Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! examines the emergence of a new job in publishing—secondary readers who comb through books for possible offenses.
Louis Marcoussis, Le Lecteur, 1937.(Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images).
As a sensitivity reader, your job is to peruse novels in progress to ensure that they do not include any harmful depictions of people whose identity differs from that of the author. The source of your authority on the matter? Your own race, sexual orientation, disability, or other identity marker. There are Taiwanese sensitivity readers, Muslim sensitivity readers, trans sensitivity readers, wheelchair-using sensitivity readers, and even white ones whose expertise is the ethnic-Greek experience. This raises the possibility of the following scenario: Say you’re a Greek American whom an editor has offered $500 to take a look at a forthcoming novel, since its cast of characters includes the child of a Greek-diner owner who, the editor fears, might seem a little stereotypical. The author is more of a Mayflower type, so how much insight could they really have into the generational trauma of food service in suburban Detroit?
Reading through the novel, you’re repelled by the procedural prose, but since your role is limited to performing a sensitivity read, you laser in on the 20 or so pages where the Greek kid appears. You note the thinly veiled references to his father’s “kalamata-stained fingertips” and his ultramasculine swagger. Your own parents were professors from Kolonaki (indeed, you’re quite looking forward to your next family trip back to Athens), so you can’t quite parse a reference to the character’s great-grandfather emigrating to Michigan from a town you’ve never heard of in Thessaly. Still, you dutifully make your notes, suggest a few changes (“I’ve never met a Greek named Harper”), and e-mail them to the editor. You hope, when your own novel in progress is ready for submission, you’ll be looked upon favorably.
This scenario, however baffling, is an increasingly common feature of the publishing business. Sensitivity readers first came into vogue around 2016, when Jodi Picoult reportedly hired some to help her craft a depiction of a Black nurse in the novel Small Great Things. The Guardian and Current Affairs applauded her and other early adopters as refreshingly enlightened, with the latter publication proclaiming: “Bring On the Sensitivity Readers.” Since then, at least one publishing imprint, HarperCollins’s romance-focused Harlequin, has added sensitivity readers to its permanent staff, while the indie publisher Riptide, according to The New York Times, “has begun requiring authors writing outside their own identities to have their manuscripts reviewed by a sensitivity reader before it will accept them, submits all such manuscripts itself to a second sensitivity reader, and has promised to distribute a formal sensitivity guide among all of its staff and authors.” The Times report states that the use of sensitivity readers is most pervasive in children’s publishing, where they “have practically become a routine part of the editing process.”
In That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, the scholar Adam Szetela attributes the rise of sensitivity readers to the fear of publishing executives that a book from their list might be the next one to trigger outrage online. For this study, Szetela anonymously interviewed dozens of book professionals, including authors, agents, and C-suite denizens from the so-called Big Five publishing houses. Szetela critiques what he calls “the Sensitivity Era” of publishing and the counterintuitive toll it’s taken on what books can get published, with racial essentialism being prized over nuanced characterizations that seek to fully articulate the complexities of American identity across class and educational backgrounds.
Szetela details several high-profile incidents in which a book became a whipping horse online, including when Jeanine Cummins, the white author of American Dirt, was pilloried for her depiction of Mexican characters, and when Ramin Ganeshram, a Trinidadian American writer of Indian and Iranian descent who wrote a children’s book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington, was excoriated for how her book “whitewashes slavery.” Borrowing a term from the McCarthy era, Szetela labels each burst of digital indignation a “degradation ceremony” and charts how they spiral predictably from social media to the highest echelons of corporate publishing.
Publishers take very seriously even the most bad-faith campaigns to tar a book; a handful of posts on X or Goodreads can sometimes generate enough backlash to force a house to rethink its relationship with the author in question. “In some cases,” Szetela writes, “the degradation ceremony continues until an author loses their literary agent, has their book pulled from distribution, or otherwise takes a hit that will diminish their ability to provide for themselves and their families.”
Initiated by chronically online crusaders, these degradation ceremonies serve no purpose beyond affirming the moral rectitude of their participants. More troubling, Szetela argues, is how attuned the publishing industry has become to this online coterie—so much so that the responsiveness of the liberal sectors of publishing to keyboard warriors ends up providing cover to the conservative wings of the same houses, which often flourish without critique. Even if acquiring a book by a demagogue or a controversial politician generates some consternation within a publishing house, that sort of internal dissent matters less to executives than taking the external chattering class into account when it might attack an author for misrepresenting one or another identity category. What could possibly explain the same group’s showering of opprobrium on allies and its continuing indifference to foes? For Szetela, it all comes back to the refusal of anyone involved in this toxic cycle to pay even the slightest attention to the working class.
