for assuming that I know how to swim (“I know that’s a culturally specific thing”). It is a peculiar quirk of the 2020s’ racial discourse that this kind of “acknowledgement” and “centering” is viewed as progress.

My point is not that conservatives have better racial politics—they do not—but rather that something about current progressive racial discourse has become warped and distorted. The anti-racist culture that is ascendant seems to me to have little to do with combatting structural racism or cultivating better relationships between white and Black Americans. And its rejection of color-blindness as a social ethos is not a new frontier of radical political action.

No, at the core of today’s anti-racism is little more than a vibe shift—a soft matrix of conciliatory gestures and hip phraseology that give adherents the feeling that there has been a cultural change, when in fact we have merely put carpet over the rotting floorboards. Although this push to center rather than sidestep racial difference in our interpersonal relationships comes from a good place, it tends to rest on a troubling, even racist subtext: that white and Black Americans are so radically different that interracial relationships require careful management, constant eggshell-walking, and even expert guidance from professional anti-racists. Rather than producing racial harmony, this new ethos frequently has the opposite effect, making white-Black interactions stressful, unpleasant, or, perhaps most often, simply weird.

Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, progressive anti-racism has centered on two concepts that helped Americans make sense of his senseless death: “structural racism” and “implicit bias.” The first of these is a sociopolitical concept that highlights how certain institutions—maternity wards, police barracks, lending companies, housing authorities, etc.—produce and replicate racial inequalities, such as the disproportionate killing of Black men by the cops. The second is a psychological concept that describes the way that all individuals—from bleeding-heart liberals to murderers such as Derek Chauvin—harbor varying degrees of subconscious racial prejudice.

Though “structural racism” and “implicit bias” target different scales of the social order—institutions on the one hand, individuals on the other—underlying both of these ideas is a critique of so-called color-blind ideology, or what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “color-blind racism”: the idea that policies, interactions, and rhetoric can be explicitly race-neutral but implicitly racist. As concepts, both “structural racism” and “implicit bias” rest on the presupposition that racism is an enduring feature of institutional and social life, and that so-called race neutrality is a covertly racist myth that perpetuates inequality. Some anti-racist scholars such as Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi have put this even more bluntly: “‘Race neutral’ is the new “separate but equal.’” Yet, although anti-racist academics and activists are right to argue that race-neutral policies can’t solve racial inequities—that supposedly color-blind laws and policies are often anything but—over the past few years, this line of criticism has also been bizarrely extended to color-blindness as a personal ethos governing behavior at the individual level.

[Theodore R. Johnson: How conservatives turned the ‘color-blind constitution’ against racial progress]

The most famous proponent of dismantling color-blindness in everyday interactions is Robin DiAngelo, who has made an entire (very condescending) career out of asserting that if white people are not uncomfortable, anti-racism is not happening. “White comfort maintains the racial status quo, so discomfort is necessary and important,” the corporate anti-racist guru advises. Over the past three years, this kind of anti-color-blind, pro-discomfort rhetoric has become the norm in anti-racist discourse. On the final day of the 28-day challenge in Layla Saad’s viral Me and White Supremacy, budding anti-racists are tasked with taking “out-of-your-comfort-zone actions,” such as apologizing to people of color in their life and having “uncomfortable conversations.” Frederick Joseph’s best-selling book The Black Friend takes a similar tack. The problem with color-blindness, Joseph counsels, is it allows “white people to continue to be comfortable.” The NFL analyst Emmanuel Acho wrote an entire book, simply called Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, that admonishes readers to “stop celebrating color-blindness.” And, of course, there are endless how-to guides for having these “uncomfortable conversations” with your Black friends.

Once the dominant progressive ideology, professing “I don’t see color” is now viewed as a kind of dog whistle that papers over implicit bias. Instead, current anti-racist wisdom holds that we must acknowledge racial difference in our interactions with others, rather than assume that race needn’t be at the center of every interracial conversation or encounter. Coming to grips with the transition we have undergone over the past decade—color-blind etiquette’s swing from de rigueur to racist—requires a longer view of an American cultural transition. Civil-rights-era color-blindness was replaced with an individualistic, corporatized anti-racism, one focused on the purification of white psyches through racial discomfort, guilt, and “doing the work” as a road to self-improvement.

