There is a line of defense in (pretty much certain type of white liberal and conservative) writers and journalists that has emerged on AD, claiming that it will diminish creativity as people will not dare to write about others, thus impacting freedom of speech (thread)
And the extreme version of this compares critics with book burners, or to fascists as Jeanine Cummins did herself in an interview they played at me in the BBC. Of course calling people from persecuted groups fascists and book burners is very rich and cynical.
But all of these arguments raise a very stupid and disingenous defense. Freedom of speech does not absolve anyone either from the reactions to work (readers have freedom of speech too) nor authorizes sheltered ignorance or stupidity (calling it out is also freedom of speech)
One can obviously say here that whose freedom of speech they defend. Everybody is worried about Cummins (who got a million dollars and whose shitty book is available everywhere and selling tens of thousands),
but Myriam Gurba gets gaslighted by the "feminist" magazine that censored her and not one of these crusaders is too worried (as no one was when white supremacists actually burned Jennifer Capó Crucet's book, and actually threatened her, in a campus in the South just months ago).
But it shows two more angles of the way in which white supremacy works in publishing. The first one is that white writers publish book about virtually any culture in the world, but foreigners and minorities cannot write beyond their role of native informants.
For instance, when Mexican Jorge Volpi published "In Search of Klingsor", it was a global success, but in the US it sold nothing, in a genre that sells tons of books in the US, most likely because readers and marketers thought a Mexican was not authorized to write about this.
And as many of us know, not being "Mexican enough" is a frequent way to reject books by Mexicans not writing the liberal or conservative stereotypes of Mexicans in their place (and also the way in which Mexicans police Mexican Americans for sure).
This is what Roberto Lovato gets at in his brilliant concept "The folklorico-industrial complex", our stories are only valued as either as cultural tourism or superficial empathy machines.
I wonder how many of these defenders of the right to write about anything have read non-white writers writing about anything other than their identity.
Second: given how much these people defend lettered culture, it is astonishing how much they replicate the anti-intellectualism and irresponsibility of media discourse. When they victimize themselves as victims of persecution against white people who care and try hard,
they cannot wrap the head around the obvious points that we are aiming at, which is not the ethnicity of the author, but rather the fact that they do not know what they are writing about. And this is particularly consequential in divisive topics like immigration.
As a Mexicanist I have read in my life many idiotic books about Frida and other cultural themes by enthusiastic Europeans and Americans (including a French dude that got the Nobel Prize for them), but they are generally harmless because of their subject matter.
But in things that are destroying the lives of vulnerable people (the migrant trail, the drug wars, and so on), you better know what you are writing about and better be aware of the responsibility that you bear if you get a platform for it.
In short, my counterargument is: no freedom of speech should shield you from your ethical duty to knowledge and care, and if you are going to defend a right so passionately, defend it for everyone and not only for people from your race. The End. Back to regular programming.
