How Sensitivity Readers Made Publishing More Racist w/Adam Szetela

27:25Because it's as you pointed out, right? So if you move out of the neighborhood, you're racist. Stay in the neighborhood, you're racist. So to tie that in with publishing, I had a conversation with an editor at Penguin Random House, one who was actually very close to the internal uprising over Jordan Peterson's book where some of her colleagues wanted Penguin Random House Canada to not publish this book because it was written by Jordan Peterson. Was it 12 Rules to Life? Yeah, yeah. His follow-up?

27:49Coleman Hughes:It was 12 Rules, which isn't a political book, but just because - Yeah, it's a self-help book. Yeah, but so at Penguin, there was - And it's mostly about lobsters. The whole first chapter is about lobsters. Yeah. Did they have to get a lobster sensitivity reader? They did not get sensitivity readers, but there was an internal town hall where people were quite literally crying and accusing Penguin Random House of violence for publishing this book. And the person I was speaking to who was in that town hall, she was someone who identified as a feminist. She's a woman of color. I quote her in my book, I think at the beginning, where she's even like, hey, I have kids.

28:31Like I do think about like diversity in publishing a lot who are giving a voice to. But she was like, that was just absolutely ridiculous. The idea that we wouldn't publish this book. And she's like, the idea that people who weren't even like working on the manuscripts were like crying about it. Like you don't even have close contact with it. You're not at the editor. She just found it absolutely ridiculous. Had they even read it? I mean, probably not. I mean, one of the things that -

28:58Coleman Hughes:The entire first chapter is about lobsters. To be clear. Yeah, yeah. It's like 40 pages of just describing the life cycle of lobsters. I think it was less about the book and more about this is Jordan Peterson who has offered these. Right. So it's hard to imagine they were sitting there reading it in tears about, you know. Yeah, and then. It was about who he was. In that case, I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the question of, if these people are genuine, and, you know, unless you're some sort of method actor, I assume they're genuine because they're literally crying, like not speaking metaphorically.

29:31If that's genuinely how they feel, then like these are people who need help. Like, you know, they're in Canada, they should have free health insurance and access to mental health professionals. Now on the flip side, if this is like sort of performative outrage and that certainly exists within publishing, then you know, if you're, if like those people shouldn't be there in my opinion. And if they continue to be there and you continue to hire people like that, you're gonna end up turning every major publisher, and they're already sort of like this, minus the one conservative imprint, you're gonna basically turn them into the university.

30:08And as we have seen, especially in the past year, if you're confused as to why so many Americans hate places like Harvard and Yale, not just conservatives, but centrists, and you're confused as to why the right wants to defund these institutions, then you're probably part of the problem. And I think publishing has been going in that direction for a number of years where it's not gonna surprise me if they start to receive the same sort of negative sentiment that academia has had.

30:42Coleman Hughes:Right. So with the sensitivity reading, why does it go in one direction and not the other? In other words, if I were to write a novel as a black author, I could write white characters. I mean, I assume I would be encouraged to write authentically from my own perspective, but I wouldn't have to run it by white readers. I mean, presumably, even if I wrote like an Italian-American character, I probably wouldn't have to run it by an Italian-American sensitivity reader, presumably. Yeah. Is that true? That's accurate. So why does it go in the one direction and not the other? Yeah, so I think it goes in the one direction, not the other, is that despite all of this ostensibly taking place in the name of anti-racism, there's some profoundly racist assumptions embedded in this.

31:31And one of the core assumptions is that white people are complicated and different in individuals. And the idea that me, Adam Satella, could write a book that really understands white culture or something like that, it sounds sounds wild even saying it out loud. I think there's some nuance there where if you have like a J.D. Vance or someone who's writing about like a distinct sort of poor white Southern culture, you can sort of get away with this sort of racial spokesmanship stuff. But for the most part, people in publishing recognize that white people are different and there's not like one culture that like binds them all.

32:11Whereas African-Americans, Asian-Americans, gay Americans, they're treated as, you know, part of this homogenous group that can have spokespeople and like, you know, just spend time reading people like McWhorter, spend time reading your book. It's quite clear that many people in these communities themselves, especially the people who aren't benefiting from this, who aren't purporting to be spokespeople are very much against it because it's super reductionist. It's often offensive. It's intellectually sort of barren.

