by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org
This morning (Januay 27, 2020) on NPR I heard a white female novelist describe her difficulty in getting her novel published. The problem was not that her novel was uninteresting or badly written. Her problem was that one of the characters was black. Unbeknownst to her, it is now considered cultural imperialism or cultural trespassing—some such term—for a person with white skin to write about even fictional people of color.
Publishers liked her novel, but were afraid to publish it. They told the novelist that publishing her book would bring them charges of insensitivity toward blacks and be regarded as a sign of their disrespect of the maxim that only blacks can know about blacks. Her problem was not that she was writing insensitively about blacks, but that it is now considered insensitive for a white person to invade black culture by having a black character in a novel.