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The Rise of the Sensitivity Reader

Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! examines the emergence of a new job in publishing—secondary readers who comb through books for possible offenses.

Louis Marcoussis’s “Le Lecteur,” 1937.

As a sensitivity reader, your job is to peruse novels in progress to ensure that they do not include any harmful depictions of people whose identity differs from that of the author. The source of your authority on the matter? Your own race, sexual orientation, disability, or other identity marker. There are Taiwanese sensitivity readers, Muslim sensitivity readers, trans sensitivity readers, wheelchair-using sensitivity readers, and even white ones whose expertise is the ethnic-Greek experience. This raises the possibility of the following scenario: Say you’re a Greek American whom an editor has offered $500 to take a look at a forthcoming novel, since its cast of characters includes the child of a Greek-diner owner who, the editor fears, might seem a little stereotypical. The author is more of a Mayflower type, so how much insight could they really have into the generational trauma of food service in suburban Detroit?

That Book is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing

Reading through the novel, you’re repelled by the procedural prose, but since your role is limited to performing a sensitivity read, you laser in on the 20 or so pages where the Greek kid appears. You note the thinly veiled references to his father’s “kalamata-stained fingertips” and his ultramasculine swagger. Your own parents were professors from Kolonaki (indeed, you’re quite looking forward to your next family trip back to Athens), so you can’t quite parse a reference to the character’s great-grandfather emigrating to Michigan from a town you’ve never heard of in Thessaly. Still, you dutifully make your notes, suggest a few changes (“I’ve never met a Greek named Harper”), and e-mail them to the editor. You hope, when your own novel in progress is ready for submission, you’ll be looked upon favorably.

This scenario, however baffling, is an increasingly common feature of the publishing business. Sensitivity readers first came into vogue around 2016, when Jodi Picoult reportedly hired some to help her craft a depiction of a Black nurse in the novel Small Great Things. The Guardian and Current Affairs applauded her and other early adopters as refreshingly enlightened, with the latter publication proclaiming: “Bring On the Sensitivity Readers.” Since then, at least one publishing imprint, HarperCollins’s romance-focused Harlequin, has added sensitivity readers to its permanent staff, while the indie publisher Riptide, according to The New York Times, “has begun requiring authors writing outside their own identities to have their manuscripts reviewed by a sensitivity reader before it will accept them, submits all such manuscripts itself to a second sensitivity reader, and has promised to distribute a formal sensitivity guide among all of its staff and authors.” The Times report states that the use of sensitivity readers is most pervasive in children’s publishing, where they “have practically become a routine part of the editing process.”

In That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, the scholar Adam Szetela attributes the rise of sensitivity readers to the fear of publishing executives that a book from their list might be the next one to trigger outrage online. For this study, Szetela anonymously interviewed dozens of book professionals, including authors, agents, and C-suite denizens from the so-called Big Five publishing houses. Szetela critiques what he calls “the Sensitivity Era” of publishing and the counterintuitive toll it’s taken on what books can get published, with racial essentialism being prized over nuanced characterizations that seek to fully articulate the complexities of American identity across class and educational backgrounds.

Szetela details several high-profile incidents in which a book became a whipping horse online, including when Jeanine Cummins, the white author of American Dirt, was pilloried for her depiction of Mexican characters, and when Ramin Ganeshram, a Trinidadian American writer of Indian and Iranian descent who wrote a children’s book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington, was excoriated for how her book “whitewashes slavery.” Borrowing a term from the McCarthy era, Szetela labels each burst of digital indignation a “degradation ceremony” and charts how they spiral predictably from social media to the highest echelons of corporate publishing.

Publishers take very seriously even the most bad-faith campaigns to tar a book; a handful of posts on X or Goodreads can sometimes generate enough backlash to force a house to rethink its relationship with the author in question. “In some cases,” Szetela writes, “the degradation ceremony continues until an author loses their literary agent, has their book pulled from distribution, or otherwise takes a hit that will diminish their ability to provide for themselves and their families.”

Initiated by chronically online crusaders, these........

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