Blood Heir, Caving in to the Mob and Standing Your Ground

Well, since I've decided to make my commentary on the whole Sarah Dessen scandal, I decided to comment on a couple more choice bits of literary drama. However, unlike the previous blog post, this one follows the trend of everything on this blog being late.

To do a quick recap, author Amelie Wen Zhao (sorry, I couldn't do the accent on the "e" without messing up the format of the post) was about to live the dream. She was about to publish her debut novel Blood Heir and receive a princely advance of $500,000 before the start of this summer. Blood Heir was meant to be a dark fantasy retelling of Anastasia. However, because a small, outspoken cluster of reviewers (who had their hands on the ARC) cherrypicked anti-Black racism out of the story, Zhao was backed into a corner and decided to cancel the publication altogether. (There were also accusations of plagiarism, but without the actual text in my hand, I can't decide that for myself.) As you know, my job isn't to give you a play-by-play of the incident. Instead, read about it here: https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/blood-heir-ya-book-twitter-controversy.html

Listen, I %100 respect Zhao's decision. I respect her grace in dealing with this whole situation and I respect her integrity. (I still don't personally think she did a lot wrong, but I believe she has integrity for being willing to put her dreams on hold to listen to her readership.) This post isn't about what I thought Zhao should've done. It's only about what I personally would've done in that situation.

Am I saying that there was zero problematic content in Zhao's manuscript? Not really. All I know is that the world and humanity is so diverse that it's impossible to parse out exactly what is considered the correct wording and descriptions. What might be considered anti-Black to Angela Davis, for example, is completely different to what is considered anti-Black to Candace Owens. So how is the non-Black author meant to be sensitive to the needs of the Black community in general? Personally, my approach is to use my judgement. (As white woman-ish as that sounds.) Personally, if my manuscript has something that my Black reader considers problematic, I don't toss the entire thing or do a complete overhaul. I simply address the issues that my Black reader was vexed with and keep the rest of the manuscript.

For all I know, maybe Zhao did make the right call by scrapping the novel altogether. All I can comment on is what her situation allowed me to reflect upon. In a recent example, I wrote a creative non-fiction piece recently about my hometown. (Perhaps you'll see it in Cal State Fresno's BOOM California Journal next year!) Before I submitted it, I allowed my critique group to look it over first. My one Black reader only requested that I further humanize the marginalized "characters" in the piece and to not "bitch out" (her exact words) in using the full acronym of "W.A.S.P.". Since my piece was about the subtle ways that my city enforces white supremacy and one of my marginalized "characters" is in fact a Black woman, I was grateful for her input.

Another person who critiqued my piece was vehemently triggered by it. In the midst of her extensive critique, I had to parse out what she was actually trying to say to me. (Her critique was very long, to the point that the moderator had to stop her, and I personally failed to connect her points together at first. I don't say this to throw shade. I say this to give contextualization to my story.) Eventually, I figured that she felt offended (and I'm not being an edgelord here, she literally did say she was offended by my piece) by the way I portrayed the affluent community in my city and how I dragged racial and economic inequality into the piece. Upon further reflection, I figured she had a point. Even the most belligerent, angry lifted truck-driving, Jagerbomb-guzzling dudebros of my story deserved at least some degree of humanization. But at the same time, I couldn't accommodate this woman's underlying suggestion to leave racial or economic inequality and gentrification entirely out of the picture. It was the crux of my piece and I felt that I would be caving in if I left it out.

I understand that perhaps this blog post seems all over the place. First I say not to cave in, then I say to listen to people, then I say not to cave in again? I get it. Hopefully by now, you get it, too. I understand how complex the feedback loop on art is. As an author, you should expect me to use a balanced approach. Yes, I will be open to racial sensitivity and even to feedback that I don't necessarily like at first. But at the same time, I have to use my personal judgement to figure out when a person has a valid point and when they're just being hypersensitive or virtue-signalling. (On a completely unrelated note, I normally hate the word virtue-signalling. The first time I heard it was when a "deplorable" responded to me on Twitter. I commented on an article about a white supremacist who was kicked off of OKCupid. Nothing serious. I just made a quip about how he should cheer up since he could still find love on Stormfront. I'm not sure how that joke equated to virtue-signalling to the sensitive deplorable. Maybe because the bar is so low nowadays that being anything better than a white supremacist is suddenly "virtue-signalling". Okay, enough of that, back to the original post.)

Perhaps when I am published someday, I will be cancelled upon the discovery of this post. But, as my one of my favorite Booktubers, Francina Simone, says, "People get cancelled all the time. Then they get renewed for another season." Perhaps I'll be too tired to fight as a published author. I can't say for sure that I will never cave in to the demands of the Twitter mob. But for the sake of my art and keeping it authentic and intact, I have to at least try.