The other day I expressed dismay that NYT writer John McWhorter produced a piece heartily endorsing land acknowledgments (“LA”s). That was out of character for a man who got a lot of attention for his “antiprogressive” stands, encapsulated in his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. My objection to the LA piece was not just that LAs are truly woke—in the sense of being a performative act that nearly always accomplishes nothing but signaling virtue—but that McWhorter neglected the problems with them. These problems included determining who should acknowledge whom (and when) as well as the objections that many indigenous object to LAs. In other words, his column was slanted.
But McWhorter somewhat redeemed himself with a recent column on “lived experience”, also in the NYT. To read it, click on the headline below or find the piece archived here.
His point is about literature: whether writers should be chastised for adopting points of view that don’t come from their own ethnicity or sex. That is, is it kosher to write about the “lived experience” of people who are Hispanic, black, or Asian if you’re white, or about a woman if you’re a man?
As we know, the “progressive” answer is “no.” I’ve attacked this viewpoint many times, arguing that one of the purposes of literature is to give the reader other points of view, and there’s no necessity that a writer can do that only by writing from the viewpoint of his sex and ethnicity, much less lived experience. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, my favorite novel, describes in detail the emotions of a woman, although of course Tolstoy had a Y chromosome. Likewise, his The Death of Ivan Ilych recounts what it’s like to be dying, though Tolstoy himself died 24 years later. It is so realistic, and so moving, that it was used in medical schools to teach doctors what terminal patients might experience. You don’t have to be a woman to portray what it’s like to be a woman, nor terminally ill to imagine what it’s like.
The presumption that only members of a group can write from the “group’s viewpoint” is doubly wrong. It assumes not only that “authenticity” requires a writer to write from his own “lived experience”, but also that every member of a group shares a similar viewpoint. Did all white men share the view of Mark Twain when he wrote the novel Huckleberry Finn, featuring an empathic view of Jim, a black man? Was it improper for Kazuo Ishiguro to write about upper-class British life in Remains of the Day? The answer to both questions is “of course not!”
In fact, imagination can stand in for lived experience, and imagination comes from the “lived experience” of encountering or studying people not of your type. But that’s not the progressive view, which has led to recent novels being demonized or canceled simply because the writer was of the “wrong” ethnicity. McWhorter gives some examples, beginning with Allan Gurganus, a white author who wrote about women and blacks.
[Gurganus’s] command of the Black characters was equally authoritative. He especially got behind the eyes of a woman taken to Charleston via the horrific Middle Passage and how she perceived whites on seeing them for the first time, throughout her childhood as a slave, and then living long past the Civil War.
Today, however, a fashion among certain influential people is to dismiss it as “problematic” that someone would approach those characters without having had their “lived experience.” Under this analysis Gurganus was being a kind of puppeteer, speaking for characters he couldn’t hope to portray as accurately and fully as someone of their sex or race.
Accusations of this kind have been standard since the late 2010s. Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 novel, “American Dirt,” sold over four million copies and was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club amid glowing reviews from many important voices, including the Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros. Suddenly, however, a chorus of detractors dismissed the book as poorly written, especially aggrieved that Cummins was a white woman writing about Mexican immigrants.
The major publishers rejected Rebecca Bruff’s “Trouble the Water” because she is white and wrote from the perspective of a Black Civil War veteran. In 2018 The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee written as a statement from a homeless Black narrator. The poem was written with care and empathy, but the predictable response from certain quarters led The Nation to publish an apology for printing it.
The Own Voices movement in the late 2010s elevated children’s books written by authors sharing the protagonists’ identities. Of late, Rachel Reid has been criticized for writing “Heated Rivalry,” a novel about gay male hockey players, when she is obviously not a gay man and has not specified whether she is a gay woman.
If you have any acquaintance with literature, you’ll be able to come up with similar examples. My own children’s book, Mr. Das and his Fifty Cats (still unpublished), was received and read with enthusiasm by a British agent and an illustrator, but it was never shown to any publishers? Why? Because, as they told me, I wrote about India and am not Indian but “white”. If you read the book (and if you’re a publisher, please do!), you’ll see how dumb that judgment was.
