This is an older blog post I'm importing from my ~author tumblr~.
So Stephen King went on twitter and compared criticism of cultural appropriation in literature to book banning. Oh boy.
I've known for a long time that if I am serious about getting my work published, establishing some sort of online presence on social media is an unavoidable evil. Not only am I ambivalent at best about the role social media plays in the world these days, I'm also deeply lazy about maintaining it. However, here I am, giving it by best effort.
Further than that, though, every time some new wave of discourse about a media creator breaks into my relatively small corner of the internet, my first thought is always "why did they have to share this opinion with the world?". Genuinely, sincerely, this post notwithstanding, even if my little cozy mystery about an academic and an auto mechanic finding love in the Hudson Valley does reach anyone someday, I would love if my opinions continue to interest no one at all.
Not that I don't think I have good opinions! They're mine, I'm partial, and I post them online more than is good for me or anyone else. And I'm not here to talk about cancel culture, smarter and more eloquent people have done that to little to no effect. I'm talking more about two things: Death of the Author and the twitter word limit and how they do not mix well.
Personally, I think this is a very bad take on King's part. Criticism is not the same thing as banning; people should be allowed to express when they think someone's ideas are bad or harmful. It's not the same as wanting to ban a book, not least because criticism lacks the authority to ban. Especially because book banning is often used to silence minority voices, and criticism of cultural appropriation in books is pointing out that the publishing industry these days elevates white voices and appropriation and thereby also silences minority voices. The comparison criticism and banning not only misses the differing intent behind the two things, it cuts out the structural elements of the industry being criticized and turns it into a "bad people want to ban books" discussion rather than "the system is discriminatory towards minority voices" discussion.
This kind of take has an origin, though. King is from a different generation than a lot of people reacting to his post, and his generation was deeply influenced by the first cultural backlashes to the horrors of Nazism. It created this very single-minded "all book banning is bad because the Nazis did it" type of discourse at the time, which perseveres in a lot of people. I see this a lot in my day job, where I interact with a lot of Germans in King's age group who were socialized to intensely reject anything perpetuated by the Nazis. Which is obviously a good impulse!
But it leads straight into the tolerance paradox where I then find myself explaining that it's not at all the same thing for young people of color to not accept being forced into reading literature in a school setting that uses racist language uncritically, or literature that uses racist language if that racist language isn't contextualized in class. This is a very different starting point for editing a curriculum - it's starting at a point of wanting to protect young, vulnerable people and to educate about and contextualize older texts that reproduce a colonial mindset. And because via repetition the "all book banning is bad" take has become oversimplified to the point of being an absolute, a lot of people aren't prepared to discuss it with nuance at all.
I have no idea where King stands on all these things, because he posted one tweet on the matter, which is a space that just utterly disallows for the nuance of the topic. And that one two-sentence tweet already has several thousand replies and far more people talking about it, to the point where any agent would probably recommend King say nothing more on the subject, because it will just create more discourse. Let's be real, King's career will not be affected, especially if he just ignores it for now.
But what I wonder is why he had to weigh in at all and why people had to engage and respond. Twitter killing death of the author is not news, but incidents like these are so starkly representative of how much easier it was to be a reader when you didn't have access to author's thoughts on everything.
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