So Jeanine Cummins wrote a book called American Dirt about a Mexican woman and her son fleeing a drug cartel and making a run at the U.S. border, and literary critics of a certain bent are panning it—not because it's bad, although it might be—but because Cummins appropriated a culture that doesn't "belong" to her.
Appropriation is when you speak from another person's POV or temporarily adopt their traits as your own. In short, it's what writers do. You create a character; you build the setting around them; you give them traits, some of them personal, others cultural; and you drop them in a conflict that allows them to overcome and grow. It's a benign practice, and it's been done for hundreds if not thousands of years. It's especially common in fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction. Whether you're writing for an elf, a Klingon, or a Roman soldier, you're trying to show the reader something he hasn't seen, hopefully something magical.
The key word here is "try." Sometimes it's done well, like in a book I'm reading now, a Japanese historical fantasy by David V. Stewart called Muramasa. Sometimes it's not done well, like in a technothriller called Arctic Rising. The former succeeded because the Japanese characters fit the setting and the story DVS wanted to tell. The latter failed because the author, Tobias Buckell, was clearly using his Nigerian lesbian hero to check diversity boxes and further his sociopolitical agenda.
I don't know and don't really care if Cummins succeeded in portraying an authentic Mexican woman. What bothers me is other people telling her she can't because she's white. Mexican immigrant culture isn't "hers," so she should leave the story for someone else to tell. It's amazing this cretinous tripe still gets peddled in 2020 America after decades of mainstreaming racial egalitarianism through every cultural institution. If a Latino had written this book, seriously, what publisher wouldn't want to publish it?
Esmeralda Bermudez is at the forefront of the backlash. Check our her Twitter feed. She's particularly aggrieved there's not enough diversity in publishing. (Maybe the problem is there's not enough diversity among readers.) Conveniently you never hear what percentage of representation diversity activists want. Setting a hard quota would preface an eventual end to the grievance, thus an end to the movement. But the movement mustn't end. It's not about diversity. It's about leveraging racial grievance to exercise an insatiable will to power.
Book publicists put on a full-court press for American Dirt: securing Oprah's endorsement, printing blurbs from Stephen King and John Grisham, etc. I went to Costco last Friday and there must have been a hundred hardbacks for sale. Now, the publisher has canceled the rest of the book tour and replaced it with a shorter series of Maoist struggle sessions where Cummins will have to engage with critics telling her she can't write what she wants because of her skin color. There's a word for that: racism.
With that out of the way, I think Cummins is partly to blame for this. Whatever catharsis of racial attention she hoped to achieve with the subject matter will not come up pass. In fact, she's made it worse. Her appeasing attitude and willing acknowledgement of her "privilege" is all grifters need to delegitimize her success. As soon as you admit you profited unfairly from a supposedly racist system, you have no defense against that success being taken from you.
Courting this ugliness won't save tradpub. It will accelerate its ruin. Meanwhile, independent creators are putting out great books. They have one aim above all: entertainment.
You can judge for yourself whether I've done that in my own writing by taking a look at the first 4 chapters of Seeds of Calamity. If it piques your interest, get yourself a copy at Amazon. I appreciate the support!
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And as always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll reply as soon as I can.