Writing in 1959, the social critic Philip Rieff argued that postwar America was transforming from a religious and economic culture—one oriented around common institutions such as the church and the market—to a psychological culture, one oriented around the self and its emotional fulfillment. By the 1960s, Rieff had given this shift a name: “the triumph of the therapeutic,” which he defined as an emergent worldview according to which the “self, improved, is the ultimate concern of modern culture.” Yet, even as he diagnosed our culture with self-obsession, Rieff also noticed something peculiar and even paradoxical. Therapeutic culture demanded that we reflect our self-actualization outward. Sharing our innermost selves with the world—good, bad, and ugly—became a new social mandate under the guise that authenticity and open self-expression are necessary for social cohesion.

Recent anti-racist mantras like “White silence is violence” reflect this same sentiment: exhibitionist displays of “racist” guilt are viewed as a necessary precursor to racial healing and community building. In this way, today’s attacks on interpersonal color-blindness—and progressives’ growing fixation on implicit bias, public confession, and race-conscious social etiquette—are only the most recent manifestations of the cultural shift Rieff described. Indeed, the seeds of the current backlash against color-blindness began decades ago, with the application of a New Age, therapeutic outlook to race relations: so-called racial-sensitivity training, the forefather of today’s equally spurious DEI programming.

In her 2001 book, Race Experts, the historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn painstakingly details how racial-sensitivity training emerged from the 1960s’ human-potential movement and its infamous “encounter groups.” As she explains, what began as a more or less countercultural phenomenon was later corporatized in the form of the anemic, pointless workshops controversially lampooned on The Office. Not surprisingly, this shift reflected the ebb and flow of corporate interests: Whereas early workplace training emphasized compliance with the newly minted Civil Rights Act of 1964, later incarnations would focus on improving employee relations and, later still, leveraging diversity to secure better business outcomes.

If there is something distinctive about the anti-color-blind racial etiquette that has emerged since George Floyd’s death, it is that these sites of encounter have shifted from official institutional spaces to more intimate ones where white people and minorities interact as friends, neighbors, colleagues, and acquaintances. Racial-awareness raising is a dynamic no longer quarantined to formalized, compulsory settings like the boardroom or freshman orientation. Instead, every interracial interaction is a potential scene of (one-way) racial edification and supplication, encounters in which good white liberals are expected to be transparent about their “positionality,” confront their “whiteness,” and—if the situation calls for it—confess their “implicit bias.”

In a vacuum, many of the prescriptions advocated by the anti-color-blind crowd are reasonable: We should all think more about our privileges and our place in the world. An uncomfortable conversation or an honest look in the mirror can be precursors to personal growth. We all carry around harmful, implicit biases and we do need to examine the subconscious assumptions and prejudices that underlie the actions we take and the things we say. My objection is not to these ideas themselves, which are sensible enough. No, my objection is that anti-racism offers little more than a Marie Kondo–ism for the white soul, promising to declutter racial baggage and clear a way to white fulfillment without doing anything meaningful to combat structural racism. As Lasch-Quinn correctly foresaw, “Casting interracial problems as issues of etiquette [puts] a premium on superficial symbols of good intentions and good motivations as well as on style and appearance rather than on the substance of change.”

Yet the problem with the therapeutics of contemporary anti-racism is not just that they are politically sterile. When anti-color-blindness and its ideology of insistent “race consciousness” are translated into the sphere of private life—to the domain of friendships, block parties, and backyard barbecues—they assault the very idea of a multiracial society, producing new forms of racism in the process. The fact that our media environment is inundated with an endless stream of books, articles, and social-media tutorials that promise to teach white people how to simply interact with the Black people in their life is not a sign of anti-racist progress, but of profound regression.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The DEI industry needs to check its privilege]

The subtext that undergirds this new anti-racist discourse—that Black-white relationships are inherently fraught and must be navigated with the help of professionals and technical experts—testifies to the impoverishment of our interracial imagination, not to its enrichment. More gravely, anti-color-blind etiquette treats Black Americans as exotic others, permanent strangers whose racial difference is so chasmic that it must be continually managed, whose mode of humanness is so foreign that it requires white people to adopt a special set of manners and “race conscious” ritualistic practices to even have a simple conversation.

