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Some thoughts on the Blood Heir situation

Okay, enough of my friends have now asked me about Blood Heir that I’ve decided it’s worth posting about. Pray for me.

A few days ago, I saw an author on my TL, LL McKinney, criticizing an ARC she had read, a secondary-world fantasy YA debut called Blood Heir, by Amelie Wen Zhao. She initially identified the book as a problem based on its description including the phrase “oppression is blind to skin color”; later, she read through the book and tweeted about elements that played into racial stereotypes, such as a black character dying to further the emotional arc of a white character. (She also used the word plagiarism to refer to a scene in the book that bears a strong resemblance to a scene in The Hunger Games.) Another YA author, Ellen Oh, tweeted that when you write books to be published outside of your own cultural context, it can be very easy to make mistakes and fall into stereotypes; the thread was clearly in reference to Blood Heir.

On 30 January, Amelie Wen Zhao tweeted an apology, saying that she did not intend to cause harm, that she appreciated the feedback of the book community, and that she asked her publisher “not to publish Blood Heir at this time.”

From my perspective, this was a successful interaction! Some people identified problems in a book that had not yet been published. Not wanting to publish the book with those heretofore unnoticed problems, the author has opted to delay publication. But the coverage of the incident has been very “gasp! censorship!”, and I want to highlight a few things that I think most major outlets have gotten somewhat or very wrong.

Misconception #1: The character’s not black, and the book’s not about American slavery.

The Slate article about this situation is organized in a Q&A format, and one of the Qs is “So … the author has said that the American slave trade was not the inspiration and the character might not even be black?”

First up, the author’s inspiration is not the only relevant point. When you create a world for a fantasy novel, it’s inevitable that some elements of your nations and ethnicities will overlap with nations and ethnicities in the real world; and this can be both intentional and not. I grew up in the American South, and I have a good working knowledge of stereotypes about American black folks, which means I could probably steer clear of a lot of those when making up fictional peoples. (Hopefully all of them, but this country is pretty racist, and there are things that take root in our minds even when we try really hard not to be racist.) But I don’t know what stereotypes exist about, for instance, Maori folks, and therefore I wouldn’t know if I had accidentally portrayed my fictional ethnic group using a set of stereotypes commonly used for Maori folks. That I didn’t intend for my characters to be read as Maori wouldn’t preclude the possibility that they might read that way to people more familiar than me with negative stereotypes about Maori folks. (Including, you know, actual Maori people! Who would then be hurt by what I had written! Even though I didn’t mean for them to be!)

Because I don’t have a copy of the book myself (like I said, I hadn’t heard of it before this dust-up), I can’t pull quotes myself to make the case either way. However, the author herself specifically identifies this character as being “islander/Caribbean-esque.” Not all Caribbean slaves were black, certainly, but I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that the book and the character are divorced from the history of the slave trade in the Americas.

ETA (7 February 2019): I didn’t have a screencap until now, but apparently the author also posted about the book using a picture of Amandla Stenberg to represent the character in question.

Misconception #2: The author was forced to cancel her book.

I really have a problem with the people who ignore Zhao’s own words in their defenses of her. She says that she chose to delay the book (or pull it), and I don’t see a reason not to believe her on that. You can say “wow I wish she had made a different decision,” but I think it’s deeply patronizing to contradict her words by arguing that she was forced to do it. She chose to do it. It’s not actually outside the realm of possiblity that a person might receive evidence of a problem with her book, and want more time to examine and address that problem. Give the woman the dignity of her choice, damn.

Moreover, neither of the two YA authors who have been cited (and harassed) in relation to this controversy were calling for the book to be pulled. Neither of them made any recommendation about the book’s ultimate fate. They both flagged problems; that’s all they did.

ETA: I popped into Zhao’s Twitter, and she has a lot of shitty people in her mentions calling her a coward for making this decision. So like, if she were inclined to make decisions based on what Twitter tells her to do, the book would already be back in the summer line-up. IT IS ALMOST AS IF SHE HAS AGENCY OF HER OWN AND IS ABLE TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT WHAT KINDS OF CRITICISM SHE WISHES TO RESPOND TO AND HOW.

Misconception #3: Twitter destroyed an author’s career! Stop them before they kill again!

Several articles have compared the Blood Heir situation to criticisms of The Black Witch, a book that — seems to be doing fine? It has a 4-star average rating on Goodreads, its sequel dropped last September, and the author appears to be hard at work on the final book in the trilogy. There’s not a ton of reason to believe that criticism of the YA book on grounds of racism destroys authors’ careers.

(Which, by the way, authors’ careers tank all the time, for a bunch of genuinely stupid, random reasons. “Your book was kinda racist” is far from the worst reason that an author might not get a second book contract.)

As for Zhao’s career in particular, I do think Blood Heir will see the light of day once she does some revisions. I also saw YA authors, including Ellen Oh, respond to Zhao’s statement with encouragement, voicing enthusiasm to read her book when it does eventually come out.

Misconception #4: The whole furore was led by people who haven’t read the book yet.

I guess there may have been some people RTing stuff about Blood Heir that haven’t read it! But since the coverage of this controversy has focused on Ellen Oh and LL McKinney, it’s worth mentioning that they both did read the book. McKinney makes it clear in her original thread that she’s going through an electronic ARC of the book, and she mentions a number of specifics (plot threads, worldbuilding details). Oh also said on Twitter that she had read the book.

Zooming out to a macro level, it is notable to me how quickly white journalists jumped to a framing of Twitter mob and toxic bullying when the people voicing the criticisms were women of color. I am old enough to remember these exact same articles being written about black women feminists critiquing white women’s allyship, back in the innocent days before 53% of white women voters went for Trump. (I’m not going to link to them because my God, hasn’t Mikki Kendall been through enough?) I would encourage white journalists think long and hard before choosing to write pieces that frame women of color as aggressive, bullying mobs.

ETA, because I think this bears mentioning: Neither of the two YA authors I’ve mentioned (I’m not linking to their tweets because they are getting a lot of abuse right now) tagged Amelie Wen Zhao in their threads. Neither of them mentioned the author’s name. By contrast, one of the people who immediately wrote a piece about the situation (Jesse Singal) (who by the way really sucks) tagged both of the YA authors in question in his tweets about what was going on, which has led to a flurry of hostile, racist attacks against them. They have both left Twitter. Yet somehow they, and not the numerous journalists who have uncritically picked up the “toxic YA Twitter” narrative, are the mob. Women of color, especially black women, are always the mob.

I’m ETAing this section because articles about the Blood Heir situation are now relitigating past cases where books received criticism for using racist tropes, which means the black and Native women who critiqued those books are being (again) accused of mob rule. It’s unbelievably exhausting and predictable.

Here’s a question that I would love commenters to weigh in on — in part because I myself am trying to firm up my own opinions on the matter. Under which of these circumstances, if any, is it reasonable to delay a book’s publication? In each case, do you think the publisher should be the exclusive arbiter of that decision? The author? Someone else?

  1. if the context in which the premise will be received abruptly changes (e.g., if you had a book about a school shooting slated to publish, and then Newtown happened)
  2. if another book with eerie similarities came out (assume no plagiarism has occurred and it’s just one of those weird things like that year there were two romcoms about a President’s daughter trying to shake off the burden of political life)
  3. if a reviewer with an advance copy identifies major errors in fact
  4. if a reviewer with an advance copy identifies major oversights in interpretation
  5. if a reviewer with an advance copy identifies harmful stereotypes of marginalized groups
  6. other reasons?

6 is a catch-all, obviously, so please let me know if there are other circumstances in which a book might be pulled, and you have opinions about those circumstances!