Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Source: Slowking4https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

People are getting so incredibly oversensitive that even the trigger warnings now have trigger warnings on them. A regional British museum management body has just released a new “Trigger Toolkit” guide advising relevant institutions upon how best to implement trigger warnings on their collections, in case staff find themselves exposed to “racist and intolerant artefacts” in the display rooms, like a talking Easter Island Head that wants to bring back slavery, or an Egyptian mummy who tries to deny the Holocaust.

More than forty exhibit-related topics were listed as likely to trigger an idiot inside a museum, including, but not limited to, death, divorce, childbirth, debt, violence, politics, classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, warfare, gambling, slavery, “the climate emergency,” disease, policing, the criminal justice system, poverty, natural disasters, and “hateful language”—or “human life,” to put it more efficiently.

The trouble was, of course, that in order to alert readers to the likely presence of such massively triggering themes within any given museum, specific mention of them all had to be made throughout the booklet’s pages…which could potentially trigger certain hyper-delicate readers too. Therefore, the booklet about trigger warnings had to come with a trigger warning printed on it itself, in big red letters of trigger warning.

“Ironically, as an author of politically correct historical fiction, Dolen Perkins-Valdez actually eerily recapitulates the role of 1984’s Winston Smith.”

If trigger warnings need trigger warnings, who’s to say that the trigger-warning trigger warnings do not, in themselves, also need to come with trigger warnings, lest these also offend or alarm people? And, in that case, may the trigger-warning trigger-warning trigger warnings not also need to come with trigger warnings attached likewise? This kind of madness could go on forever, ad infinitum. It’s all positively Orwellian, in fact. Which is rather appropriate as George Orwell’s 1984 has just acquired a brand-new unnecessary trigger warning all its own.

101 Damnations
It has recently been noticed that the official 75th-anniversary edition of 1984 from last year had been published with a new, specially penned foreword, approved by the estate of Orwell himself, from black female author Dolen Perkins-Valdez—which warned those who had never read it before about the prospective triggering content within.

You’d think such warnings might focus largely upon disturbing scenes in which rats are set loose to eat through the main character Winston Smith’s face inside Room 101, but no—instead, they warned us about the text’s excessive whiteness. The book, the author asserted, was “not a classic,” but she had quite “enjoyed the story”—until, that is, she realized that “in Orwell’s novel, there are no black characters at all,” which meant that “As a contemporary reader, I feel myself self-pausing,” as “a sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to [my own] race and ethnicity.”

So her main problem here is that Orwell’s book is somehow racially exclusionary, because, being written in a basically all-white country in 1948, all its characters are white. But the main reason Orwell had only white people in 1984 was not any conscious decision to exclude others, it was just his natural assumption about what Great Britain would be like forty years in the future—i.e., still white, because that is what it always had been, forever.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s books, however, are different. Living in a modern, multiracial society like the 21st-century USA, she has a conscious decision to make as an author about what races and ethnicities her characters should be, from an entire smorgasbord of different options. And yet, she chooses overwhelmingly to write about black people—generally black women, and strong, independent black women at that (are there any other kind?).

Doesn’t this make her more racially exclusionary as an author than she accuses Orwell of being?

Poison PEN
Educated at Harvard (instead of a more academically qualified Asian woman, probably), and now a novelist of the precise cloying kind Oprah Winfrey fawns over, in 2020, when George Floyd reached his final chapter, Perkins-Valdez was serving as no less than the Chair of PEN America, the campaign body supposed to stand up for authors’ rights in the face of threats like government censorship. Instead, Perkins-Valdez used her position to issue a joint statement in which PEN “extends its condolences to the family and friends of George Floyd,” even though nobody at PEN probably even knew any of them.

What did George Floyd have to do with authors’ rights? Well, in the aftermath of George’s death, PEN now argued it “must empower artists to chronicle these turbulent times, and we must bring those narratives and conversations into our communities. That is the tradition of literature.”

No, it’s the tradition of propaganda, not of literature—but then, to people like Perkins-Valdez, the two appear essentially indivisible. “As an organization, we devote ourselves to reading and self-education to better understand the fears and frustrations of marginalized communities,” PEN now wrote, as if politics were the sole function of literature, not access to truth or beauty, insights into the eternal verities of the human condition, nor even sheer entertainment or amusement.

Homer, Keats, Yeats, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, even simple laughter merchants like P.G. Wodehouse—none of their work was truly literature at all, according to this mortally limited definition of the term.

Big Brother’s Big Sista
“We are living in the most turbulent moment of this newly-formed century,” continued Perkins-Valdez in the name of PEN, ignoring, say, 9/11, the 2008 financial collapse, the Arab Spring, etc., “but our faith in the power of the written word to transform minds and hearts is unwavering.” Joseph Stalin thought similarly, in terms of his comment that writers were truly the “engineers of human souls.”

To engineer human souls even more, PEN “curated the following reading list” to reeducate literature lovers about race, including Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be a Racist and Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race (And if You Don’t Want To, I’ll Make You Do It Anyway)—a long litany of pure, unadulterated race Marxism.

