<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi Tony, I want to refute a few assertions from this email and perhaps a inference or two that I'm making about your post.</div><div><br></div><div>First, I think we all could do with some factual context about the American Dirt and Flatiron Press situation.</div><div><ul><li>American Dirt is a NYTimes Bestseller on it's release week. It sold 50,000 copies<br></li><li>Jeanine Cumming received a seven-figure advance for writing the novel</li><li>American Dirt is still an Oprah's book club pick</li></ul><div>There can be no conclusions drawn from this context other than that American Dirt is a very successful book. In light of this, perhaps you may want to retract your claims of censorship. (As an aside, our profession has a special relationship with censorship. Opposing it is a core professional duty. However, also as a profession it is in our core values to understand that censorship applies only to governmental actions. Could you please share which government group is repressing the book? Which libraries are removing it from their collections?)</div><div><br></div><div>As for criticism of the book, librarians also have book criticism in our core professional values. One might suspect that your reaction to American Dirt has more to do with the financial impact of the book's unpopularity on the publisher than on our professional library values. We do not hold publisher profits to be sacred. Flatiron invested heavily in the book and it turns out they made a bad investment. (As an aside, something they could have avoided by paying money to sensitivity readers.) Jeanine Cumming is free to write her book. She is free to get her book published, but unlike your letter seems to assume, she is not entitled to sales or a successful book tour. If people do not like her book, these critics are free to talk about why they do not like her book to other people and all of those people are free not to buy the book. We, as readers, are not required to like or purchase this book simply because Flatiron paid out large sums of money on publicity and celebrity spokespeople.</div><div><br></div><div>This seems like a very simple point, but intellectual freedom does not require anyone to like a particular book. Certainly enough people have liked American Dirt enough to put it on the NY Times bestseller list. As for the book tour, Flatiron Press is more than free to continue to pay for it. You email suggests that threats of violence discouraged the tour. I suggest a much more banal reason: the critics are right. The book has significant flaws and these flaws mean that sales from the tour will not recoup the costs of publicity. That's not censorship, that's capitalism. <br></div><div><br></div><div>For all that, I expect libraries will buy and circulate the book. Oprah and the NY Times will ensure that. Cultural appropriation is not a crime. It's bad manners at least. The book seems aimed at a Latinx market, and the outsider-written story failed to resonate with that market. In the end, the appropriate way, from my perspective, to frame this conflict is not as censorship or silencing. Rather, it is the story of an author who received a seven-figure advance to write about other cultures. In the end, people from those other cultures didn't care for it and that bad opinion ruined the market for the book. It's a story about a business not understanding it's target market.</div><div><br></div><div>Maybe I've repeated this too many time, but Jeanine Cumming is free to write whatever books she wants to write. She is not, on the other hand, entitled to sales if her words fail to please the consumers. Successful book tours are not a entitlement.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Nicholas Schiller<br></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Feb 4, 2020 at 6:39 AM Tony Greiner <<a href="mailto:tony_greiner@hotmail.com">tony_greiner@hotmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<span style="font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);display:inline">Librarianship is in danger of losing one of its foundations- that no one can tell you what you can read, or
what you can write. Let's not let that slip away.</span> As I hope you know, Jeanine Cummins' new novel
<i>American Dirt, </i>which tells the story of a middle-class Mexican woman suddenly reduced to refugee status,<i> </i>has been the subject of attacks from those who want to silence any voice or story they do not approve of. These attacks are not primarily
on the quality of the book, but on the idea that a white American woman dare write a fictional story about Mexicans. The censors, and the threats of violence from their supporters have led to the cancellation of Cummin's book tour, including an appearance
at Powells. </div>
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Paired with that bigotry, the idea that a writer should be silenced if her characters don't match her skin color has been given serious hearings in the media. To my knowledge, only the wise and big-hearted Oprah WInfrey has taken the position that the book
should be viewed on its merits, and last I heard, she was still planning on featuring the book on one of her programs.</div>
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That said, the advocates of silencing others have tasted victory in cancelling the book tour. They may choose to continue their campaign of censorship by calling for removal of the book from library shelves. With that real possibility in mind (and given the
silence from the American Library Association, which has chosen to look the other way,) I offer this defense that librarians may choose to take against the censors. It is a list of books with white protagonists written by famous people of color. (Some of
the titles on this list were found in the research of Robert Fikes, a librarian at San Diego State University, and Martin Japtok of Palomar College.) If the censors assert that a white woman should not write fiction about a Mexican woman, then ask them if
they wish to censor these authors as well. Included is a thought from a better writer and thinker than I can ever hope to be.</div>
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Tony Greiner</div>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">“No human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world”-
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Novels with a protagonist of one race or culture written by an author of another race or culture:</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck:
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Tortilla Flat</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">;
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">The Pearl.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck:
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Good Earth, and </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">others. Buck has also been a target of race-based criticism, but she spoke
Cantonese, and her work has been praised by Anchee Min. There is a statue of her in Nanjing, China. </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Remains of the Day. </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">David Guterson.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Snow Falling on Cedars</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">. Winner of the Pen/Faulkner award for Fiction, 1995.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Dubose Heyward.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Porgy.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Praised by Langston Hughes, who said that Heyward's brings "with his white eyes, wonderful, poetic qualities in the inhabitants of Catfish Row</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400"> that
makes them come alive." This book is the basis for George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess.” "Porgy and Bess" has had some criticism, but was also praised by Duke Ellington and recorded by many black jazz musicians. Gershwin’s will stipulates that the opera
may only be produced with a black cast.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">James Patterson. A series of detective novels featuring Alex Cross.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">James Baldwin. Short Story: “The Man Child.” </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Ann Petry.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Country Place</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">. Petry isn’t well known now, but her first novel,
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">The Street,</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400"> (set in Harlem) was the first novel by an African-American woman to sell 1,000,000
copies. </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Richard Wright.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Savage Holiday</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">. Wright’s novel about an insurance executive has no black characters. </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Zora Neale Hurston.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">Seraph on the Suwanee</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">. This novel looks at the life of poor white ‘crackers’ in Florida.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Dunbar, better known as a poet, had two novels with only white characters,
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">The Uncalled
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">(1898) and
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400;font-style:italic">The Love of Landry
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;font-weight:400">(1900) a western.</span></p>
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<div id="gmail-m_-6873018557528906674Signature">**<a href="mailto:tony_greiner@hotmail.com" target="_blank">tony_greiner@hotmail.com</a>** </div>
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