Who gets to say what?

Heather Mac Donald writes in Quillette about the death of the author and the end of empathy.

The anti-cultural appropriation crusade views racial and sexual identity as something that can be stolen, if a writer from an allegedly privileged group has not been granted ‘permission’ (from whom is never clear) to imagine the life of someone from an official victim group. Publishers are at present rejecting manuscripts of novels and stories because their authors entered into the forbidden territory of victim identity.

Anyone who believes, however, that human beings are incapable of grasping the experience of an allegedly oppressed Other has never read literature, with its stunning insights into, say, female psychology (see, inter alia, The Slaves of Solitude, by Patrick Hamilton) and the lash of stigma (see Esther Waters, by George Moore). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Twain, Thackeray, and countless other authors who have expanded the radius of human sympathy could not be published today. Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner, among others, used dialects in their novels; who is to say whose languages are off limits? Here, again, the rules are asymmetrical. Members of official victim groups are encouraged to expound on and portray the lived experience of ‘white privilege’ and ‘toxic masculinity.’

...An English professor at California State University, Fresno, demanded that all white editors everywhere resign. It’s time for white editors to “STEP DOWN and hand over the positions of power,” wrote Randa Jarrar on Twitter. “We don’t have to wait for them to fuck up. The fact that they hold these positions is fuck up enough.” Never mind that one of the Nation editors was Hispanic; apparently she had no agency. (Jarrar had previously garnered negative publicity in April for gloating over the death of former First Lady Barbara Bush.)

White editors will demur from Jarra’s demand that they step down, of course. Instead, they will keep their positions of authority and compensate for their whiteness with ever more exacting tests of who gets to say what. Such barriers around the human imagination spell the end of literature and the end of empathy.

Read more here.