“Before
the manuscript had even reached the presses, however, a furor erupted when
Zhao, a 26-year-old banker born in Paris and raised in Beijing, was accused of
racism. Armed with merely the blurb and a handful of excerpts from the book,
her critics — many of them fellow authors, editors and bloggers in the Young
Adult genre (known as YA) — repeatedly tore into Zhao on sites such as Twitter
and Goodreads, outraged by, among other things, the novel’s depiction of
indentured labour. For despite Blood Heir’s Slavic setting,
her detractors assumed the plot was inspired by American slavery and thus
something Zhao had no business writing about because she is not black. In a
tirade that might surprise students of Russian antiquity, one critic reportedly
raged: “[R]acist ass writers, like Amélie Wen Zhao, […] literally take Black
narratives and force it into Russia when that shit NEVER happened in history.’”
You might expect an author to
reply with manners or even a bunch of “F--- you” remarks.
But, nooo.
“For
Zhao, the onslaught proved too much and in January she released a statement
titled ‘To The Book Community: An Apology’ in which she confirmed she had
withdrawn Blood Heir from publication. However, in a volte-face last month,
Zhao revealed that, with help from multicultural scholars and ‘sensitivity
readers’, she had re-written the novel and would now be publishing it in
November.”
Do
what? “Multicultural scholars and sensitivity readers?” Those are commonly
known as “censors.”
As
these works are in the field of young readers, there is the distinct
possibility that those “multicultural scholars” and “sensitivity readers” are
part of the first wave of newly-educated millennials who know nothing of
fantasy or history.
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