32:48Coleman Hughes:I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated, and genuinely fascinating story. One of the things I care about on this show is engaging seriously with complexity rather than flattening it. That's exactly what host Dr. Noam Weissman does on Unpacking Israeli History. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present, with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives.

33:24Coleman Hughes:And when he brings in guests, like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Retzig-Gor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare, and it matters. Find Unpacking Israeli History on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today. If you listen to Conversations with Coleman but you're not yet a paid Free Press subscriber, you're missing out on access to some of our best subscriber-only content, live streams, and community benefits, including early access to event tickets.

34:02Coleman Hughes:For less than$2 a week, you can get access to all the Free Press has to offer. Become a subscriber today at thefp.com slash Coleman. That's thefp.com slash Coleman.

34:32Coleman Hughes:dot com slash forum or use the link below to start asking now. You mentioned satanic verses and Salman Rushdie in the book. Thinking about how this conversation deals with the question of Islam is a really interesting one because if Salman Rushdie's book and his fatwa, which lasted, decades and eventually someone did end up stabbing him multiple times and thank God he survived. Or thinking of the treatment of someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has had and will have to have security for the rest of her life for the same reasons that Salman Rushdie does. How do you then, it seems like a paradox to me because I think everyone would want there to be more and more interesting novels with Muslim protagonists, whether those are Muslims in the West or Muslims in the Middle East or in Asia.

35:41Coleman Hughes:But how do you then allow for really interesting stories if you're not allowed to portray Islam negatively or even in a complicated manner, right? Like if you want to have a Muslim protagonist that ends up renouncing their faith or that struggles with their faith for whatever reason, you've just got like 10 ,000 different landmines to avoid so that in this case, we're not just talking about mere cancellation, we're talking about actual potential violence. For sure, yeah. So then that kind of discourages the writing of those kinds of books, at least in any kind of a way that would be complicated enough to produce a truly great novel.

36:25For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a quote that I like by Ray Bradbury. He wrote it in his coda to Fahrenheit 451 novel about book burning. And he says, there's more than one way to burn a book and there's no shortage of people running around with lit matches. So when I think about Salman Rushdie in the sort of novel that you're talking about, there's pressure to not produce that novel, but I do think it's different than the sort of, you know at least in some respects than the sort of liberal anti-racist stuff that goes on you know down the street in the New York City publishers in the sense like if for some if you somehow got a novel published that's I don't know depicting Muhammad in one way or another like yeah there's there's real violence that might come with that like you might lose an eye whereas you know if you if you write a book that quote-unquote reproduces stereotypes about gay people or black people.

37:19It's unlikely that's going to lead to violence. Though you might lose your age and never be able to write a mainstream novel again.

37:27Coleman Hughes:To revisit the stereotype question, it's worth asking whether and in what situation stereotypes are harmful to begin with. So from my perspective, the stereotype that black kids are more likely to like basketball is not inherently harmful. It's definitely true. And if you were to write a novel from that perspective about a black kid that wants to become a basketball player, to me, that would be neutral, right? I would say, okay, maybe it's a good novel, maybe it's a bad novel, but you're not doing anything wrong or racist as a result. On the other hand, if you write a novel where every white character is complex and some are stereotypically white and some are counter-stereotype, yet every black character in the novel really fits a very narrow mold, then I think you can build a case that this novel stereotypes one group in a very basic way and allows for complexity in another group.

38:38Coleman Hughes:Sure. And so I guess the question is, in what scenarios are stereotypes actually harmful and in what scenarios are they harmless? Yeah, I mean, I would agree with you 100 % on an impression of a novel like that. Now, the question of harm, I think, is a complicated question because, I mean, as someone listening, I'd be like, well, how do you define harm? Right, I mean, harm might be the wrong word because... It's a word these people use frequently, often without definition. Sure. I mean, at some level, I don't think you're going to be harmed by a novel or a story, period. I think there's a level of concept creep around the concept of harm.

39:26100%.

39:26Coleman Hughes:Where it's like, I don't think I've ever been harmed by a movie. it's an interesting comparison because people you know don't as often talk about this with movies I mean the only times I felt harmed from a movie is if it gave me nightmares for instance like a horror movie that's why I don't do horror but if I thought a movie if I thought a movie's characters were overly simplistic or even racist in their depiction of those characters I don't personally feel harmed by that. I just feel like, I mean, the truth is the market of moviegoers and readers, I think, is smart enough to punish those kinds of stories.