If we are going to find a way out of the racial discord that has defined American life post-Trump and post-Charlottesville and post-Floyd, we have to begin with a more sophisticated understanding of color-blindness, one that rejects the bad color-blindness on offer from the Republican Party and its partisans, as well as the anti-color-blindness of the anti-racist consultants. Instead, we should embrace the good color-blindness of not too long ago. At the heart of that color-blindness was a radical claim, one imperfectly realized but perfect as an ideal: that despite the weight of a racist past that isn’t even past, we can imagine a world, or at least an interaction between two people, where racial difference doesn’t make a difference.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

How should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos? (See any and all items below for context, and feel free to construe the question broadly or to focus on anything related to it.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

In the September 2023 issue of The Atlantic, my colleague Graeme Wood profiles Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonymous illiberal philosopher who has gained a cult following on the ideological right while mixing “ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and a deep knowledge of ancient Greece.” Many people understandably believe that his self-published manifesto ought to be taboo. Might successfully maintaining such a taboo safeguard liberal society from those who seek to end it?

BAP’s rise has been especially upsetting to some of the academics who worked with him as a graduate student. Here is a passage from Graeme’s article in which Professor Bryan Garsten, speaking at a conference of political philosophers, laments the seductions of illiberalism and wonders if he could have done more to arrest them:

Garsten told his listeners that they—he—may have failed to cultivate students’ imagination. His illiberal students, Garsten said, had learned why the Greeks admired Achilles, the fiery warrior. But they neglected the Greeks’ admiration for Ulysses, a subtler and greater model of manhood. Ulysses’s greatness emerged not from his rejection of this world, but from his mastery of its constraints. He owed myriad debts to those around him: to his men, to his son, to his wife. The students romanticized the tyrant, while assuming that liberalism bred sloth and laziness. “Life in a liberal democracy is full of demanding moments,” Garsten said … I had the impression that he was addressing BAP apostrophically, delivering a warning he wished he had delivered in person. “As far as I have read, life under tyrants is full of lassitude, selfishness, duplicity, betrayal.”

Listening to discussions like that one, Graeme sensed “the stirrings of dormant liberal passions—as if the mere invocation of BAPism, after many years ignored, had inspired a counteroffensive.”

He wrote:

Another political theorist, a former Marine and a Brookings Institution scholar named William A. Galston, piped up to remind everyone that when liberalism had come under mortal threat in the Pacific theater, “Americans as a whole found it in themselves to do something.” Specifically, his fellow Marines charged, shot, and bayoneted their way from island to island until illiberalism, in the form of Japanese fascism, begged them for mercy. “Is there really an opposition between the open society and the virtue of courage?” Galston asked.

The defeat of imperial Japan illustrated the point nicely, I thought. But it also raised a much stranger question, about how liberals acquired such a reputation for sissydom in the first place.

The Battle of Iwo Jima wasn’t that long ago.

As Graeme concludes his article, he winds up arguing not that BAP’s work ought to be shunned or ignored, but that the impulse to confront and rebut its ideas is overdue and good for liberalism.

He writes:

Liberalism’s victory had been so overwhelming that for generations it grew soft, flabby, and unaccustomed to the hard work of defending itself from a vigorous challenger. As such challengers left universities and newspapers, those institutions became self-congratulatory monocultures, inhospitable even to conservatives far less nutty than BAP. By now, a ranting nudist [Bronze Age Pervert] poses a real danger—of poisoning politics, splitting apart societies, and persuading otherwise talented people to spurn the modern world’s greatest achievements, which are peace, tolerance, and prosperity …

Allan Bloom predicted doom for liberalism when these challenges disappeared … An unchallenged liberal democrat, he argued, ceases to want to improve, unless he confronts his enemies in their most potent forms. Those forms will shock and humble us, he wrote … I have come to think of BAP’s performances in immunological terms: a gnarly virus that had lain dormant for decades in circles of philosophers and their unread books. Now that it’s loose in the human population, it is a vicious kick to the liberal immune system. And that is not entirely bad. Unchallenged, liberalism’s defenses waned, and liberals forgot, temporarily, why their cause was worth defending. The antibodies are stirring.