Examine an interview Perkins-Valdez conducted in 2021 with asha bandele, a Black Lives Matter activist who refuses to use capital letters (except when writing the word “Black,” obviously), presumably as they are an alphabetically oppressive white man’s construct; just to annoy her, I have deliberately placed her surname at the start of the following sentence, so it has to be capitalized anyway. Bandele’s book When They Call You a Terrorist (Because You Are One), a memoir coauthored on behalf of BLM founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, had just been added to the curriculum at American University in Washington, D.C., the same city where Perkins-Valdez is now Professor of Awesomely Creative Writing at a separate college.

Even though bandele’s book is certainly not literature, still it appears on the college’s curriculum anyway, as part of American University’s new “Raise Your Voice Program,” which was implemented there following the death of St. George Fentanyl.

But if it’s not literature, why is it being publicly lauded by a creative-writing professor like Perkins-Valdez? Because “The book illustrates key components…[that American University’s new program] discusses, such as intersectionality, systems of oppression, liberation efforts, and cultural celebrations.” In other words, it’s an extended racial indoctrination pamphlet.

In her interview, Perkins-Valdez complains to bandele that “As a black woman, I feel cast into the position of truth-teller in organizations. Why do you think that role is often filled by black women?” Maybe because, as per the stereotype, the more loudmouthed ones are always so volubly angry about everything, even 75-year-old sci-fi books with no kinky-haired characters in them. Forget a “Raise Your Voice Program,” how about starting a “Lower Your Voice Program” for such individuals instead?

White Pages, Black Ink, Green Notes
To make up for 1984 not featuring any darkies, Perkins-Valdez seems to have decided to include an abundance of such entities in her own limited oeuvre. This may seem hypocritical, but as she says, she has to pursue such a path in order to right widespread antiblack systemic literary prejudices of the past: “Traditional publishing has its biases. It’s more difficult for writers of color to navigate, no question. But cream rises to the top.” Not anymore. Cream is white.

Contemporary publishers, good little white liberals to their core, are in fact falling over themselves to print pro-black propaganda from “writers of color” like Dolen Perkins-Valdez, not the reverse like she misleadingly implies, as her entire publishing history tends to prove:

Her breakthrough 2010 book, Wench: A Novel (just in case readers were confused), was about a black slave woman in a sexual relationship with her white master.

Her second novel, Balm: Also a Novel, was about a black healer and a freed black soldier living in Chicago in the aftermath of the Civil War (alongside some white people, as not even she can hide the fact that they once used to live in Chicago too—at least until all the blacks moved in and trashed the local economy).

Her next book, Take My Hand: Look, Everyone, I’ve Written Another Novel!, was about some black women having sinister sterilization-related medical experiments performed upon them by evil white medics.

Best of all, for someone who claims to be so very, very offended by 1984 not having any blacks in it, her latest 2025 book, Happy Land, is set within an all-black rural commune established following the end of slavery. So, while I haven’t read it, I’m guessing it includes nothing but black people. If a contemporary white Boer wrote a novel set in the white separatist South African settlement of Orania, I wonder what she’d think of that?

The History of Herstory
Ironically, as an author of politically correct historical fiction, Perkins-Valdez actually eerily recapitulates the role of 1984’s Winston Smith: Readers of proper books will recall that Winston’s job was to quite literally rewrite history along preapproved Party lines. Perkins-Valdez was acclaimed by black-interest magazine Essence as having “a calling to bring others back to remembrance,” but she seems to do so partly by acting as a spirit medium: “The voices of the [black] past kept calling me, and to this day, I hope that I can do those spirits justice. I know that sounds odd, but I really do believe in the ancestral spirit world.”

Happy Land is based upon an allegedly true legend about a lost all-negro mini-monarchy in post–Civil War America, but hard, detailed evidence for its existence is pretty scarce. So why did Perkins-Valdez believe in it? As she told an interviewer, “I was convinced because I believe in the imagination of black folks…. When we go into those archives and look at all those [incomplete] records, we do have to infer. We do have to interpret.”

If that sounds a bit like “We have to make things up,” then her interviewer seemed to approve, on the grounds that “Throughout my life, I’ve encountered black folk who strongly believe, with or without proof, that our enslaved ancestors were descendants of African royalty.” As this interviewer was called Nefertiti Asanti, was she one of them?

“It’s important we keep teaching these [black] histories so they are not lost,” Perkins-Valdez argues, but what she really appears to wish to transmit down from generation to generation is a narrative of perpetual victimhood for blacks, and a narrative of perpetual guilt for whites. And, what’s more, this tactic works—as proved by George Orwell’s white descendants feeling so “guilty” for the “crime” of 1984 not having any Africans in it that they paid her to write a new trigger-warning preface to the book complaining about the fact.

Of her first book, Wench, it has aptly been said that “The novel looks at what history gets privileged and what gets forgotten.” So does 1984. It’s no wonder Dolen Perkins-Valdez didn’t seem to like George Orwell very much. She sounds like precisely the kind of individual he was warning us about.