40:13And smart enough to reward stories that perfectly calibrate authenticity and complexity. So I'm not sure, I mean, if I were running a publishing house,

40:28Coleman Hughes:I would really want to make, I would want to release the best stories possible. And that by definition would mean, because the audience has seen everything before, right? The audience has everything it's seen in its cultural memory. So when you introduce a simple stereotype, the problem isn't a feeling of harm. The problem is I've seen this before. Sure. Right? And so what are you showing me in this book or this movie that is new? Yeah. And so I feel like there is a role for feedback, but the problem with a sensitivity reader is almost that they're doing an official audit of the book for no-nos when what would be a lot more useful is give me 10 ideas about how I could make this more complex and more interesting, which is just normal feedback.

41:22Coleman Hughes:I mean, in a way, what would be good, the good kind of sensitivity reader is just a reader, just a reader giving feedback. Totally. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with you. And if we want to be scholastic about this, what you're essentially talking about is the distinction between flat characters and round characters. So round characters, someone who's complicated, someone who has contradictions, someone who feels like a real person. And that's true whether you're writing a fantasy novel or what have you. Like those are the characters we remember, that we empathize with, that we connect. And, you know, if you're reading a novel where the round characters are all white and the black characters are sort of background stereotypes, then yeah, that's feedback.

42:05And people have been giving that sort of feedback for years. Like it's certainly the case that white authors have written amazing books that have black characters or Asian characters. That's all existed. But to your point about harm, it raises the stakes of all of this in a way that I think has created real problems. So there's a difference between just offering the sort of feedback that you said and then saying, I mean, the title of my book is called That Book is Dangerous. And I didn't use dangerous to be hyperbolic or whatever. There's people I quote in the book who call books dangerous, who call them harmful.

42:47I mean, I quote a distinguished professor of literature who has been interviewed in Esquire and Washington Post who has compared the Dr. Seuss books that were pulled from publication and ceased publications to cars without seatbelts. And once you're using that language and you're sort of generalizing about people's harm, I don't agree with that at all for a number of reasons. And because that's the language that's used, the publishers themselves are panicking and hiring people like sensitivity readers because there's a huge difference between just publishing a book that, you know, isn't that good because the characters are sort of flat and what have you, and publishing a book that has done violence to the black community.

43:32Like nobody wants to be accused of that.

43:34Coleman Hughes:Right. I'll just add to, you know, it wasn't until I really got to like certain spaces of American life. So Harvard, Cornell, those sorts of places that I started hearing people use harm to describe watching a movie, right? I mean, I've met people, especially people in my upbringing, who have quite literally lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I have zero memories of anyone talking about a book causing them harm. It's a profound lack of respect for the audience because what you're saying is, this book or movie portrays a character of a race in such a way that the audience is going to absorb a message.

44:22Coleman Hughes:The audience is too dumb. They can't see that we've written a flat character. Sure. What they're going to see is, oh, all Hispanic people are that way. And they're just going to download this brainwashing from the movie rather than saying, you know, I found that Hispanic character to be pretty boring, right? They were just salsa dancing the whole time and, you know, had no complexity. and it seemed a little out of place given the fact that everyone else in the movie was like a Freudian character study. The truth is, if you write that way, the audience is going to pick up on that in two seconds and they're not going to leave the movie theater or leave the novel more racist than when they entered.

45:07Coleman Hughes:They're going to leave thinking, wow, they really didn't put too much effort into that character. And so it will reflect badly on the author and on the director. It won't like beam racism into the hearts of the audience. And so to assume that it's harmful and that it's dangerous is to assume the audience has no defenses, no immune system to racist writing, which is, it's just to me, it's precisely the opposite of the truth. In other words, the audience is actually the correct judge of what's good writing and what's bad writing. And when you do it well, everyone in the theater can feel it. Everyone who reads the book can feel it.

45:52Yeah.

45:54Coleman Hughes:So another question I wanted to ask you is— Should I just add on that? Yeah, please. So I think there's unquestionably a huge strain of elitism in these conversations. in the sense, again, it's not the black dude at the local homeless shelter who's like outraged over the latest book deal that was given out at HarperCollins. This is a very clear class of highly educated, left-leaning, often affluent people, often white people too, like we're gonna be honest about that, who are engaging in these conversations, stirring these debates and things like that. And, you know, as we talked about, I think there's like very clear incentive structures to that.