Now McWhorter makes no points in this article that haven’t been made by others. But the article is valuable because the ludicrous view that authors must write from their experience as a member of the target group is a view still with us. These points must be made over and over again so long as “progressive” attitudes persist, passed on from one generation to the next. Also, McWhorter is a superb writer himself , having a lot of experience with novels and musicals, and so makes a trenchant and compelling argument:
Broadway musicals, for example, are the product of people who created beyond their lived experiences, as the forthcoming book “Broadway in Black and White,” written by the conductor John Mauceri with interpolations by yours truly, describes. The score of “Show Boat” is a vast, plangent and achingly beautiful surge of musical and lyrical creativity, much of it channeling Black spirituals, blues and ragtime music as well as the Black characters’ speech patterns and perspective on their lives (“Ol’ Man River”). None of this was the “lived experience” of the two white, educated, affluent men who made “Show Boat,” Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. But they created something so powerful that after the first performance, audience members were so stunned that they at first forgot to applaud.
Kern was of course Jewish, and Hammerstein was of part-Jewish ancestry, but the musical has nary a Jew in it. A huge portion of Broadway musicals were in fact written by Jews, but none before Fiddler on the Roof starred explicitly Jewish characters. Did anyone object to all those other musicals being “inauthentic”? I don’t think so.
The one original point in the essay is in fact made by Garganus:
Gurganus has said: “It’s extraordinary that it is considered a feat for a male human to actually imagine a female one. Fifty-one percent of human beings on earth are women, right? We’ve all spent nine months riding around in the belly of one, and yet when it comes to writing I and thinking she — impossibility looms.”
Of course I’m not trying to justify the hegemony of whites or men as authors. Far from it. There was a time, though, when members of minority groups were barred from writing nearly anything—a product of bigotry. Those days are thankfully passing, and my view is that anybody can write about anything or any characters, and the product should be judged not by whether the “lived experience” comes from real life, but by whether the writing is engaging, resonating with the viewer, listener, or reader. As I wrote in Quillette:
The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.
Or, as McWhorter says at the end:
. . . But the idea that one should write from only one’s own experience is a willfully narrow-minded attack on creativity, empathy and even reason. It is cherished most by a vocal and generally younger minority, to whom the literary world caters out of fear of being called dirty names on social media, as well as mere expedience. Best not to poke the bear, you know.
The lived experience notion has certainly elicited pushback. This should continue, increase and ultimately render the whole idea an obsolete curiosity. This needlessly Balkanizing fashion, presented as enlightenment, is simply jejune. The literary world needs to get over it and get back to publishing writers for being the uniquely imaginative and empathetic humans they are.
Perhaps some day before I die an agent will read Mr. Das and His Fifty Cats and not devalue it because I am “white”.
Here is a note I wrote to Professor McWhorter about land acknowledgments.
Dear Professor McWhorter,
I disagree with you in every way about land acknowledgments. I don’t think they’re just performative nonsense; I think they’re pure performative nonsense!
So far, thankfully, I’ve had very few instances where I have had the displeasure of being subjected to them, and if I were, I’d leave the event if I possibly could.
Here, the good is not the enemy of the perfect. Who was here before the “indigenous” inhabitants? Why not acknowledge that God provided the land? It makes just as much sense to acknowledge an invisible “being” as it does to pretend that we know who was indigenous. We do not know, and we are unlikely ever to. Who did the indigenous people take their land from?
I am going to go out on a limb here. If you truly believe what you wrote, more power to you. I can agree to disagree, but not to sit through that nonsense with feigned solemnity. If you wrote what you wrote to avoid being a lightning rod for woke editors at the NY Times, that is another matter! But then again, Bari Weiss seems to have come through that storm well enough.
This is not meant to question your columns or other writing. I read and enjoy most of what you write, but this is an exception.
The demand for “lived experience” in literature is the literary twin of Edward Said’s argument that the only people who can write a history of a group is a member of the group that the history is being written of, and to do otherwise would be to impose the values and perspectives of an “other” on the target subject, because objectivity is impossible. Whether you agree or disagree (I disagree), the philosophy has bled into everything, from what doctors should see what patients, to what chefs can make what food.
Apropos “what chefs can make what food”: There is a brilliant SNL (comedy) sketch about this. It aired in October 2023:
It’s an absolutely hilarious sketch. I must have seen it about a dozen times by now because it hits the bull’s eye so beautifully. It was a hit with the audience as well, as reflected in how many times it has been viewed on YouTube since it was uploaded – 15.5 million times.
If you want to have a laugh, just search on YouTube for: SNL chef show.