Taboos in the Internet Era

What should happen when a public intellectual is revealed to have published virulently racist, flagrantly white-supremacist articles under a pseudonym? I pose the question as someone who values maintaining the taboo against such things. Does it matter how long ago the deplorable views were published or how young their author was at the time? What if he purports to disavow or renounce some of those views? What if he has also written racist things more recently under his own name? Can his new account be trusted? When is forgiveness or redemption appropriate? Who should be able to extend or deny it? What incentives best serve society?

These are among the questions a corner of the internet is debating thanks to a specific public intellectual’s deeds. Because his case is eliciting such diametrically opposed reactions from observers I follow, and because the writer’s work more generally is often too trolly for my earnest taste, I suspect that focusing on his case in particular will be less constructive for our purposes than asking what general rules we ought to apply when such situations arise. Here are a few more questions: Should a forthcoming book by such a person be judged solely on its words, or should the author’s outside actions color its reception? If the book were pulled from publication, a course that some of the author’s critics favor but that shows no sign of happening, would more or fewer people read it (assuming it was self-published like Bronze Age Mindset, or picked up by a less mainstream publisher)? Should that bear on the publisher’s decision?

Book Report

The free-expression advocates at PEN America have published a report titled “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” It argues that insofar as advocates of an open society stand for “the principle that books should be as widely available as possible,” their concern must extend “not just to government book banning but also to how the literary community governs itself.” In major publishing houses, an introductory statement frets, “staffers have increasingly expressed opposition to specific book contracts with writers whom they allege to be promoting forms of harm, in some cases going so far as to demand that contracts be nullified.”

More broadly, PEN America warns:

Some readers, writers, and critics are pushing to draw new lines around what types of books, tropes, and narrative conventions should be seen as permissible and who has the legitimacy, authority, or “right” to write certain stories. At one extreme, some critics are calling for an identity-essentialist approach to literature, holding that writers can only responsibly tell the stories that relate to their own identity and experiences. This approach is incompatible with the freedom to imagine that is essential to the creation of literature, and it denies readers the opportunity to experience stories through the eyes of writers offering varied and distinctive lenses.

These critics have argued that “problematic” books or authors deserve special censure from the literary world—with “problematic” being a catchall term ranging from an author accused of committing a crime to one who relies on lazy narrative conventions. Fiction that is regarded as employing stereotypes, outdated tropes, or unrealistic character sketches may be described as threatening “harm” or being “dangerous.” In the past several years, books deemed problematic due to their authorship, their content, or both have been subjected to boycotts, calls for withdrawals, and harassment of their authors. Some have argued that merely to read the book is to become complicit in its alleged harms. While proponents of these arguments are, of course, free to make them, such arguments risk laying the groundwork for, and justifying, the ostracism of authors and ideas and the narrowing of literary freedom writ large.

In The Atlantic, George Packer contrasts this recent report with a bygone report that the same organization published on a different subject:

In “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN examined in detail how the American book business has always been and, despite recent improvements, remains a clubby world of the white, well connected, and well-off. It presented a damning picture, backed by data, of “the white lens through which writers, editors, and publishers curate America’s literature.” It called for publishers to hire and promote more staff of color, publish more books by writers of color, pay them higher advances, and sell their books more intelligently and vigorously.

The two reports are related, but the relation is fraught. The first showed the need for an intensified campaign of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the industry. The second argues for greater freedom to defy the literary strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Is there a contradiction between the two?

PEN doesn’t think so. The new report states: “It is imperative that the literary field chart a course that advances diversity and equity without making these values a cudgel against specific books or writers deemed to fall short in these areas.” In the words of Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief executive officer, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” But this might be wishful thinking, and not only because of practical limits on how many books can feasibly be published.