46:37I also think, too, that within these spaces, there's a lot of competition for relatively few resources. So that's whether that's like a six figure book deal, whether that's a fellowship at a university's English department. Most people are sort of losers in the professional managerial class economy. And they end up at, you know, Penguin Random House has an editorial assistant who makes$52 ,000, which is clearly not enough money to live on. So if you're living that life and then you see someone like Amelia Wenzel get a huge advance for her debut book, you know, I think it would be like incredibly naive to think that like just basic emotions, like jealousy and just the competitive nature of this corner of the economy aren't a major factor in what's going on.

47:30Coleman Hughes:For sure. Another topic I wanted to touch is how to write characters that are themselves bigoted, right? And this is something that you talk about in the book. Yeah. The, I think the example of our parents' generation used to be like Archie Bunker type of character, but I never really watched that show. And I think in our generation, Tony Soprano is like a better reference point for people because obviously he's a bad guy, but he's also the center of the show. He's someone for whom a lot of empathy and sympathy is built over the seasons. If that weren't true, the show wouldn't work. um but you know when his when his daughter bring brings home a black boyfriend he's racist about it i mean casual racism casual big casual homophobia um in fact hardened homophobia violent homophobia at times um and so what what how does the publishing industry today in the era of sensitivity readers treat the writing of bigoted characters?

48:47Yeah. So I interviewed a woman, I'm not going to say her name, but a very influential literary agent who's been in this game for decades. If you look at the list of authors she represents, it's sort of like a who's who of contemporary literature. And she was telling me on the phone about being in a meeting recently, and this was really just emblematic of the current climate, where they were talking about a historical novel with the publisher. And in this novel, there's a character who says and does misogynistic things. And she said there was red flags from the publisher and editorial assistant pointing to these passages where this character says these things.

49:28And from their perspective, they were kind of like, this is misogynistic language. Like this shouldn't be in the book. And she's telling me over the phone, Her response was just very straightforward. She was like, this is 1850. Like, this is how they talk. What are we talking? This is how they talk.

49:51But there are people, the true believers, who genuinely believe that even having that in the book is problematic. It's problematic because it's gonna make a reader feel uncomfortable. It's problematic because maybe -

50:02Coleman Hughes:Maybe it should make them feel uncomfortable. Sure. Maybe that's the point. Sure. It's uncomfortable because maybe it will, you know, someone will read that and think it's cool that a character is talking like that. There's sort of, those are the arguments, right? But I think even people who see those arguments as profoundly stupid who work in publishing, they're concerned about the bottom line. And the number of incidents at this point that have affected the bottom line are innumerable. So these people will say, you know, Now, I don't think it makes a book misogynistic to have a misogynistic character.

50:38That's profoundly stupid. But what I'm worried about is this cabal of people on Twitter and Goodreads who are gonna screenshot this passage before the book even comes out. And now that's the big blow up and it gets picked up on the New York Times.

50:51Coleman Hughes:And that will define the book on the internet. That one passage out of context. Yeah, like I've talked to people like that who are like, Adam, like I agree with you down the line. Like, I think that's crazy. But at the end of the day, I'm trying to sell books. And I'm also trying to get this great book attention. And I don't want the attention to shift to this other thing that really has nothing to do with the book. But it's really unfortunate, right? So to your question, right, obviously there still are books that have a racist in them or misogynistic. I would say far fewer books and far sort of like, you know, a sort of different kind of racism, sexism.

51:27And in those cases, it's gonna be easier to publish that book with a mainstream press if those characters get privilege checked or if they have their comeuppance. So what you don't want is a conversation with two characters where one character says something racist or anti-Semitic or sexist, and then the narrative just continues on. What you want is a character who can be - They need to get struck by lightning

51:51Coleman Hughes:right after they say it, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, they want a character who's gonna be a voice of reason and counter that. But, you know, I grew up my own literary tastes, especially when I was younger, were sort of novels about bad characters who don't get their comeuppance. Like I love the novel American Psycho. One of my favorite novels, some Wall Street banker who's racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, kills people, rapes people. And at the end of the novel, he doesn't go to jail. He doesn't confess anything. He doesn't admit he was wrong. He just sort of like continues on. And I love those books just at an aesthetic level.

