Why My New Novel About Racial Conflict Ran Into Trouble -Today’s identity politics has led many in the publishing industry to insist that writers can only tell stories about people like themselves. That’s bad for fiction and for our democracy.

Richard North Patterson: I Quit Novels to Cover Trump – The AtlanticHow Trump Made a Writer of Thrillers Stick to Facts – New York Times

But this novel deals with a distinctly fraught subject, both in life and in today’s publishing world: America’s accelerating racial discord.It concerns the televised trial of an 18-year-old Black voting rights worker, stemming from the fatal shooting of a white sheriff’s deputy during a late-night traffic stop in rural Georgia. The narrative addresses charged racial issues: voter suppression, the abuse of police power, the mass exploitation of racial anxiety, and the difficulties of Black defendants in controversial cases. It’s seen through the eyes of three major characters, two of them Black—the defendant and his mother, a nationally prominent voting-rights activist in Georgia…The manuscript of “Trial” was rejected by roughly 20 imprints of major New York publishers. A number of them found it impressive; several opined that it evoked my best work. Nonetheless, my ethnicity was now deeply problematic.

One publisher responded that I would be “rightly criticized” for writing the book; another that she only cared to hear on such subjects from “marginalized voices”; another, more colorfully, that I was “too liberal for white people and too white for black people.”

I’ve had a long, productive career and have no wish to be the aggrieved white guy decrying so-called reverse discrimination.

Mr. Patterson is a lawyer and commentator and the author of 23 novels, including his latest, “Trial,” which will be published by Post Hill Press on June 13.