The Highs and Lows of the Sensitivity Read

A publisher's take on the value of sensitivity reads, and their shadow side

Sensitivity reads became nearly prerequisite in the months following George Floyd’s murder. The massive social justice initiatives of that summer and fall were a wake-up call for the publishing industry, which had long acknowledged how white-centered and -dominant it was, but remained inert when it came to making any real and meaningful changes.

That summer another blow to the industry landed when, in the early days of June 2020, the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe went viral. This collective public sharing of advances showed us discrepancies that could not be ignored between what white authors were making and what their Black counterparts were making by comparison.

In my two-plus decades in book publishing, I’ve never watched anything go from a simmer to a boil so fast. Like a smaller-scale #MeToo moment, it felt as if every writer and author of color who’d ever been slighted by the industry, who’d ever been underpaid by their publishing houses, who’d ever felt resentment about white authors dominating the publishing landscape, was coming forward with a story to tell. And everyone had a story. I remember Luis Alberto Urrea later sharing with me what an editor in New York said about one of his novels, “No one wants to read about dirty Mexicans.” It was shocking to hear those words, yet emblematic of the kind of reactions (ie, abuse) writers of color had been swallowing for years.

To publishing’s credit, it course-corrected. In the immediate months to follow, publishers started acquiring massive numbers of titles by writers of color—a wave we’re still riding and one I hope won’t recede as a passing trend. Most publishing houses supported DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) training. Most houses hired more people of color. And, the practice of hiring sensitivity readers emerged like a volcano on a previously flat landscape. For my publishing house, adopting the sensitivity read felt like stepping into place, getting with the program. We added to our submissions form the following language:

In our current culture we are sensitive to and take very seriously the heightened awareness around race, sexual orientation/gender identity, ethnicity or cultural background, ableism, and more. If you are writing a book in which you have a character that is not your racial, sexual orientation/gender, or cultural identity, please share with us here.

Today, I about 25% of our authors get sensitivity reads prior to publication.

A sensitivity read, according to Wikipedia, addresses “perceived offensive content, stereotypes, and biases.” But the value for me as a publisher, and for publicists representing our authors in the media environment, is that these reads take into consideration topics that are historically loaded, or which are simply “sensitive,” meaning that if you’re not in it, if you’re not living it, you don’t know what you don’t know. Some authors fear that the sensitivity read will change their voice, or that their publishers will force unwanted changes on the manuscript, but in my experience this is rarely the case. Instead, it gives writers the opportunity—and I would argue the moral imperative—to be what Daniel José Older calls a “responsible creator.” (Listen to the Write-minded podcast on this subject for his important insights: “How to be a Responsible Creator.”)

Overall, the adoption of sensitivity reads has been so good for the industry, and for the genres it serves, but like everything good, it does have a shadow side. I’ve seen this shadow emerge in a few different ways: 1) sensitivity readers’ compounding authors’ shame; 2) failing to consider the importance of the Western mindset to “sensitivity”; and finally, applying “presentism” to judge books from the past.

Let me unpack:

1. Shaming
The sensitivity read is a virtuous and important tool for fiction, particularly and uniquely for writing outside one’s own experience, but more fraught when it comes to memoir. Memoir, after all, is one’s own lived experience. Also, in my experience, women often get shamed for their choices, judged for things they share in their memoirs when they’re writing about things like sex, motherhood, desire, and more. We’ve run into complexities with sensitivity readers over books by mothers of disabled children, for instance, because the memoirist has articulated something that’s true to her experience but is perceived by the reader to be harmful to the disabled community. In multiple cases, mother-authors have pushed back on various points to note that a feeling they’re writing about—such as regret, or longing to have had a child not burdened by disability—is a valid part of their lived experience. The sensitivity reads, at times, have contributed to authors’ sense that the full range of their emotional truth is disallowed. All of this begs a question, too, of what the memoirist’s role is, how much they have a mandate to protect others. In memoir, expressing unpopular truths is both part of the genre and part of the fallout.

2. The Western Lens
Sensitivity emerged to try to address dominant culture. Progressive-minded people see the reverberations of historical oppression, and the ways that stereotypes and biases have worked to hold people back, demean them, and worse. It’s this desire to do better that drives the sensivity reads. So a problem can and does emerge when international citizens are brought in to be the artiber in matters of their own cultures, if and when they don’t have a Western context of sensivity. I’ve seen this play out often with writers whose stories take place in, say, Sudan, or Thailand, or Peru. These writers, following the logic that a Black reader should read for Black characters/experience, a gay reader for gay characters/experience, insist they need someone native to the culture they’re writing about to be their reader. But unless that person holds deep context about the West’s current reckoning, they’re actually not the best sensitivity readers. Too often my authors have said to me, “Oh, my Sudanese friend read it and they said they weren’t offended by anything.” That’s likely because they don’t know what to look for. I would argue that a progessive-minded Western person attuned to the issues is more likely to spot a white-savoir narrative for the simple fact of their awareness of it. So when it comes to sensitivity reads, I don’t think we need to insist that the reader have the lived experience of the character/experience, but rather that they have the mindset and attunement to the issues that need addressing.

3. Presentism
This one has been the subject of much consternation—recently with Agatha Christie, who’s been at the center of this debate, or Georgette Heyer, one of the most popular and influential romance authors of all time (and subject of a recent NYT article on this topic). “Presentism” is the phenomenon of judging others by the standards of our era rather than theirs. Yes, overt racism in literature is distressing to read, and it also shows us something about the person, their privilege, and the context of the era in which a given piece of writing emerged. I also think it matters who the reader is—a child vs. an adult. I support removing racist tropes from kids’ classics, like the Dr. Seuss books that were “fixed” to remove certain racist depictions. On the other hand, when it comes to adult fiction, thinking adults with an awareness of the world we live in might be better served by an introduction or foreword added to the front of a book, written either by a family member, another author, or the publisher, articulating that some of the views or language or perspectives in a given book are not condoned and reflect a bias that was common, or permissible, at the time. To feature this prominently at the front of the book, to my mind, would be a more powerful reparation than simply editing out the offenses, sweeping them under the rug.

With all the changes going on in publishing, mostly for the better, I’ve heard many writers and authors (all of them white) bemoaning the notion that they’re not “allowed” to write the other. This is simply not true. Most publishers and editors, authors and writers, believe that anyone can tell the story they want to tell, as long as it’s done responsibly.

Part of being a responsible creator involves hiring people with perspectives different from yours to read your work. We can also go into our writing holding ourselves to more rigorous standards, asking ourselves questions about what we must include in our stories and why. And, human experience is messy and complicated, and literature has long been a window into the vastness of that messiness. We also live in a culture that encourages us to live out loud, all the while being ready to pounce on anyone who transgresses norms (which are also changing all the time). All of this is true. All of this is complex.

Living in the nuance is what makes us creators. Thinking about how we show up on the page, given this nuance, is what makes us responsible ones.