52:28I find them very entertaining.

52:29Coleman Hughes:No country for old men. Yeah, 100%. You know, I like those books a lot, but I also think like from a more sociological perspective, like that's how the world works. Like that's, once you start eliminating those characters from books, you know, we're losing the verisimilitude of literature. The ideal world that these people want where like everyone who makes a racist comment or does a sexist thing like gets their comeuppance, that's not the world we live in. So then, you know, is the purpose of literature to only create sort of like an ideal world, I would argue no. And I would argue if you care about art, that's not the function of art.

53:08And it can be a function of art. But when you have these people running around sort of dictating what art should be, what literature should be, and if you have a different understanding of that, then you yourself must be racist or sexist. I mean, those people are creating real problems like for just aesthetics broadly conceived.

53:26Coleman Hughes:Right. Right. So I wonder how all of this works when books are turned to film because, you know, Hollywood obviously is always ravaging through the latest novels for new source material for film to option something that's already written, a story that's already proven, so they don't have to come up with stories from scratch. Sure. and we just talked to Justine Bateman a little bit about why movies haven't been as good so people can look at that podcast if they're interested but I guess there's two things one, if you have sanitized novels then there isn't as good source material for film like I said, a novel like No Country for Old Men I actually haven't read it, I've seen the film but if the ending in the book is similar which I'm not sure it is, I've been told it's different But the evil character walks off and that's it.

54:29Coleman Hughes:He doesn't get his comeuppance. And so if you're not allowed to really write complicated stories like that or complicated characters or a character like Tony Soprano who is a complicated bigot, he's not someone that gets comeuppance for his bigotry. He's someone that gets comeuppance for his, well, arguably, depending on how you interpret the final scene in The Sopranos. I won't even go there. But the point is, if we don't have books like that, then we get fewer movies like that. And you add on top of that what the Oscars tried to do a couple years ago. At the height of 2020 race craziness, they instituted some requirements for movies to receive Academy Awards.

55:16Coleman Hughes:Some of those requirements were essentially straightforward racial quotas in certain cases. And so I thought to myself, how is a movie like Belfast going to shoehorn in like a Native American? It's literally taking place in Belfast in the 1960s, right? Like there's no, everyone around is white. Everyone around is Irish, right? So are you allowed under these rules to basically make a period piece? I mean, it's a very strange thing. and the strangest part about it is that I think in the West, we're no strangers to government dictums, right? Dictats, right? We expect when we read Orwell and when we study the history of fascism and communism, we expect it when a strong man comes to power and says only art that justifies the state, only art that glorifies the state.

56:14Coleman Hughes:This is something we have antibodies to. But what's happening is the authoritarianism is now coming from inside the house, as it were. It's coming from the bottom up. And the effect is the same, but it's actually we are censoring ourselves. We're choosing to put the shackles around our own wrists. And it's a very strange thing. And I think we don't have good cultural antibodies to fight against that. Yeah. And so, I mean, obviously there is censorship legislation organization across the country in the name of the state targeting, you know, a lot of books in like K through 12 schools and stuff.

56:52So like this, this is the right. They've been very effective at that. And I do think it is censorship and I'm not, you know, just because I wrote a book focused on left-wing censorship, it's not like I don't care about the other stuff. I actually think there's so many resources devoted to covering that and so many organizations tracking that stuff that frankly, I am not even sure what I would contribute to that conversation. But the difference is, The right has been very effective at using law and legislation, whereas the left has just been very effective at the sort of soft censorship, which is, again, not the kind that you see in like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and those sorts of apocalyptic dystopian stories that we all read in high school and are like, oh, we don't ever want to see this in the real world.

57:38The way it operates in places like these publishers and agencies, it's soft. It's not legislative. It's not as top-down. But at the end of the day, if it produces the same outcome, then it should provoke the same concerns among readers.

57:58Coleman Hughes:Right. In a way, it's more difficult to fight because if you don't like the critical race theory law in a red state, you can fight it. There is a clear set of steps you can take to repeal that law and ultimately win that legal battle. If you don't like the entire culture of the American publishing industry because of the problems we've been talking about for the past hour, the steps to fight it are not as clear. There are steps to fight I mean, you can start your own publishing company. That's a lot of work. You can start your own publishing company. You start your own institution that exemplifies how things should be, right?

