Political and social correctness has become a rising tide that threatens to swamp creativity and edge us closer and closer towards Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
There seems to be a burgeoning army of commenters seeking to both signal their own virtue and to silence those who have the temerity not to share the commenter’s views.
Whether its book banning or ghosting or reputation trashing, there seems to have arisen a new kind of Puritan and if we don’t resist them, they will kill literature.
Readers and watchers of The Handmaid’s Tale can see clearly what has happened to women under these circumstances and that repression can equally apply to any social group.
What happened to Jeanine Cummins when she published ‘American Dirt’ was typical of what happens to writers when they are vilified for ‘cultural appropriation’ when the only criterion should be literary merit.
Bonus clip:
I hadn’t heard of the novel but did some reading around the reactions to it and it seemed a little more than objections to cultural appropriation. I’ll have to find it and read it to get an idea of the quality of the work. But I suspect that there are few writers who do not self censor based on the expected impact on readers.
I'll admit to some self-censoring of language in my upcoming historical novel.