I was told I couldn’t say the word ‘black’ when writing about the Windrush – but I’m not going to change anyone’s race
AS a writer, I expect to be corrected by my editors if I make a factual error or if I get a story wrong.
What I’m not so used to is being asked to believe that black is white — or, to be more precise, to pretend that blackness no longer exists.
As my brother and I prepare to release an updated version of our book Windrush: The Irresistible Rise Of Multiracial Britain, I’ve been consulting friends and other writers about what’s changed in the past 25 years.
I was taken aback when one asked me whether we planned to keep the word “black” in the book as it applied to the Windrush voyagers and their children.
Asked why, he said these days “people of colour” might be more acceptable, and that, for some, the use of the term “black” might be seen as somehow diminishing.
He wasn’t alone.
At one point even people at our publishers were suggesting we should make the change.
Happily, common sense prevailed so — like many writers we are always happy to update our work to take account of real-world change — we won’t be making this one.
We don’t plan to change anyone’s race.
Most of all we don’t think the words we chose so carefully need to bow to the latest politically inspired fashion.
Readers are not stupid.
They know what they’re reading and it’s not the author’s job to lecture them on what to think about the story we’re relating.
The word black has also troubled Roald Dahl’s publishers, themselves caught in an editing storm this week.
I’m not a fan of Roald Dahl, no parent should be.
After all, his heroes are smelly, gluttonous and disobedient. Kids call each other filthy names.
Yet while Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, has taken it upon itself to rewrite his stories, excising words such as “fat”, they have also taken fright at the use of the term “black”, worried about the supposedly racial undertones — even though the word describes tractors, not people.
Dahl already turned the Oompa Loompas from black to white in later editions.
Apparently this futile revision of authors’ work is the doing of a new breed of censors employed by some publishers, called “sensitivity readers”, who vet works of literature for words that might offend.
Authors choose their words care fully; these rewrites by campaigners border on artistic vandalism.
In fact, it could be a criminal act.
If I were a parent of a young reader I might be minded to seek a prosecution under the Trades Description Act, on the grounds that what Puffin now plans to sell are knock-offs penned by a poorly paid assistant in a basement office, at the behest of some extremist zealots.
But there is a deeper issue here.
The censors claim they are acting on behalf of the “vulnerable” — minorities, disabled people and women.
No society is without bias and prejudice.
I have spent a lifetime railing against bigotry but it is a childish fantasy that if nasty things can be removed from books, films, plays and every kind of speech they will be removed from people’s minds.
The most important thing is that children read books, even if the stories aren’t to your taste.
Teach children to be critical, but stop trying to turn them into “woke” angels.
Every dictator in history has tried to change human nature through censorship and mind control. It never works.
The biggest danger now is not creating a generation of traumatised little flowers but raising a nation of young people who never learn to read.
That’s why China looks down on us — while their kids are doing further maths at 11, ours are being encouraged to count on their fingers and toes for uni entrance.