In a different world, it would be entirely possible to expand opportunity without creating a censorious atmosphere. In our world, where DEI has hardened into an ideological litmus test, the effort to place social justice at the center of publishing almost inevitably leads to controversies over “representation” and “harm” that result in banned books. The first report presented DEI in publishing as an urgent moral cause. The second report takes issue with “employees’ increasing expectation that publishers assume moral positions in their curation of catalogs and author lists.” But those employees no doubt believe that they are carrying out the vision of the first report.

Social justice and intellectual freedom are not inherently opposed—often, each requires the other—but they are not the same thing, either. “The Freedom to Read” makes this clear: “It would conflict with the public interest for [publishers and librarians] to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.” That statement was written at a time when the cause of intellectual freedom was non- or even anti-ideological. Its authors advocated no other goal than the widest and highest-quality expression of views. But in PEN’s new report you can feel a struggle to reconcile the thinking of its earlier one, in which every calculation comes down to identity, with the discriminating judgment and openness to new and disturbing ideas that are essential to producing literature. As one editor told me, “There’s no equity in talent.”

Provocation of the Week

In The Atlantic, the writer and onetime feminist blogger Jill Filipovic revisits her bygone support for trigger warnings:

I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.

Feminist writers were trying to make our little corner of the internet a gentler place, while also giving appropriate recognition to appallingly common female experiences that had been pushed into the shadows. To some extent, those efforts worked. But as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?

Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011 …

Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control … A person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling … To help people build resilience, we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression and denounced censorship and conformity in language whose clarity and force are startling today. It argued for “the widest diversity of views and expressions” and against purging work based on “the personal history or political affiliations of the author.” It urged publishers and librarians to resist government and private suppression, and to “give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought.” The manifesto took on not just official censorship, but the broader atmosphere of coercion and groupthink. It concluded: “We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”

“The Freedom to Read” was covered in papers and on TV news. President Dwight Eisenhower, who that same month had urged the graduating class of Dartmouth College not to “join the book burners,”’ sent a letter of praise to the manifesto’s authors. In one of the darkest periods of American history, the manifesto gave librarians and publishers the courage of their principles. One librarian later wrote, “There developed a fighting profession, made up of dedicated people who were sure of their direction.”

This past June, the library and publishers’ associations reissued “The Freedom to Read” on its 70th anniversary. Scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty organizations, and authors signed on to endorse its principles. And yet many of those institutional signatories—including the “Big Five” publishing conglomerates—often violate its propositions, perhaps not even aware that they’re doing so. Few of them, if any, could produce as unapologetic a defense of intellectual freedom as the one made at a time when inquisitors were destroying careers and lives. It’s worth asking why the American literary world in 2023 is less able to uphold the principles of “The Freedom to Read” than its authors in 1953.

The attack on intellectual freedom today is coming from several directions. First—and likely the main concern of the signatories—is an official campaign by governors, state legislatures, local governments, and school boards to weed out books and ideas they don’t like. Most of the targets are politically on the left; most present facts or express views about race, gender, and sexuality that the censors consider dangerous, divisive, obscene, or simply wrong. The effort began in Texas as early as 2020, before public hysteria and political opportunism spread the campaign to Florida and other states, and to every level of education, removing from library shelves and class reading lists several thousand books by writers such as Toni Morrison and Malala Yousafzai.

Given that states and school districts have a responsibility to set public-school curricula, not all of this can be called government censorship. But laws and policies to prevent students from encountering controversial, unpopular, even offensive writers and ideas amount to a powerfully repressive campaign of book banning, some of it probably unconstitutional. The campaign stems from an American tradition of small-minded panic at rapid change and unorthodox thinking. You can draw a line from Tennessee’s 1925 Scopes trial to Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act. This threat to intellectual freedom is the easiest one for the progressive and enlightened people who predominate in the book world to oppose. No one at Penguin Random House or the National Book Foundation hesitates to stand up for Gender Queer and The Handmaid’s Tale.

