 Alberta Gulaba Jr. is a first-generation college grad from a working-class background who was set to publish his debut novel that told the story of a black ex-offender going to college at a predominantly white university. His publisher, an agent, thought Gulaba might become a literary wonderkind. But right before university thugs came out, his agent wanted to promote the book by highlighting Gulaba's racial identity. And then he made an 11th-hour discovery that could have only happened in the age Though the book featured an African-American protagonist, Gulaba himself is Filipino. After his agent's discovery, not only was Gulaba asked to make changes, the publisher also hired a black editor to give the book a careful read. Novelist Kat Rosenfield recounts this story in a recent article in Reason Magazine, titled Rise of the Sensitivity Reader. A sensitivity reader is hired either by an author or by the author's publisher to review the book specifically in terms of how characters with certain marginalizations or certain identity characteristics are written and to let the author know if they've gotten it, quote unquote, right. Rosenfield has first-hand experience with the process. She was once brought in to read the novel of a male author to verify that he had accurately portrayed the female experience. I had to imagine myself in the position of a much more sensitive, much more easily offended person. The kind of person who reads a book looking for something to get mad at. I was doing something fundamentally at odds with what it means to write fiction. Trying to get this man to save his own hide by altering his book in service of the sensibilities of people who were never going to read it in the first place. Though authors rarely talk about this process publicly, sensitivity reading seems to be a growing phenomenon among publishers and writers fearful of Twitter mobs. By bringing in a sensitivity reader, Globis publishers were essentially saying that a Filipino author can't be trusted to envision the thoughts and motivations of a black ex-con. What was sort of ironic was the idea behind sensitivity reading is that if you don't share certain identity characteristics with your characters, that it's morally wrong, essentially, to try to imagine their interior lives and that you're not actually capable of doing it. That this act of imagination is off limits to you, that you're not going to be good at it, that you're prohibited from it in some way ethically. There is this very kind of race essentialist, even crude stereotyping going on. In 2019, the Scottish writer Kate Clanshee published an award-winning memoir titled Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. In one passage, she wrote, In Essex, though, the kids fiercely denied that their names had any history or meaning at all. I was baffled when a boy with jet-black hair and eyes and a fine Ashkenazi nose named David Marks refused any Jewish heritage, or when a freckled Irish-eyed kid called Orirdin declared he'd never heard of Dublin. Elsewhere in the book, Clanshee described a character named Kumar as long and slender as many of the Somali kids are, with a thin nose, narrow skull, and very dark, almost black skin. And then a character named Adel as more muscular and square-set, with chocolate-colored skin, a broad-faced nose, and rounded head. It was the three lines, really. Ashkenazi nose, chocolate skin. People were caricaturing every single thing I'd done. There wasn't anything I could do about it. They were saying that some of the most that I was, some of the things that I most fundamentally hate. Would a sensitivity reader have saved Clanshee and her publisher from the Twitter mob? It turned out that a sensitivity reader had vetted the book. It's just that the person hadn't flagged the offending phrases. She submitted to multiple sensitivity reads from multiple different people. And what she described was not just that the sensitivity readers were often in conflict with each other, but that they were reading the book not to make it better literature, but to make it palatable to a very particular type of extremely oversensitive sort of Twitter-activist person. There was this aspect of language policing, of being asked to sort of represent the world as people wished to see it rather than as it was. It's not about writing. I can tell you that because nobody had read the book. So it was about me as a Twitter person. Because it means that publishing is entirely about social media and popular people will be published and unpopular people won't be. And people's reputations will rise and fall entirely on that. And I do apologize. And I have apologized. In March of 2022, the author Sandra Newman posted a cover reveal and plot synopsis of her new book, The Men, on Twitter. The book utilized the premise of gender side, where all the men disappear from the planet, leaving behind only individuals with X chromosomes. But there was something Newman had failed to account for. It's offensive in certain circles to suggest that everybody with an XY chromosome is in fact a man. Cue the Twitter mob. Many assumed that Newman had skipped a sensitivity read. They started saying, like, what about trans people? What about trans people in this book? Did you have a trans sensitivity reader? Author says, I did have a trans sensitivity reader. And then the response to that was, what? Only one? Do you think that's an excuse? Like, this is even worse. It means you knowingly did this. Sandra Newman went ahead and released the book anyway. Kay Clanchy is currently rewriting parts of her memoir, and Gulaba gave up on trying to accommodate his agent's demands and self-publish his book under a pseudonym. Now, he's working on his second novel. And if his agent suggests a sensitivity read, he says he might self-publish again. As publishers become more skittish about white authors writing about the minority experience, they're encouraging minority authors to fill the void. They're being pigeonholed into writing these very specific narratives that really are like an elite white agent and editorial world's idea of what a marginalized person's story is. They're being asked to write about violence and racial trauma. And, you know, that's not necessarily what they want to do. So it's just as bad for an imaginative person of color. The people who come after these books, they really do not seem to be particularly interested in reading. They're more interested in getting angry. And I think writing with them in mind ultimately does a disservice to everybody, including the story itself.