The Suffocating Censoriousness of Identity Authorship

In a recent essay written for the Wall Street Journal, I detailed the experience of having numerous American publishers reject my latest work of fiction after publishing 22 prior novels, 16 of them New York Times bestsellers. But what transcends the fate of this particular book is the predominant reason for this resistance: that as a white author I should not have presumed to pen a work of imagination which featured black characters grappling with my country's ongoing racial problems.

Happily, I found an independent publisher willing to publish Trial. But the larger issue is what my experience says about the toxicity of preemptive censorship based on the race of the author.

A bit of background. I am also a political commentator. In writing over 300 columns or essays between 2015 and 2021, I was struck by how many were suffused by our tribulations of race - including discriminatory law enforcement; the systematic efforts of Republicans in states like Georgia to prevent Blacks from voting; the mass exploitation racial anger and anxiety by right-wing politicians and media; the rise of white nationalism; and the difficulty of obtaining a fair trial for Black defendants in racially-charged cases.

I also believe in the power of a good story to engage a wider audience with pressing social problems. As my late friend Pat Conroy once remarked, "Fiction is where I go to tell the truth." So I conceived a narrative culminating in the televised trial of an 18 year old Black voting rights worker for capital murder, stemming from the fatal shooting of a white sheriff's deputy after a late night traffic stop in rural Georgia.

Obviously, I could not write this novel responsibly without doing the work required ground fiction in reality – including interviewing people where they lived about their actual experience of my chosen subject. So I traveled to a county in southwest Georgia with a harsh racial past and divisive present.

My interviewees included numerous Blacks immersed in the struggle for voting rights: judges, law enforcement officers, ministers, civil rights and defense attorneys, politicians, community leaders, voting rights activists, elected officials and ordinary citizens.. Fortunately, these Georgians were uniformly generous in sharing with me their own challenges , helping to shape my narrative while immeasurably enriching my fictional characters.

The result was a manuscript which my agents believed equaled my strongest and most commercially successful work. But they also worried that this book would fall prey to the new theology in American publishing: that only a Black author is entitled to write fiction which includes the perspective of Black characters, particularly with respect to problems of race which - while they should concern us all - directly impact Blacks.

Their misgivings proved prophetic. None of the publishers who rejected my book suggested that it was in any way racially insensitive or obtuse. Rather, the principal problem was my identity: the insistence that only a Black author with the " lived experience" of racism could safely write fiction focused on racial discrimination.

But the core question has nothing to do with me in particular. Rather, it applies to anyone who dares to write fiction: Should empathy and imagination be allowed to cross the lines of racial identity?

To me, this goes not only to the nature of literature, but to the quality of our society at large. For to repress books based on authorial identity is destructive to the essence of creativity, and inimical to the spirit of a pluralist democracy. 

To begin, in literary terms this newly–minted dispensation is profoundly anti-historical. Over the last three centuries a particularly rich vein of fiction has been novels of social realism by authors like Emile Zola and Charles Dickens, explicitly intended to awaken readers to the privation, and often the perspective, of working class people. Nor did such Americans as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck and Tom Wolfe shrink from examining race or class.

These novelists were white men of their time who, nonetheless, believed that fiction could address important subjects beyond the prism of authorial identity. Accordingly, their novels were distinguished by assiduous research into experiences outside their own. Not only did these books enrich the broader stream of literature; they deepened the understanding of readers about societal problems they might not have otherwise considered, includingthe lives of those who confronted them.

Each of these authors chose to transcend their own origins. Can one seriously argue that Western literature would be better off had they confined their ambitions to the suffocating cul-de-sac of identity authorship defined by race or class, denying generations of readers the absorption and enlightenment offered by "David Copperfield” or "Huckleberry Finn”” or "The Octopus” or "The Jungle" or "The Grapes of Wrath” or “Bonfire of the Vanities “? If so, there goes “Othello". Or, whatever its flaws, the modern American classic “To Kill A Mockingbird" . But the larger point is this: assuming that authors can have no insight beyond their own ethnicity, but universal comprehension within it, is preposterous as a template for writing fiction.

To embrace such a primitive doctrine of ethnic determinism necessitates a level of analysis so oblivious - not least to the infinite varieties and limitations of human experience within our (frequently arbitrary) racial categories - as to be risible. Imagine, if you will, the patrician Louis Auchincloss as the intuitively gifted chronicler of impoverished whites in Appalachia. Or the aristocratic Anthony Powell deciding that his whiteness equipped him to write four novels of working class Britain instead of the elegant volumes comprising" A Dance to the Music Of Time”.  But even taken at face value, choosing an author’s racial identity as a basis for preemptive censorship ignores every other component of good fiction: narrative, characterization, dialogue, descriptive power, a sense of place, richness of language, psychological acuity, curiosity about others and, as necessary, assiduous research. Most of all, it obliterates the essential engine of literature and, indeed, of compassion : the capacity to imagine, and to empathize with, lives different than our own.

By redlining literature into ethnic neighborhoods, the proponents of creative segregation elevate race above all other factors which separate one human being from another. In truth, to write about any character whatsoever is, inevitably, to step outside ourselves. Whatever our origin, we are each the product of infinite variables – not only ethnicity, but heredity, family, environment, social class, opportunities, mischances, the predominance in our lives of love or trauma. Indeed, in our own "lived reality” we  spend every day of our actual lives trying to understand “the other” - people who, regardless of race, are so different from us that they defy easy understanding.

