A decade ago, progressives expected that cultural shifts, the emergence of Black Lives Matter, and the inevitable election of Hillary Clinton would usher in a new, more enlightened age. What we got was speech codes, struggle sessions, “mostly peaceful” riots, furious culture wars, and, well, Donald Trump. Right-wing backlash and leftist excesses have breathed new life into 19th-century antisemitism, old-fashioned ethnonationalism, and a lurid fascination with Hitler and racial purity.

Just why this all happened will occupy historians for many decades to come. But I suspect a piece of the story will be how the censors and scolds taught Americans to think about identity. On that count, Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing (The MIT Press) is immensely instructive. Its signature contribution is extensive interviews he conducted with agents, editors, authors, publishing executives, librarians, and sensitivity readers. Taken together, it all documents how race essentialists and grifters plundered the publishing industry (especially young adult literature).

Advocacy groups and related social media campaigns like Own Voices and #DisruptTexts bullied publishers and cowed authors. #DisruptTexts, for example, wants to ditch everything from Shakespeare to Lord of the Flies, though the reasoning can get tough to follow. The Great Gatsby is in their crosshairs because it supposedly “perpetuate[s] the myth of meritocracy.” (I rather doubt that’s been the takeaway of anyone who’s ever actually read the book.) The bullying and cowing were all pursued in the name of “justice” and “safety.”

Professor Philip Nel, an authority on “radical and anti-racist children’s literature,” endorsed removing six Dr. Seuss books from circulation because they use “dangerous” visual tropes or terminology (like “Eskimo”) that were common 70 years ago. “In the 1950s, cars didn’t have seat belts. Now, we recognize that as dangerous—so, cars have seat belts,” Szetela quotes Nel as saying. “In the 1950s, lots of books recycled racist caricature. Now, Random House is recognizing this as dangerous.” Nel and his allies have made it their mission to ensure that such works aren’t “poisoning” young minds.

Szetela quotes novelist Padma Venkatraman, who explained in School Library Journal: “Even if we establish safe environments for discussion, classics privilege white readers . . . If we want to nurture readers of color, we must get rid of racist classics in homes, bookstores, and English classrooms.” Just so there’s no room for doubt, these crusaders make it very clear that their indictment applies to all the “classics” (from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Catcher in the Rye). These books are judged uniformly and immutably racist, due to the misfortune of having originated in a less enlightened age.

Szetela rips into the burgeoning cottage industry of “sensitivity readers” hired by authors, agents, or publishers to review manuscripts to ensure “authenticity.” He notes that their expertise is not about knowledge or skill; it’s about being black, trans, or what-have-you. These readers purport to speak on behalf of whole swaths of humanity, while (by Szetela’s calculation) potentially earning $156,000 to $312,000 a year for their feedback. Szetela quotes the editor who told him, “If a person can be a good set of eyes for, say, Filipino American queer—sometimes they get very, very granular—that’s amazing.”

He also quotes an in-demand sensitivity reader who explains that black people don’t go to national parks. “That it’s not a thing we do, as a group,” she explains. Szetela cites another sensitivity reader who explains that they can tell when a character “reads like a white person, but the author’s painted them brown.” In normal times, such claims would be deemed crude racial caricature; in modern publishing, they pass for enlightened thinking.

Szetela relates that many of his sources see the problems with sensitivity readers but that most are terrified to say anything critical. He quotes the president of one major publishing house who explains how readily things can run off the rails:

We had a book, written by a gay man, for other gay men—very, very explicitly. The sensitivity reader went through it with a flying, fine-toothed comb, and sort of added all the other categories of queerness. Every time he said “gay” or “gay men,” she would add, you know, “LGBTQ,” every other category of queerness and difference into it. In a way, it completely invalidated the book. It lost its point.

This kind of pressure is shaping what gets published. One senior editor at HarperCollins indicated she would only accept submissions from minority authors, while another editor privately conceded they probably wouldn’t publish a talented writer due to “fear of contamination by association.” There’s the gay writer who told Szetela about an editor who told him, “Your stories aren’t gay enough.” In response, the writer recalls promising, “I’ll try to gay it up.” An editor of color lamented, “I’m very left-leaning. I’m very liberal. I’m a feminist. I’m a woman of color. I feel a responsibility in my position to give a voice to everyone . . . But this just feels a bit insane to me now.”

