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5 Feet of Fury

Kathy Shaidle's blog. Est. 2000

Lionel Shriver: “…it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’”

April 2, 2018 By Kathy Shaidle

Today’s “Thanks for coming out!”, over at the US Speccie:

A sole review of my last novel — amid perhaps a hundred — characterised The Mandibles (hence also its author) as ‘racist’. The evidence: my Latino US president of 2029 speaks ‘with a lisp’, a description of the reviewer’s invention. The review also took a snapshot out of context. A secondary character — who married into a white family and happens to be black, but is more pertinently suffering from advanced early-onset dementia — is part of a midnight trek to a refugee encampment. To prevent the confused, often violent woman from wandering off in a dangerous city, the family leads her by a leash. (How else would they control her?) By inference, Shriver wants to bring back slavery. Great. (…)

We’re well on our way to the label becoming a perverse badge of pride; if you’re outside the far-left faithful, your first charge of racism constitutes a losing of your political cherry, inoculating against any further sense of injury. This commonplace code for ‘not one of us’ is morphing into a meaningless playground taunt, just as forgettable as ‘stupid’.

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Filed Under: Kathy Shaidle

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