Tracking degradation ceremonies can feel like playing whack-a-mole. Szetela’s narrative begins in 2019, when Amélie Wen Zhao’s debut novel, Blood Heir, became a target for social-media rage because its jacket copy described a world where “oppression is blind to skin color, and good and evil exist in shades of gray.” L.L. McKinney was one of a number of fellow YA authors who shared that text with their followers, tweeting: “someone explain this to me. EXPLAIN IT RIGHT THE FUQ NOW.” Zhao issued a public apology on Twitter, and her publisher postponed the book’s release so it could be significantly revised. Two months later, an author named Kosoko Jackson, who had also criticized Zhao on Twitter, found himself in a similar situation when a Goodreads user wrote that “I have never been so disgusted in my life”—because the villain of Jackson’s forthcoming A Place for Wolves, a novel set during the Kosovo War, was an Albanian Muslim, the demographic targeted by Serbs for extermination during that conflict. The book was never released.
Similar brouhahas have continued to break out on a regular basis. Last year, for instance, the romance novel Sparrow and Vine was withdrawn by its publisher because some Goodreads users were incensed that one of the characters was rude to undocumented farm workers and praised Elon Musk. It hardly mattered that the book’s author, Sophie Lark, had deliberately set out to create a “flawed character” whom readers were meant to view with skepticism; such subtlety is missed when literary analysis stops at the level of key words.
Szetela argues that the willingness of publisher after publisher to cave in immediately to social-media pressure stems from a more enduring problem: the inequality within their offices. In 2023, a survey from the publisher Lee & Low found that the industry was 72.5 percent white, while the ranks of leadership were 76.7 percent white. Although the survey found that diversity in the overall publishing industry had grown over the previous four years, the leadership looked practically the same. When diversity is seen as a zero-sum game, it becomes harder for those from working-class backgrounds, regardless of race, to break into the industry: One agent observes that, because salaries for entry-level jobs at publishing houses are so low, “a lot of people have parental support. That cuts out a big portion of people who might otherwise be interested in the field.”
The same critique could have been made of publishing 20, or 40, or 60 years ago. The difference now is not just the way that social media creates a vector for the public to directly attack publishers for their blind spots but also the cottage industry that has sprung up to shield them. Indeed, it is not social media itself that defines Szetela’s Sensitivity Era but rather “sensitivity readers, diversity gurus, and other moral entrepreneurs selling consultations, seminars, webinars, weekend retreats, and so on.”
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There is little room, in this environment, for a meaningful reform of publishing. Instead, Szetela writes, the mores of the Sensitivity Era “endow VPs, editors, agents, and other gatekeepers with moral capital while not requiring them to sacrifice anything in return.” This makes publishing little different from any other progressive workplace, from the marble edifice of an Ivy League university to the linoleum kitchenette of a local nonprofit. Everywhere, conscientious white liberals feel immense pressure to address the iniquities of society even as they resist any changes that might compromise their positions of authority.
The cognitive dissonance around diversity inside elite spaces is obvious to the wider public, which helps to explain the unpopularity of political correctness in America writ large. That the Sensitivity Era has persisted through the opening year of the second Trump administration suggests the deep disconnect between social-media gadflies and the actual human beings they purport to represent. Calling out a romance author for her unflattering depiction of an undocumented migrant does little to change the wider discourse around immigration—indeed, it only underscores the tendency of progressives to emphasize the country of origin of undocumented laborers over their living conditions and lack of legal protections. Meanwhile, publishing executives quietly play both sides, ensuring that both Ibram X. Kendi and Josh Hawley have a place in their catalogs.
Aside from the “moral entrepreneurs” whose livelihood revolves around monetizing the fear of cancellation, nobody has benefited more from the Sensitivity Era than conservative politicians. Whenever a particularly gaudy bit of inclusivity furor breaches containment on social media—the discovery of some racist images in old Dr. Seuss books, or copies of Harry Potter being burned because of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia—conservatives are quick to seize the opportunity to paint anyone who champions multiculturalism as the Thought Police from 1984.