Aside from its illuminating spadework, Szetela’s book is distinct from other anti-woke polemics for being an unapologetically leftist project. He’s not a conservative or a disillusioned liberal but rather a class warrior who’s angry that wokeness and identity politics have squeezed out class awareness. He sees identity-driven publishing as a scam that provides a small, “privileged class of black people” with “more book contracts, writing fellowships, and prestigious awards” while doing nothing for the “material interests of poor and working-class black people.” He slams literary journals that waive fees based on identity rather than financial need, agents who want low-income authors to hire sensitivity readers out-of-pocket, well-off professionals who wring their hands about “white privilege” while cashing big checks, and academics who tally identity markers while paying scant attention to the affluence or class status of either author or characters.

Szetela takes aim at Dhonielle Clayton, an author and influential sensitivity scold, for “criticiz[ing] white authors who include characters of color in their stories.” Her complaint? “They’re showing up and they’re taking a seat. And they’re not realizing that them writing a story about a black kid prevents me from writing one, because when I show up with my manuscript, the publisher tells me that the position is filled.” Szetela responds: “For this New York Times bestselling author with a Netflix adaptation deal and her own business, ‘that’s what real censorship looks like.’”

When it comes to the most famous anti-racist writer in the game, Szetela is even tougher:

The best thing to happen to Ibram X. Kendi’s career was George Floyd’s death. A glance at the New York Times bestseller list a few weeks after his death . . . illuminates the alchemy project that converts police violence against poor black people like Floyd into soaring mountains of literary profit for black writers like Kendi. When black people from the projects get killed, black elites get book deals, speaking engagements, and MacArthur Genius Grants.

Identity consciousness tends to feed upon itself. When the market-moving Kirkus Reviews started “identifying characters in children’s and teen books by identity and/or race—all the time,” publishers and authors had to shoehorn every character into a category. In its review of Eric Fan and Terry Fan’s picture book The Night Gardener, Kirkus described the old gardener as white. Fearing what that perception would mean for sales, the Fans wrote Kirkus to explain that he was modeled on their Chinese father. They sent a picture to “prove” that their fictional character wasn’t a white guy. Kirkus children’s editor Vicky Smith apologized, saying she now understood he was “indubitably Asian”—that what she had deemed “peacefully closed” eyes were actually a racial tell. As Szetela writes:

In the Sensitivity Era, whether a fictional character wants to go for a hike or garden under the moonlight, they have to look, speak, and act Asian, black, or whatever enough to receive the proper racial classification from the international magazine that awards the Kirkus star, “one of the most coveted designations in the book industry.” Above all, to receive a positive review, these characters must prove they are “authentic” members of a racial culture.

Social media and digital gatekeepers have taken on an outsized role endorsing books in the modern era. Since many leaders and followers of these social media campaigns proudly refuse to read “problematic” works, a few vicious tweets or one-starred reviews can be enough to spark a death spiral for texts or authors. Szetela discusses a study he conducted at Cornell in which participants were asked to read several famous poems with the author’s name altered. When readers were primed to look for sexism, racism, or homophobia in the verses, they were ten times more likely to find it. Given two sentences of fictional criticism claiming a poem was homophobic and informed their response might be shared online, 42 percent of 156 readers concluded that Allen Ginsburg’s “A Supermarket in California”—a poem written by a gay poet and included in the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature—was homophobic. When people are told to hunt for evidence of wrongthink, and that failing to find it might reveal their own biases, they learn to see it everywhere.

Szetela doesn’t really try to explain why a generation of educated, privileged scribblers, academics, educators, and executives got so besotted with racial and gender essentialism, though he does make clear that the identity industry was a recipe for professional success for educated elites who got with program. He also notes a troubling legacy: Censored views have a stubborn habit of gaining credibility and an audience when they go underground, which may go far in explaining our current moment. It also raises big questions about where we go from here.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”