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Elana Gomel's avatar

A great but profoundly disturbing story! It is not just about the perils of being an author in a rapidly changing industry. It has implications for freedom of speech in the academy and beyond. When we think of censorship, we imagine the state-sponsored Big Brother. That had been the case for my mother, a Soviet dissident, who could not have her writings published in a country where all presses were under the surveillance of the KGB. But even there, self-censorship was more effective than outright prohibition. People would not say or write anything challenging because of their commitment to the communist ideology or because it just "wasn't done". And nowadays, self-censorship si strangling freedom of expression and critical thinking more effectively than the clanking Soviet state machinery could ever do. I normally only read speculative fiction but I will read your novel (which I assume is realistic) just to challenge the Big Brother lurking in people's hearts and minds.

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Nick Herman's avatar

My friend who is a gay white male genetics researcher at a major university told me the official policy of that university is to no longer hire any white men for any future professor positions, regardless of their qualifications. I also know for a fact, from someone else who was a grad student at this university, that despite being a publically funded uni on the west coast, they basically have a default policy to not hire their own graduates for faculty positions, and only to hire people who have post docs from Ivy Leagues.

There’s so much absurdity that gets lost in these initially well intentioned procedures to make society more equitable. And it’s so fascinating going through your story, I feel like I want to just sit down and go through a whole bottle of wine going through this type of stuff with you, there’s so much to work with! It you can’t cry, laugh 😀

And interesting to hear your take and experience too as someone who is 1/2 Asian but I guess, not really leaning into that or using it in your favour, if you want to say..vs I definitely know people who are 1/2 Asian or 1/2 black and have absolutely capitalized on those labels to the maximum, irrespective of actual life experience or socioeconomic experiences in some cases. It’s weird. Meanwhile, according to modern labelling, I am merely a “white man” despite having close to 0% central/or northern European DNA, not resembling most Caucasian people in N America too much, and having grandparents that didn’t speak English, (to make no mention of the significant work I’ve put into living abroad, learning languages to a degree, and teaching mostly black and Latino students for a few years in the past in some pretty harsh areas).

Rare is to find a human who sees other humans in all their full evil-good-weird-ape-multicultural complexity.

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