The same Republican who defends the First Amendment in one breath may call for banning a book that acknowledges the existence of gay people or addresses the history of American slavery in the next. However hypocritical this may seem to a free-speech absolutist, it showcases the calculated way that many conservatives navigate questions of censorship. Conservative media’s forever war on political correctness is ideologically aligned with MAGA revanchism: Firing Black government officials, the mass deportation of immigrants, and the restriction of abortion rights all fit into a coherent vision of returning America to an era when comedians could feel free to offend anyone and everyone and C-suites were exclusively white and male.
Even as these cultural currents reshape the nation, the publishing industry’s inattention to class has left it stuck in the paradigm that produced Kendi’s Antiracist Baby. Though they may “love to talk about the differences between black people and white people, trans people and cis people, and queer people and heterosexual people,” Szetela writes, “many of these liberals have little or nothing to say about the differences between the overwhelming majority of Americans on the one hand and highly educated Americans with high incomes (themselves) on the other.”
When class is removed as a consideration, it becomes all too easy to cast any minority writer as a spokesperson for their demographic—yet sensitivity readers effectively argue for the essentializing of racial characteristics by claiming the ability to adjudicate the “authenticity” of a fictional character. The result is an array of well-intentioned white people so terrified of online backlash that they feel empowered to ask a Black author to justify a Black character’s desire to go to a national park (“if this little girl loves to camp, you need to figure out how that happened”) or to turn down a Latina author for “not writing in an authentic Latina voice.”
There are limits to how much of America’s complex polity the publishing industry is willing to wrestle with, especially when it might affect the bottom line. One of Szetela’s interview subjects reflects that not everyone “can afford to have these complicated, impossible to follow belief systems as a way of showing—kind of as a way of relieving their guilt for being so privileged.” That leaves authors holding the bag. With no impetus from publishers to include class in their constellation of carefully curated identities, how can you blame an aspiring writer for focusing on what might actually get them published?
This sort of posturing feels downright naïve in the current political climate, to the point that it’s tempting to assume that the Sensitivity Era may already have come to a close—after all, the multiyear lag between acquiring and publishing many titles means that the backlash from the heady days of 2020 is still not completely evident in bookstores. At least four of the Black women who were named to prominent roles in the Big Five in that period have since moved on or been dismissed. (That group includes Lisa Lucas, who led Pantheon when the house acquired my first book but was gone by the time it was released last year.) Even so, could it really be possible that a MAGA era is forthcoming when the same publishers who assimilated #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices activism into their business models over the past 10 years were simultaneously quashing internal resistance to releasing books by conservative ideologues like Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopoulos?
An executive at one house remarks to Szetela that although many production and marketing staffers loathe being assigned to books by conservative figures, “anyone who is incentivized to make money is in support of conservative imprints because they have tended to be very lucrative.” That sentiment is echoed by a different publishing executive, discussing the fact that practically every book published for children or young adults today revolves around identity: “The truth is when books sell, we do more of the kinds of books that sell. It’s that crass.” Publishers recognize that there is profit to be made on both flanks of the culture war, so they have adroitly moved to capitalize by investing in imprints specifically geared toward serving both markets: All Seasons Press and Threshold Editions for the right, Joy Revolution and Emancipation Books for the left.
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From this perspective, sensitivity readers begin to seem less like an inescapable part of the publishing industry and more like an inescapable part of the relatively narrow portion of the industry that serves progressive parents and young adults. The idea of hiring a few people to give your manuscript a read to ensure that you haven’t unintentionally used a harmful stereotype before you try to sell that book to the people most likely to be offended by it is understandable. Far more odious would be a mandate that every book must be subject to this kind of scrutiny, but there’s little evidence that such a mandate exists outside of a select few imprints. As far as the sensitivity readers themselves, it’s hard to get too upset about a category of young writers taking whatever opportunity they can to participate in an industry that is so notoriously impenetrable.
If the Sensitivity Era can indeed survive the resurgence of fascism, it will say less about the durability of its ideas than the continuing bifurcation of America. Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts, pronouns are still a common feature of e-mail signatures and LinkedIn profiles, ethnic-studies programs and affinity groups continue at most universities, and the children’s section of every locally owned bookstore remains populated by a Rainbow Coalition. Each signal of multiculturalism, acceptance, and, sure, political correctness persists because it does not fundamentally challenge our economic model. We can welcome the alternative vision to the MAGA machine that these signals represent, even as we work to craft a world of revolutionary equity.
Kyle PaolettaKyle Paoletta is a contributing writer at Columbia Journalism Review and the author of American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.