“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” The second threat to intellectual freedom comes from a different source—from inside the house. This threat is the subject of a new report that PEN America has just published, “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” (Because I have written about censorship and language in the past, PEN asked me to read and respond to an earlier draft and gave me an advance copy of the final version.) The report is focused on the recent pattern of publishers and authors canceling their own books, sometimes after publication, under pressure organized online or by members, often younger ones, of their own staffs. PEN has tracked 31 cases of what might be called literary infanticide since 2016; half occurred in just the past two years. “None of these books were withdrawn based on any allegation of factual disinformation, nor glorification of violence, nor plagiarism,” the report notes. “Their content or author was simply deemed offensive.”

A few cases became big news. Hachette canceled Woody Allen’s autobiography after a staff walkout, and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth was withdrawn after publication by Norton, both following accusations of sexual misconduct by the authors (Allen and Bailey denied the accusations). Publishers have canceled books following an author’s public remarks—for example, those of the cartoonist Scott Adams, the British journalist Julie Burchill, and the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

In one particularly wild case, an author named Natasha Tynes, on the verge of publishing her first novel, a crime thriller, saw a Black employee of the Washington, D.C., Metro system eating on a train (a violation of the system’s rules). She tweeted a picture of the woman at the transit authority with a complaint, and immediately found herself transformed into a viral racist. Within hours her distributor, Rare Bird Books, had dropped the novel, tweeting that Tynes “did something truly horrible today.” The publisher, California Coldblood, after trying to wash its hands of the book, eventually went ahead with publication “due to contractual obligations,” but the novel was as good as dead. “How can you expect authors to be these perfect creatures who never commit any faults?” Tynes lamented to PEN. Most publishers now include a boilerplate morals clause in book contracts that legitimizes these cancellations—a loophole that contradicts tenets of “The Freedom to Read” that those publishers endorsed.

Many of the cases discussed in the report have nothing to do with an author’s offensive statements or bad behavior. Instead, they involve sins of phrasing, characterization, plot, subject matter, or authorial identity. Last year Picador dropped a schoolteacher’s prizewinning memoir when it was attacked for racially insensitive portrayals. A scholarly study of Black feminist culture was withdrawn by Wipf and Stock after critics pointed out that its author was white. Simon & Schuster preemptively killed a biography for children of Hitler because of Hitler. Four young-adult and children’s novels (which seem particularly vulnerable to attack) were pulled for supposedly offensive stories and descriptions. One of them, A Place for Wolves—a novel about two gay American boys set in Kosovo during its war with Serbia—was canceled by its author, Kosoko Jackson, himself a prosecutor of literary offenses via Twitter, after people on social media accused him of violating his own edict about identity placing strict limits on appropriate subject matter: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people,” he’d tweeted. “Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during horrific and life changing times, like the AIDS EPIDEMIC, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

At the heart of these literary autos-da-fé is identity—or, in a phrase the report uses several times, “marginalized identities.” The trip wires that can blow up a writer’s work—charges of “harmful” language, failures of “representation,” “appropriation,” or generally “problematic” content—are all strung along lines of identity. When Jeanine Cummins, a white writer, received a lot attention (and, reportedly, a seven-figure book deal) in 2020 for American Dirt, a novel about a Mexican mother and child on the run from a drug gang, she was denounced for taking an opportunity that should have gone to a Latina author who would, some critics said, have written a better book. Her publisher, Flatiron/Macmillan, didn’t pull the novel—it was selling far too many copies—but it canceled Cummins’s tour, citing safety concerns, and issued an abject statement of self-criticism. The ordeal of American Dirt showed publishers that crossing lines of identity can be dangerous, prompting one former editor, interviewed anonymously by PEN, to ask: “Are we saying that not anyone can write any story? Do you have to have a certain identity? There’s a lot of fear around that.”

