Japanese American author received offer to license her book but only if she agreed to censor the word "racism" from her author's note

Written By Wei Tsay

Maggie Tokuda-Hall is Japanese American and the author of Love in the Library. It’s a picture book based on the true events of her grandparent’s love story while they were cruelly imprisoned at Minidoka, a concentration camp for Japanese Americans.

Maggie says she received an offer from Scholastic to license her book but with the condition that she censor the word “racism.” The following screenshots show the edits she says Scholastic requested she make.

Via emteehall on Twitter

She’s now going public with her experience via a blog post on her website.

“They wanted to take this book and repackage it so that it was just a simple love story. Nothing more. Not anything that might offend those book banners in what they called this “politically sensitive” moment. The irony of curating a collection tentatively titled ‘Rising Voices: Amplifying AANHPI Narratives’ with one hand while demanding that I strangle my own voice with the other was, to me, the perfect encapsulation of what publishing, our dubious white ally, does so often to marginalized creators. They want the credibility of our identities, want to market our biographies. They want to sell our suffering, smoothed down and made palatable to the white readers they prioritize. To assuage white guilt with stories that promise to make them better people, while never threatening them, not even with discomfort. They have no investment in our voices. Always, our voices are the first sacrifice at the altar of marketability.”

In her response to Scholastic, Maggie wrote, “It’s a deeply offensive offer. It’s a deeply offensive and particular edit. To say yes, we’d like to sell your grandparent’s story but not in a way that connects them to the suffering of those just like them now for fear of potential bans is, to put it lightly, cowardly. They will not have the right to sell this story because they’ve proven to me that they’re not up to the responsibility of it. Nor do they have the right to tell me and people like me that our family’s stories must stay in the past where they’re deemed no longer political.”

Click here to read Maggie’s blog post in its entirety.

Click here to purchase a copy of Maggie’s book.

Wei Tsay

Founder & Editor

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