So… Sally Rooney is a racist now, too?

Blocking her book from Hebrew isn’t a brave political stance. It’s a racist one.

new realities.

--

The last couple of years have truly peeled back the layers.

One of those (perhaps unsurprising, as you’ll read in the article) is that Sally Rooney is now basically a racist.

Medium readers of a certain disposition probably didn’t want to hear that.

Sorry y’all.

But it looks like your wunderkind of vanilla sex, bathos and the low hanging fruit of ‘oh, gosh, a certain brand of Millennials have low empathy for others and high ennui’ also really enjoys cultural discrimination.

After all, Ms Rooney, if you’re so pro human rights as you wish to revere yourself, why not block your book from being published in Arabic, US English and Mandarin, too?

Specifically, that cultural discrimination includes actively marginalising Jewish people and speakers of an already persecuted language, and banning religious groups from the right to read her book.

Cynically, her book’s Hebrew translation translation rights “are still for sale”.

It’s arrogant.

It’s a publicity play.

And super depressing.

Why?

Well, we know how that goes.

The last person who attempted removing a Jewish person’s right to read anything was Adolf Hitler.

So, can we go ahead and cancel Sally Rooney now please - in the same way she is cancelling apartheid’s real issues to generate translation sales publicity around her own book?

Why did Sally Rooney ban her own book from being translated?

This is beyond some authorial idiosyncrasy. It’s all-out cultural authoritarianism.

Rooney clearly enjoys her brand of cultural discrimination so much, to the point that she would censor her own books away from the Hebrew-reading community, but not any other oppressive regime.

--

--

new realities.

Linguistics, health, computing, marketing, privacy, narrative, media, ecology.