A skeptic might ask why a few dozen awkward decisions and minor controversies out of tens of thousands of books published every year should matter. The answer is that these incidents reveal an atmosphere of conformity and fear that undermines any claim book publishing has to being more than just a business. Most of the canceled books described in the report are victims of a pervasive orthodoxy. At its most rigid, this orthodoxy puts the claims of identity above everything else—literary quality, authorial independence, the freedom to read. Its reach can be seen in how many of the canceled books were already making obvious, if clumsy, efforts to abide by the values of equity and inclusion; and in Natasha Tynes’s attempt to defend herself from online attacks by pleading that she herself is “a minority writer.”

Eventually, orthodoxy makes the suppression of books unnecessary because it leads to self-censorship by editors and writers. One canceled author interviewed by PEN said, “It has shut me down, creatively. There is always a censor, perched on my shoulder, telling me I cannot write about this or that topic.” What writer can honestly say it isn’t true of them? Almost none of the editors interviewed for the PEN report were willing to be quoted by name. What are they afraid of, if not the fate of their authors?

Below the waterline lie all the books that aren’t contracted, or even written, because of the examples that become public. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the best-selling author Richard North Patterson wrote that his latest novel—about an interracial relationship set against battles over voting rights and white racism—was rejected by “roughly 20” New York publishers. “The seemingly dominant sentiment was that only those personally subject to discrimination could be safely allowed to depict it through fictional characters,” Patterson wrote. (Trial was published in June by a conservative Christian firm in Tennessee and currently ranks around No. 37,000 among all books on Amazon. Several books in the PEN report, canceled by major publishers, were grabbed up by small houses with far less reach.)

PEN is a free-speech organization. Having already issued a lengthy report and numerous statements condemning book banning by state and local governments, it seems to have realized that it could not ignore a pattern of suppression closer to home, by organizations that publish PEN members and sponsor its fundraising galas.

In May, PEN landed in the middle of its own free-speech controversy when two Ukrainian soldier-writers announced that they would withdraw from the organization’s World Voices Festival if two Russian writers were also included on another panel. Rather than cancel the Ukrainians, who had already arrived in the United States, and send them back home to the war, PEN asked the Russian writers and their panel’s moderator, Masha Gessen, a PEN board member, to speak under a different banner, that of PEN America. The Russians and Gessen instead decided to cancel their own event, and Gessen resigned from the board in protest for what was seen as PEN caving in to the Ukrainians’ demands. (One of the Russian writers later said that she did not want to participate if the Ukrainians didn’t want her there.) A month later, PEN declared it “regrettable” and “wrongheaded” when the writer Elizabeth Gilbert suspended publication of her next novel because Ukrainian readers were upset that it was set in Soviet Russia. All of this merely shows that it’s easier to hold a principled position on free speech when you’re not the one facing unpleasant consequences.

PEN spent months researching and internally debating the new report, anticipating controversy. An early draft was hampered by reflexive hedges and tactical critiques, and a few of them remain in the published report: Accusations of literary harm “risk playing into the hands of book banners” on the right who use the same rhetoric; the publisher of American Dirt might have avoided trouble if it had marketed the novel with more sensitivity.

The report is an important, even courageous, document in our moment. PEN is offering guidance and backbone for a book trade that appears to have lost its nerve and forgotten its mission in the face of ceaseless outrage. Among its recommendations, the report urges that “publishing houses should rarely, if ever, withdraw books from circulation.” It calls for greater transparency and author involvement in any decisions about cancellations. Goodreads, the online review site, where mobs sometimes beat books to death before they’re even finished, let alone published and read, is asked to “encourage authentic reviews” and prevent “review-bombing.”

These technical fixes would greatly improve policies and procedures in the publishing industry, but they can’t solve the wider problem—a climate of intolerance and cowardice that stifles the book world. In the conclusion to its report, PEN calls for “a broader tonal shift in literary discourse,” which is necessary but probably beyond the power of any report. Essentially, PEN is saying to the remaining gatekeepers, “Remember your purpose,” and to the new gate-crashers, “Don’t use speech to limit speech.” For inspiration it reprints “The Freedom to Read” in full and urges workers in the book world to take it to heart. Ayad Akhtar, the president of PEN America, told me that he hopes publishers will include the 70-year-old manifesto along with DEI training for new hires. PEN wants its report to have an effect similar to that of the earlier document—to make publishing once more “a fighting profession.”