The “lived experience” notion is a small subset of the larger issues explored by Michael Brown in his excellent book “Who Owns Native Culture?” from 2005.
Hmmm. Did H.G. Wells violate the vaunted rules of “lived experience” when he wrote War of the Worlds? Who anointed this special class of culture warriors with the power to license art, literature, music, and even thought itself? The repression is very real—and consequential for the artists—but the controversy itself will fade over time for one compelling reason. The human imagination is too fertile to be kept locked in a box.
Whenever I hear the phrase “lived experience” used to confer special status, I discount the source.
” Who anointed this special class of culture warriors with the power to license art, literature, music,” In a galaxy far away, this function was carried out by a state agency called GLAVLIT. The wokerati, incessantly hankering for such functions, reveal their deep psychological kinship with that galaxy and ALL its practices, without saying so aloud.
But, Jon, it’s all about belonging. It’s all about community. It’s all about inclusion and the humanizing embrace of “We.”
Best to live outside the Woke walls.
Transferring the experience from the author to the reader shows just how much this aspect of woke totalitarianism is not about “social justice” but about grabbing cultural power and suppressing people they don’t like. If a niffelonian isn’t permitted to write a book with a dorignian protagonist because he doesn’t have the “lived experience” of a dorignian, then why should ze be allowed to read a book about a dorignian? After all, ze can’t really understand it.
Maureen Corrigan (not exactly a right-wing crazy; she worked for NPR for 30 years) phrased it best:
“I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.” Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own.” (from Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Chapter 2)
I suspect I know the answer, but let me ask to be sure; may I presume that this “Jerry can’t get his book published” only runs from male to female and white to black, and that none of the woke mob are complaining about women writing about men, blacks writing about whites, or Mexican authors writing about Koreans (or vice versa)?
When identifying with people of races/genders different than our own becomes the # 1 cultural sin, we’ve pretty much lost everything the Civil Rights movement had attempted. It’s particularly disheartening to me that people who ludicrously call themselves “progressives” are leading this regressive stampede to undo everything that movement stood for.
Porgy and Bess by Jewish kid from Ny. Never been to South Carolina. A masterpiece.
Those days had long passed by a couple of decades ago now, since about ~ 2010 onwards it is white males who are rejected just for being white males. There’s a good article on this recently in Quillette.
That was a great article…but I don’t entirely blame the publishing industry. Young men simply don’t read many books, yet there are still tons of excellent literature from the past available (often for free). So the fact that publishing is female-dominated doesn’t entirely explain the lack of male interest in books.
To me, a huge culprit is video games. Young men seem to be more susceptible than young women to wasting hour upon hour gaming, gaining no useful skills in the process and basically frittering their lives away.
“That is, is it kosher to write about the “lived experience” of people who are Hispanic, black, or Asian if you’re white, or about a woman if you’re a man? As we know, the “progressive” answer is “no.”
But this does not seem to be a problem in reverse. I doubt that a black woman would face much pushback if she wrote a novel about a white man. Nor a gay person writing from the perspective of a straight person.
It is the same type of thinking behind the word “diverse”. Diverse in woke thinking does not really mean a multiplicity of ethnic/racial/religious groups…it means less representation of the “dominant/oppressor group”..i.e. white and “white adjacent” people. This is the type of logic that led Nikole Hannah-Jones to brag about sending her daughter to a “more diverse school”…even though the racial composition of the school was overwhelmingly black and therefore less diverse than schools with more white and Asian representation.
This is also why no one bats an eye at the lack of diversity in collegiate sports such as football and basketball, which are hugely disproportionately black, with certain groups such as Asians practically nonexistent. To the far left, there is no “diversity” problem whatsoever here.
Meanwhile, I’d love to know what “experiences” these people have besides “lived” ones. Drug-induced ones?
To quote Simon Heffer: ‘Life experience’ and ‘lived experience’ are tautologies and show either a poor command of the language or an attempt at the manipulation of the feelings of others.
Not either/or, but “and”
I agree with you. Perhaps Mr Heffer was being kind? 🙂
I’m waiting for the next author to regale us with tales drawn from his experience as a U.S. Civil War veteran. If each can only write about what he knows, or what she has lived, I propose that every piece of creative prose and poetry now be titled “Me.”
Jerry, I wonder whether you make too great a concession here, particularly in the final clause: “There was a time, though, when members of minority groups were barred from writing nearly anything—a product of bigotry. Those days are thankfully passing . . .” Those days, to the degree they existed at all outside of slavery and accompanying anti-literacy laws, are not passing. They are long gone.
Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize. James Baldwin was perhaps more widely read. Langston Hughes achieved popular acclaim. Ellison’s “Invisible Man” was a major media event in the benighted 1950s. Scanning my shelves, by no means exhaustive, I also see Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and a dozen writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Then there’s James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, and W.E.B. DuBois. And let’s not forget Frederick Douglass. Step outside of the American experience, and one of the most influential writers in Western culture was a provincial North African whose works were read, studied, copied, and venerated for centuries. We know him by the name of Augustine.
Many black writers never reached audiences comparable to their white peers; others never saw financial rewards. But write they did: poetry, prose, essays, and the Blues. But even for all the abuse blacks in America once suffered, there is not a black man or woman alive who can depict the agonies of those earlier generations if they restrict themselves to “lived experience.” It is the Woke who have now erected the bars to “writing nearly anything.” It is a product of their own bigotry.
Very well said, Dog. If we can only write about our “lived experience”, what happens to historical fiction? For instance, a black female born in 1990 in Houston, Texas, why is she supposed to have privileged access to the experience of black females brought to America as slaves in, say, 1750?
My lived experience of being 49% Indian, 49% Chinese, and 2% Denisovan is that my Chinese part takes the piss out of Indian culture, the Indian part takes the piss out of Chinese culture. OTOH my Denisovan minority genomic complement is metaphorically eating the popcorn, having a ringside seat to AI making homo sapiens mentally retarded, or its vaunted ‘civilisation’ collapsing into an eternal Dark neolithic era.
We acknowledge the Denisovans and Neanderthals were true custodians of the entire Eurasian landmass, their sovereignty never ceded to the rapacious colonising usurpers illegally migrating out of Africa in their Great Replacement.
Very good, Ramesh. The Neanderthal part of my genome chuckled.
“Rachel Reid has been criticized for writing “Heated Rivalry,” a novel about gay male hockey players, when she is obviously not a gay man.”
I thought Rachel Reid’s more serious shortcoming is that she is not a hockey player. “I played in the local boys’ peewee house league for one season” doesn’t cut it.
https://macleans.ca/culture/how-my-book-heated-rivalry-became-a-tv-phenomenon/
“Why? Because, as they told me, I wrote about India and am not Indian but “white”.”
Wait a minute. I thought wokeness and progressivism meant that you are whoever or whatever you identify as. So men can identify as women or cats or whatever and must be treated as such. Therefore you could just identify as a non-white Indian and voila – problem solved and your book gets published!
Gosh, could it be that wokeness contains some inherent contradictions?
[ OK – last comment from me ]:
This illustrates that it is not the Identity or Lived Experience – attractive as they might be – that matters.
They serve only as a Motte in the creation of a collective power to establish the preconceived framework and directions for social repair – the Bailey:
For Motte and Bailey, see:
The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology
Nicholas Shackel
Metaphilosophy
Volume 36, Issue 3 pp. 295-320
2005
It seems to me that someone writing about a type of life that he or she never lived can compensate by doing extensive research about the topic, the way it was always done.
That said, I often get irritated when reading a book about a subject that I know well—and finding mistakes that could have easily been avoided by a bit of research.
Could a male author convincingly impersonate a woman? It is suspected that “Elena Ferrante”, an author celebrated for her depiction of a girl’s coming of age, and a friendship between two women, in mid 20th century Naples (My Brilliant Friend), is really Italian novelist Domenico Starnone. For this, and the opposite — a woman writer impersonating a man, see https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2025/11/24/sexual-turing-test-5/
Only murderers should write murder mysteries. Serial killers above all for their relative abundance of lived death experience.
Wow
QED … FTW!
I’ll get a bit personal – but I’m sure most would agree :
I “grew up with” The Snowy Day (1962) by Ezra Jack Keats. You gotta see this book – aw – just perfect. So I basically grew up so struck with this book that Keats’ Identity factored not at all – or at least figuring Keats was maybe, possibly, if I had to say, FWIW black. Nope – found out just a few years ago FWIW Keats is not black.
Some call it E Pluribus Unum –
But
some (see below) call it (bold added):
Enlightened Racism : The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream
Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis
1992
Westview Press
Boulder • San Francisco • Oxford
… the latter of which I’d call demoralization
/YuriBezmenov