58:40Coleman Hughes:That's in a way analogous to what the free press is to the world of journalism, right? Sure. Or what the University of Austin is to the world of higher ed. But that requires more of a spirit of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. and it's a slog and it's a lot. It's a lot more involved than writing a letter to your congressman or fighting for a law to be changed. Yeah. Okay, final question. Obviously, the culture of publishing is left-leaning to a degree that is really more extreme than even most left-leaning institutions, I think. For sure. where are the conservative authors? Where are the conservative novelists?

59:30Coleman Hughes:Do conservatives just not want to write books? Do conservatives not want to read books? What's going on there? How could it possibly be as lopsided as it is? Yeah, I mean, how could it possibly be as lopsided as it is, is one question. The question of where you can find conservative authors, I think is a different question. So I'll answer the first one because I think it's a bit easier. So there are imprints within Big Five Publishing that are devoted to publishing conservative authors. So, you know, like Mike Pence gets to publish his memoir, other leading political figures. What about fiction, though?

1:00:04That's what I really like.

1:00:06Coleman Hughes:Because obviously, conservatives read books. The realization that conservatives read books is talked about as a moment in the publishing industry where people started getting these right-wing imprints, but that's nonfiction. I'm talking about novels. There's got to be conservatives that want to write novels. I would imagine. And there's got to be conservatives that would want to read novels. And yet, if I were to like scour the American public publishing industry for an explicitly conservative novel, I feel like I would be Googling for a long time before I hit on something. Yeah, totally. I mean, if you're actually producing that work, I think off the top of my head, I would sky horse publishing would probably they're not going to care if you're writing conservative fiction or progressive fiction.

1:00:48And you know, they're a legit publisher with a huge audience that publishes New York Times bestsellers. Outside of them, I mean, I'm not, I'm just as dumbfounded as you are.

1:01:01Coleman Hughes:So is there a reason for that that goes deeper than, I mean, is there something inherent about the conservative psychology or mind that strays away from fiction and something about liberals and progressives that gravitates toward it? Or is that making too much of what is really just a context-specific situational lopsidedness? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily advocate this myself, but there are people who have done studies of, for example, Amazon buying habits within literature. And it is true that liberals, people lean left of center are going to be more prone to buy fiction, poetry, et cetera.

1:01:42And there's a sort of chicken and the egg sort of question there is like, Like, are they buying it because it's sort of the stuff that's going to be written in a way that's congenial to them? Or is there buying fueling it, fueling the production of it? I think it's both. But, you know, I know people who have come out of, you know, certain traditions, like moral foundations theory, like Jonathan Haidt's work and stuff, that has concluded, at least in certain respects, conservatives are more rigid, less sort of open-minded, things like that. And I think especially with fiction, there's certain qualities of writing fiction that at least in some respects might correlate more closely to a liberal sort of open-minded person.

1:02:24But again, I'm not necessarily advocating that, though I don't think it's like a position at totally discount. Because for the past few years, just being engulfed in this, it's quite clear. And Jonathan Haidt, this is what coddling was about, that there's enormously rigid-minded progressive people, and a lot of them are on the New York Times bestseller list in fiction. You know, like if my only goal was to write a New York Times bestselling novel and make a lot of money, I would make sure it's well-written from a sort of aesthetic standpoint, but even better if it could be sort of either explicitly or more implicitly advocating some sort of like progressive viewpoint.

1:03:07obviously the gold standard is if you are a black author who can write well and who will write literature that is in some way shape or form advocating progressive opinions like i mean there's so many authors here that that's their bread and butter right and there's a clear market

1:03:26Coleman Hughes:for that right okay adam setella thanks so much for coming on my show and once again the book That book is dangerous. How Moral Panic, Social Media, and The Culture Wars are remaking publishing. Thanks, Adam. Hey, everyone. If you've got thoughts on this episode or just want to keep the conversation going, come find me in the Free Press Forum. The forum is kind of like a Reddit page for free press subscribers. And on Tuesday, August 18th at 3 p.m., I'll be in there live to answer all of your questions. Head to the fp.com slash forum or use the link below to start asking now.