Thread by @jessesingal

1/ Okay so here is the latest YA Twitter blowup. It's quite cannibalistic. All social-media screencaps sent in by anonymous tipsters and independently confirmed. Please do NOT insert yourself into any of this drama -- as I'll demonstrate (not for the first time), one of the ways

2/ this community shields itself from criticism is by portraying anyone who shines a light on its internecine unpersoning/career-wrecking campaigns as a "harasser," a "stalker," or whatever other scary term is entirely inappropriate to describe, well, reading and responding to

3/to things that people have chosen to publicly post to social media. Don't give them ammo by sticking your noses into their feeds.

ANYWAY: The victim this time around is Kosoko Jackson, an author who is black and gay (matters in this context) and who has a book coming out soon

4/ called "A Place for Wolves," a romance-adventure backdropped by the Kosovo War. It’s an #ownvoices book, #ownvoices being “a hashtag that was created by Corinne Duyvis to highlight books that are written by an author that shares a marginalized identity with the protagonist.”

5/ These books are particularly celebrated in the YA community given legitimate concerns about representation and diversity within the genre, though there’s of course a more complex convo to be had about the potential of shoving people too hard into writing about their own

6/ experiences given that writers, as a rule, tend to be fascinated by the world and to want to branch out.

Okay, so last night I saw that a VERY negative Goodreads review of APFW was circulating.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1100602179327537152

7/ “I’ve never been so disgusted in my life” wrote the reviewer. If you’ve read one of these YA outrage-reviews you have read them all, but Jackson is accused of doing substantial harm for a number of reasons, in part because one character in the book was the 'wrong' ethnicity

8/ given his role in the plot (among YA social-justice types, the ethnicity of characters matters a great deal and has to ‘match’ what they do or what happens to them in specific ways, or else the book actively harms Young People). I am ill-equipped to evaluate the specific

9/claims w/regard to Kosovo/Yugoslavia, but the review absolutely fits into a subgenre which always features morally charged language, overclaiming, context-stripping, and sundry other harms to the concept of thoughtful literary criticism. The damaging review began to spread and

10/ Jackson asked his network to respond.

There are two very intriguing subplots here, one involving Jackson and one involving Heidi Heilig, a successful author.

First, on Jackson himself: Jackson actively participated in the recent, successful campaign against Amelie Zhao,

11/ which I wrote about here and which led to Zhao’s hotly anticipated debut novel being cancelled (at least for now).

tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an…

As I noted recently, the Twitter-policing over this controversy got so severe that YA people went after an account called KidLitCon

12/ merely for *retweeting* a very mild response to something LL McKinney, another SJ-minded YA figure, said a/b Zhao’s book. Jackson participated — b/c of his+others’ pressure, the keys to that account were taken from the woman of color who tweeted the response to McKinney and

13/ control was handed over entirely to a white woman with the ‘correct’ stance on this blowup. Jackson is being victimized by some of the same dynamics he has contributed to, and the reaction shouldn't be Schadenfreude, as tempting as that may be, but

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1093530343582429186

14/ rather reflection on the inevitable results when no one tamps down on the worst tendencies and norms in breaking or broken online communities. Eventually, things will reach a point where no matter how righteous you believe yourself to be, they’ll go after you too. It’s bad

15/ news and I feel bad for Jackson even as I feel bad for Zhao.

I feel a *little* less bad for Heilig. Jackson solicited and received a very positive blurb from her. Then all this blew up and Heilig found herself in a tough position, from an SJ-reputation standpoint: She had

16/not only praised a book that had been deemed problematic, but praised it in a prominently public way, in glowing terms. So Heilig updated her online review, raising the possibility that substantial (offensive) changes were made to the book between when she blurbed it and when

17/ it was published. From a publication-schedule perspective, this is not credible. It’s kinda like having your hand caught in the cookie jar and saying “Wait, what? I was reaching for a bowl of apples and someone replaced that bowl, at the last minute, with these cookies!”

18/ Heilig also raises the possibility that she simply lacked the knowledge to realize why the book is offensive, but what’s striking is she completely ignores the possibility the campaign against APFW is itself a misunderstanding, overstated, or being prosecuted in bad faith.

19/ That’s telling. When you’re deep in these dysfunctional SJ communities, it’s very, very hard to do anything but float along with the tide.

WRAPPING UP: Naturally, after I first tweeted about this last night a number of the figures involved did what they always do -- they

20/ treated criticism of these online dynamics as itself a form of harassment. Most notably, McKinney said that I (a liberal Jewish journalist) deserve to be viewed in the same light as Steve Bannon and Neo-Nazis (Nazis are inveterate screencappers, I guess). It's a bit

21/offensive, but whatever: It’s also telling. McKinney and the other people who participate in these campaigns want to be able to say whatever they want about anyone they want, without anyone ever stepping in and pointing out how heated and unfair things can get. I can highlight

22/this stuff because I (thank God) have no personal/professional ties to the YA community, but if you did, what possible incentive would you have to pipe up and defend a besieged author? Do you want LL McKinney and other people with 10k+ followers calling you a Nazi or otherwise

23/ coming after you? Not fun!

Heilig, for her part, is spreading rumors I had a role in some FB group I have never heard of going private — again, because I reported on public claims writers made, under their real names, about other writers’ work. There’s also something about a

24/ “stalker account” (this is my only Twitter account). Again: whatever. The idea that it’s “harassment” to respond to damaging claims Person A makes about Person B publicly is asinine, and everyone not suffering from terrible cases of Internet Fever completely understands

25/ this.

That's it! Another totally normal episode on YA Twitter, an internet community that handles conflict well and which has no major problems.

Update: Name-searched Jackson and realize this tweet may have come back to bite him in the butt now that he has written a book with at least one Albanian character and set in a post-Yugoslavia setting

Another update: Kosoko Jackson changed his website today.