Remember the novel “American Dirt?” It was supposed to be the next big thing back in January of 2020. Celebrity authors praised it and Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club. And then the progressive backlash started.

The main focus of attacks was the fact that author Jeanine Cummins was white. Here’s author David Bowles attack on the book:

Let me start with the obvious: Cummins has never lived even within five hundred miles of Mexico or the border. In fact, until very recently, she didn’t lay claim to the Latinx heritage that comes to her through a Puerto Rican grandmother. Just five years ago, she was calling herself white.

Latina or no, Cummins certainly isn’t Mexican or Chicana. That’s a problem.

If you don’t know this, Mexican writers are horribly underpaid. Women writers in Mexico, more so. And Chicanx authors suffer marginalization in the US market. As a Mexican American writer, I have seen my Chicana and Mexicana colleagues struggle to get their stories told, to get their manuscripts into the hands of agents and past the publishing industry’s gatekeepers.

While I have nothing against Jeanine’s (or anyone else’s) writing a book about the plight of Mexican women and immigrants (especially if they do their homework and don’t exoticize our culture), I am deeply bothered that this non-#OwnVoices novel has been anointed the book about the issue for 2020 (with a seven-figure advance, no less) with glowing reviews from major newspapers and the support of big names in US publishing.

There were lots of other attacks but the central idea was cultural appropriation mixed with a lot of undisguised jealousy by other authors. And so in a matter of weeks, American Dirt went from being the next big thing to being something everyone was backing away from as fast as possible. The film rights to the book were sold before it was published and the company that made Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule” was set to make the movie but so far it hasn’t happened. The author’s book tour, which again was expected to be a triumph, had to cancel dates as bookstores pulled out and the publisher said there were safety concerns about continuing it.

Today the NY Times published an opinion piece with an interesting take on American Dirt. Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing that the novel got canceled from within by the publishing industry. Maybe doing that told the industry to play it safe and be afraid.

Looking back now, it’s clear that the “American Dirt” debacle of January 2020 was a harbinger, the moment when the publishing world lost its confidence and ceded moral authority to the worst impulses of its detractors. In the years since, publishers have become wary of what is now thought of as Another American Dirt Situation, which is to say, a book that puts its author and publishing house in the line of fire. This fear now hangs over every step of a fraught process with questions over who can write what, who should blurb and who can edit permeating what feels like a minefield. Books that would once have been greenlit are now passed over, sensitivity readers are employed on a regular basis, self-censorship is rampant…

“It was a witch hunt. Villagers lit their torches,” recalled the novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett, whose Nashville home Cummins stayed in after her publisher told her the tour was over. The two were up all night crying. “The fall that she took, in my kitchen, from being at the top of the world to just being smashed and in danger — it was heartbreaking.”…

In one of those online firestorms the world has come to recognize and occasionally regret, activists, writers, self-appointed allies and Twitter gunslingers competed to show who was more affronted by the crime of the novel’s success. “American Dirt” was essentially held responsible for every instance in which another Latino writer’s book got passed over, poorly reviewed or remaindered.

As the story gained traction, the target kept moving. According to her critics, it was the author’s fault for not doing better research, for not writing a more literary novel, for writing a “white savior story,” for inaccurately reflecting aspects of Mexican culture, for resorting to negative stereotypes. It was the florist’s fault for repurposing the barbed wire motif on the book’s cover as part of the arrangements at a launch dinner. It was the publisher’s fault for mounting a “perfectly orchestrated mega-budget campaign” on behalf of a white, one-quarter Puerto Rican author rather than for other, more marginalized Latino voices. The blurbs for “American Dirt” were too laudatory. The advance was too big. There were accusations of cultural appropriation, a nebulous and expansive concept whose adherents will parse from homage, appreciation or cultural exchange according to rules known only to them…

In conversations at the time, a number of novelists — from all backgrounds and ethnicities — told me privately they were afraid the rage would come for them, for earlier novels they’d written in which they’d imagined other people’s lives, other people’s voices. For future novels they wanted to write that dared traverse the newly reinforced DMZ lines of race, ethnicity, gender and genre. (Even now, three years later, many of Cummins’s early champions I contacted were wary of going on the record for fear of poking the bear; many people in the publishing world would speak to me only off the record. Macmillan, the imprint’s house, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Like so many cancel culture situations, this one happened online and on Oprah but the country at large didn’t seem to care. The book was number one on the NY Times bestseller list for 36 weeks and it was translated into 37 other languages. Presumably Jeanine Cummins did pretty well for herself.

But if the author wasn’t really canceled, what does it matter? The answer is that no other author has ever asked best-selling author Cummins to write a blurb for their book. Three years later she’s still radioactive. And as mentioned above, everyone in the industry is now on alert to avoid the next cultural appropriation minefield. The critics were arguably wrong about the book, the author and the debate in general but they still terrified the industry into avoiding future crusades.

“People who are not reading the book themselves are telling us what we can and cannot read? Maybe they’re not pulling a book from a classroom, but they’re still shaming people so heavily. The whole thing makes me angry, and it breaks my heart,” Ann Patchett said.

There are some good comments on this as well. Here’s the top one:

Making any kind of art is an act of imaginative empathy. This movement toward “owning” representation will make bad art, bad policy, and is already not ending well. Really sad.

This next one is a story I’ve heard before. Progressives who are turned off by cancel culture.

In 2003 the Dixie Chicks spoke out against the invasion of Iraq and conservatives raged and waged their own cancel campaign against them. I bought their CD even though I don’t particularly care for their music, but it was my own way of supporting their right to express their opinion.

When the American Dirt issue came to light, I purchased that book, as well. As an avid reader, teacher of English, and advocate of free speech, I felt the criticism of the book was not only ridiculous nonsense but meant that no writer could ever write about an experience he or she never experienced first hand. It’s a stance that defeats the entire point of literature.

I started but was unable to finish American Dirt but that was because I didn’t think it was particularly well written. And THAT is the criteria against which literature should be judged, not some arbitrary rule about who can write about what.

A few years ago I self identified as a progressive. Today, I’d call myself a moderate. The groupthink and shaming behavior and self-righteous attitudes of the far left has pushed me farther rightward — and I’m certain I’m not alone.

And one more:

“the target kept moving” That sums up in a few words what is wrong with our current twitter/comment culture of criticism. Its like trying to swat a swarm of gnats. Answer one accusation and they just come up with a 100 more.

And let’s not forget envy and jealousy as a motive. How much of Myriam Gurba review was motivated by the fact that her memoir, Mean, wasn’t on the Best Seller list? I wonder how much it eats at her that her chief claim to fame is a review she wrote about somebody else book?

The far left has turned off a lot of people across the political spectrum. The story of American Dirt is just one of many recent examples.