And yet something holds the report back from using the full-throated language of “The Freedom to Read.” I think the difficulty lies in an earlier report that PEN published last year.

In “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN examined in detail how the American book business has always been and, despite recent improvements, remains a clubby world of the white, well connected, and well-off. It presented a damning picture, backed by data, of “the white lens through which writers, editors, and publishers curate America’s literature.” It called for publishers to hire and promote more staff of color, publish more books by writers of color, pay them higher advances, and sell their books more intelligently and vigorously.

The two reports are related, but the relation is fraught. The first showed the need for an intensified campaign of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the industry. The second argues for greater freedom to defy the literary strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Is there a contradiction between the two?

PEN doesn’t think so. The new report states: “It is imperative that the literary field chart a course that advances diversity and equity without making these values a cudgel against specific books or writers deemed to fall short in these areas.” In the words of Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s executive director, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” But this might be wishful thinking, and not only because of practical limits on how many books can feasibly be published. In a different world, it would be entirely possible to expand opportunity without creating a censorious atmosphere. In our world, where DEI has hardened into an ideological litmus test, the effort to place social justice at the center of publishing almost inevitably leads to controversies over “representation” and “harm” that result in banned books. The first report presented DEI in publishing as an urgent moral cause. The second report takes issue with “employees’ increasing expectation that publishers assume moral positions in their curation of catalogs and author lists.” But those employees no doubt believe that they are carrying out the vision of the first report.

Social justice and intellectual freedom are not inherently opposed—often, each requires the other—but they are not the same thing, either. “The Freedom to Read” makes this clear: “It would conflict with the public interest for [publishers and librarians] to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.” That statement was written at a time when the cause of intellectual freedom was non- or even anti-ideological. Its authors advocated no other goal than the widest and highest-quality expression of views. But in PEN’s new report you can feel a struggle to reconcile the thinking of its earlier one, in which every calculation comes down to identity, with the discriminating judgment and openness to new and disturbing ideas that are essential to producing literature. As one editor told me, “There’s no equity in talent.”

Last year, a federal judge blocked a bid by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in America, to buy Simon & Schuster, the third largest (a takeover would have practically made the conglomerate a sovereign country). This year, book sales are down across the industry, bringing waves of layoffs; last month, senior editors at Penguin Random House were given the option of a buyout under the shadow of termination, and some of the most illustrious gatekeepers in publishing headed for the door. These events bring me to the third and most serious attack on the written word.

This one is more insidious and pervasive and therefore harder to see clearly, let alone oppose, than book bans and cancellations. It’s the air every writer and reader breathes: the consolidation of publishing into a near-monopoly business; the correspondent shrinking of heterodoxy and risk taking; the fragile economic situation of employees; the withering away of bookstores and book reviews; the growing illiteracy of the public; the decline of English instruction in schools, regardless of political pressures; the data crunching that turns ideas into machine-made products and media into highly sensitive barometers of popularity (with artificial intelligence coming soon to replace the last traces of human originality). All of these trends amount to an assault on the free intellect perpetrated not by Moms for Liberty or YA Twitter, but by Mark Zuckerberg, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon. In a sense, this third attack underlies the other two, because strong emotions and extreme language are programmed into the brains of book banners of every type by algorithms that profit a handful of technology and media giants.

Literature and journalism have never been remunerative fields. But compared with three decades ago, the chances of a serious, sustained career today are far slimmer. I can’t help thinking that these circumstances have something to do with the willingness of publishers to be frightened by a few hundred tweets. Perhaps years of consolidation and precarity have so weakened their conviction in the mission of book publishing that a little outrage online and in house is sufficient to erase it. If the editor’s function is to match the identity of writer and subject matter, then gather data to measure the success of the product, perhaps gatekeepers have finally outlived their usefulness.

With the US Supreme Court banning race-based admissions to colleges and universities, companies are starting to scramble, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) leaders are under threat. Though the court decision did not directly mention corporate DEI initiatives, many organizations are cutting budgets—and…

Read more...