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When I was a middle- and high-schooler, I read a lot of James Michener novels \u2014 Hawaii, Centennial, Chesapeake, Space, Poland and The Covenant are the ones I remember, looking at the Goodreads list<\/a>.\u00a0 If you\u2019re unfamiliar with his novels, they generally take the form of a narrative of several families, told over generations, centuries, or millennia, in a particular place; the stories of the individuals from those families intersect\u00a0with the history and the historical figures of that place. My vague memories include Poland\u2019s describing the partitions by which Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary divided Poland up among them, and a character who winds up in a concentration camp.\u00a0 Of Hawaii, I remember having to give a book report in 5th grade, and adjusting the narrative because it wasn\u2019t entirely PG, what with affairs and illegitimate\u00a0children and so forth.\u00a0 (Had my Dad read the book himself, or did it just wind up on the family bookshelf?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 But they made a big deal out of, \u201cJane is so smart that she\u2019s reading such a long book!\u201d without any apparent interest in the age-appropriateness of the book.\u00a0 There probably wasn\u2019t anything explicit in it, though.)\u00a0 Of Space, I remember that one of the protagonists was from the \u201cwrong side of the tracks\u201d and I pictured him as black and Denzil Washington-y, and was surprised later in the book when NASA management is embarrassed by a photo of a lily-white staff and makes efforts to hire blacks, showing that my image was incorrect.\u00a0 And The Covenant portrays families in South Africa, both Zulu and of Dutch origin.\u00a0 I recall in particular a scene in which, in the recent past, a girl is studied to determine whether she is \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201ccolored\u201d by determining whether her hair holds a curl, and have vaguer memories of character portrayals that attempted to provide the point of view of the whites, and how it is that they thought that setting up the apartheid system was not a self-serving way to oppress others but somehow the \u201cright thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Could Michener have written such a book in 2018, rather than its original publication date of 1980?\u00a0 Or would sensitivity readers have stood in the way?<\/p>\n Sensitivity readers, if you\u2019ve missed the recent press on them (e.g., the New York Times<\/a>, Reason<\/a>, and, back last winter, Slate<\/a>)\u00a0are \u201cexperts\u201d employed by publishers, or by authors themselves, to read drafts of novels and provide feedback, corrections, or outright rejection, with respect to how \u201csensitive\u201d the book is to issues of race, sex, mental illness, poverty, and the like.\u00a0 This is most common for children\u2019s and young adult fiction (why do we call fiction written for teenagers \u201cyoung adult fiction\u201d, by the way?), but\u00a0the Times reports that they\u2019re coming into use for adult fiction as well.\u00a0 And the principle of the thing isn\u2019t bad, per se \u2014 Michener researched his novels extensively, and presumably if he were writing about, say, the life of poor black families in inner-city Chicago, he would have consulted with experts on that subject as well, and perhaps have some such individual provide feedback on a draft.\u00a0 Hence, a \u201csensitivity reader.\u201d<\/p>\n But the task sensitivity readers set themselves to seems to be far more extensive than just providing that sort of factual knowledge.\u00a0 These \u201creaders\u201d care as much about tone and emphasis.\u00a0 As Slate says,<\/p>\n There are issues of framing to consider: Is the book about the girl struggling with her weight too much about a girl, well, struggling with her weight? Does a character\u2019s reference to his \u201cshrink\u201d denigrate therapy?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And the readers themselves \u2014 according to a database of individuals<\/a> holding themselves out as experts, anyway \u2014 appear to be, well, very intersectional<\/em>, as the label goes, claiming expertise in the immigrant experience, or the experience of blacks in America, but also simultaneously claiming expertise in LGetc. issues, trans issues, and mental health issues (anxiety, depression), which suggests that their ability to put themselves in the shoes of a straight, cis, neurotypical kid of a minority race or class experience is actually limited.<\/p>\n Now, to a certain extent, near as I can figure, sensitivity readers seem, in general, to be employed by or for authors seeking to write socially-conscious books, didactic books with messages, that attempt to teach majority-culture children about minorities of some sort or another, or to teach understanding of mental illness, or poverty, or the like, or that attempt to provide children in those situations with some comfort.\u00a0 And narrowly speaking, that does me no harm; it\u2019s just another genre that I and my kids don\u2019t read, and, if there\u2019s a market for it, then fine, there can be endless \u201csocially-conscious\u201d books.\u00a0 It\u2019s an irritant that they take up seemingly-disproportionate shelf space at the library<\/a>, to be sure, though, to be sure, I have no way of knowing whether, among other families, they\u2019re popular enough to warrant the extensive copies that our library purchases.\u00a0 And, likewise, I don\u2019t know if non-didactic books are less likely to get Kirkus stars or other sorts of attention, by their lack of such.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s my concern:\u00a0 the practice of sensitivity readers seems to go beyond pragmatic understandings of minority-ethnic group culture, or the particulars of what it means to have a mental illness, say, and appear to push characters which conform to their own notions of how a character from that particular (ethnic\/racial, religious, sex\/gender, mental status) minority group would think and feel, and, in particular, seem to result in\u00a0literature in which minority characters are always flawless, because no flaws would be acceptable to these readers.\u00a0 And who would want to read a story in which the minority characters, whether as protagonist or secondary characters, are cast as perfect, and perfectly heroic?<\/p>\n