But the crabbed logic of identity authorship suggests that it is impossible for any single author to write fiction which reflects the diversity of America. Imagine, for example, a book centered on a white man and a Black woman. Must it be written by co-authors, one white and one Black? Or, to insure “authenticity of voice" must they be a Black woman and a white man? Must a novel whose characters reflect the diversity of our two countries be written by multiracial committee, lest it be preemptively censored? Or, instead of imposing censorship arbitrarily rooted in identity, should we continue to entrust fiction to the informed imagination of writers, and the collective judgment of readers left free to read what they choose?

In saying this, I don't minimize for moment the importance of race in dividing the lived reality of whites from that of Blacks, or the ongoing role of racism in the warp and woof of American society. That's why I wrote the book. Any author who presumes to write outside their racial identity assumes the responsibility for undertaking whatever work serves as a prerequisite to doing it well -  or refrain from doing it at all. But it serves no one to elevate a presumption of incapacity –or capacity - based on race into a license for censorship.

Soon enough, this imaginative straight jacket can reduce writers of fiction to representatives of a personal experience rigidly defined by race. If white authors are barred from addressing America's toils of race, Black authors will be effectively conscripted as the sole chroniclers of a profound social malady which is rightly the responsibility of every American. In a curious way, the idea that it is notionally impossible for white authors and, by extension, whites in general to comprehend the effects of racism on their Black fellow citizens can have a pernicious side effect: relieving whites of the responsibility to try.

Indeed, one of the telling byproducts of my own experience has been the reaction to it by prominent Black intellectuals. Asked for comment by the Boston Globe, the distinguished literary scholar, author, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a longtime advocate of the freedom to write, responded: “ Art has to be open to everyone. The act of imagination cannot be censored. We simply cannot allow anyone to stand at the gate holding signs that say, ‘ Whites Only 'or Blacks Only, 'or in this case, ‘ No Whites Allowed.‘ We have done our best to dismantle the perverse logic of Jim Crow, characterized by the fallacious concept of ' separate but equal.' We must never allow any form of Jim Crow to be transposed onto the world of literature and art.”

Similarly, Professor Tyler Austin Harper of Bates College defended the primacy of imagination: " In the view of racial solipsists, it is deemed illegitimate –inappropriate and even appropriative –to assume that it is possible to understand the lived experience of another… And in a trivial sense, of course, this is obviously correct. I will never ‘truly understand’ what is it like to be a disabled woman, or a Ukrainian immigrant, or a tax- avoiding billionaire. But there is a difference between drawing limits to what we can reasonably know about others and asserting that we should all stay trapped in prisons of our own positionality, unable to reason about - or simply imagine –being other than ourselves.”

Indeed, my own observation suggests that censorship based on the race of the author is primarily a project driven by white people who embrace a perversely proscriptive mutation of racial progressivism, rooted in a combination of condescension with ideological authoritarianism and a blinkered view of humanity. Concerning his own scholarship, Professor Harper writes of a parallel experience in academia:" Over the last decade, I have been persistently dumbfounded by comfortable white (supposedly ' woke’) faculty members suggesting that a Black person isn't sufficiently focused on their own Blackness. With a single exception, every time I've been criticized for studying white authors, it was a progressive- presenting white academic levying the complaint.”

So, too, with publishing. Viewed in this light, the self–righteousness inherent in enforcing the preemptive censorship of fiction based on authorial identity is redolent with irony. Given the demographics of the major publishing houses in Manhattan, it is near-certain that a great majority of publishers who objected to my identity are white, and have little or no experience of the challenges facing the Black Georgians who spoke to me from their own hard experience. For these publishers to imagine themselves the literary benefactors of Black America bespeaks a self-flattering and lamentably unexamined paternalism. Do they never look in the mirror, and she reflected the book banners and racial history suppressors of the right?

Nor, it seems, have they reflected on the nature of publishing - or literature itself. Authors aren't like applicants competing for the same job. Nor is fiction fungible. Each novel is its own creation, unique to its author; it exists only because that author imagined it. If a particular author is allowed to publish a meritorious book, it hardly means that a different novel by some presumptively more suitable author will not be published. Publishing is not a zero sum game.

To the contrary, a regime of preemptive censorship means that there will be fewer good books to read –including those which are never written for fear of cancellation. Indeed, preemptive censorship is particularly insidious because it is largely invisible, occurring behind closed doors of publishing houses rather than subject to public debate or, equally, in self-censorship which prevents books from being written at all. As I noted in the Wall Street Journal, “Consider the plight of a gifted young writer driven to base a first novel in an identity different from their own –a novel that might then be quashed along with the potential for a literary career. How badly will their chances of publication be diminished depending on their identity? What chances will they decide not to take in order to keep on writing? And how would the rest of us know that our potential reading was the poorer for it?”

Enough. We don't need a race–based limitation on citizenship in the world of letters premised on the insistence that it is impossible, even arrogant, to deploy authorial imagination beyond ones racial identity. Instead, we need a capacious  literary sensibility that unshackles the creative gifts of diverse fiction writers who make a conscientious commitment to cast off the myopia of tribe. Literature should expand our humanity, not shrink it.