If there is one thing readers of my books tend to agree on it is that I do not talk down to them. There is a difference in experience levels between old and young, but that doesn't make old people geniuses or young people idiots. So lets do some more of that direct honesty thing.

Yesterday a person here on Goodreads decided that rather than actually read my books, she would call me a racist and an ableist. Did this hurt my feelings? Yeah, it did. It's false, obviously, but it still bothers me.

I've never made myself out to be some kind of role model. Without going into detail, I am not exactly impressed with big parts of my own backstory. I think I have a fair notion of who I am, my strengths and weaknesses. I'm an average prose writer with a world-class imagination and a surprisingly good ability do define character. My secret weapon as a writer is probably that I have excellent work habits and my battery never seems to run down.

On the down side I am arrogant, sometimes dismissive, and always impatient. I have great big, gaping holes in my education - I'm a high school drop-out. In the part of my brain where math should be I have an empty space where I store old episodes of The Simpsons. I have the math skills of a fern. I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and borderline ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and more than a touch of OCD. There's a lot wrong with me, a lot of baggage I'm carrying, a nice big load of guilt, an intimidating awareness of my own capacity to do stupid, impetuous things, and a long list of failures and fuck-ups.

There is in short plenty wrong with me. But racism or ableism or any form of bigotry? No. Categorically, no.

People who actually read my books are likely to be baffled by accusations alleging that I am this or that sort of 'ist.' I've authored or co-authored something like 150 books, including ANIMORPHS, GONE, BZRK, MAGNIFICENT 12, MESSENGER OF FEAR and FRONT LINES. People who read my actual books come away if anything with a sense that I evangelize constantly for diversity, inclusion and tolerance. One might, for example, wonder why if I'm this or that 'ist' I would place an interracial romance at the heart of ANIMORPHS, or why I would carefully nurture Edilio in GONE from despised undocumented outsider to become the most respected person in the FAYZ. Or why I would shoehorn Tulsa in 1921 into FRONT LINES. I could go on and on, but again, the people who actually read my books are not the people attacking me.

People who actually read my books understand perfectly well where I stand on race, gender, religion, etc... They might well accuse me of using too many short sentences, or not exactly knowing how to punctuate, or writing overly-long books, but the people who actually read my books are almost never the ones accusing me.

So, why would people who don't read my books decide to attack me on the most absurdly dishonest grounds possible? Politics. No, really: politics. I am a political guy at least as much as I am a literary type, and in that capacity I have challenged the concepts of 'cultural appropriation,' I've said that 'name-and-shame' is too often a self-defeating tactic that can only hurt allies, and I've criticized efforts to ban books from the Left, just as I oppose such efforts when they come from the Right. Yes, that's what this is all about: a fight over tactics.

I am a man of the Left. I've been a financial donor for Democrats since I reached the point of having money to give. I was for gay marriage literally decades before it was even on the political radar. I have despised racism since as a child I saw 'whites only' drinking fountains at a drive-in movie in the panhandle of Florida. My family was threatened by the KKK at one point because my mother was tutoring kids from the segregated high school. I take these slanders seriously because I take racism seriously. It's not something to joke about or toss off lightly. Racism isn't just wrong or impolite, it's evil. Six million members of my particular tribe went up Nazi chimneys because of racism.

I am a liberal, but I strive to be honest in my politics. I don't fight for a team, I try to fight for principles: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, a free press, equality under the law. So when 'my side' goes in directions I think violate those core principles, and employs tactics I think are unfair, politically stupid and self-destructive, I speak out.

When I speak out, do I know I'll be attacked? Of course. It's quite deliberate. My thinking is that I am in effect the right 'size' to speak out. See, if someone as famous as, say, Suzanne Collins, speaks out it becomes a headline. If someone smaller speaks out they risk their careers, and they'll be ignored anyway. I am not 'big' enough to make headlines, but big enough that people in the publishing world will pay attention, and at 62 I'm not as worried about my career.

What's fascinating and a bit of a lesson in politics is this: the people attacking me have the same exact stated goals that I have. In other words, we both want diversity in kidlit at the level of characters, at the level of writers and at the level of publishing. Yes: we are on the same side. Proof? Well, again, try actually reading my books, there are about 30,000 pages of proof. And that is a big part of the problem because each new generation discovers old issues and imagines that they are the first on the scene, and no one wants some bald old fart to already be there, hanging around and smoking a cigar. Well, sorry kids, but this bald old fart was already on the scene. I didn't need to be 'made aware,' I was aware before most of the people telling me I need to be aware were born.

I have no control over publishing, and I can't change my skin color, so I can't do anything about those two areas of diversity, but I can make a difference at the level of characters. In fact: I have. In fact: no other single kidlit writer has done more. But I am old, an old white guy, born back before we had seat-belts, let alone the internet. Old. Therefore I am assumed-to-be-out-of-touch and quite possibly senile and certainly incapable of the sort of perfect enlightenment that comes only to the very most sensitive of folks. So I couldn't possibly have anything useful to contribute to a conversation on diversity. The mere fact that I've spent 6 million words promoting diversity is apparently not something to be celebrated, it's something to despise because I didn't wait for everyone else, I just went ahead and did it on my own.

My essential crime is that I went ahead and did the assignment at the end of the textbook and did not wait for the teacher or the rest of the class. Sorry. I will try in future not to get the answer before the other kids.

There is a bit of an industry growing up around diversity in books. There's money to be made, publishing deals to be struck, positions to be enhanced. A sort of self-appointed priesthood is forming to act as intercessors, guides, scolds, judges, juries and Twitter executioners. And then I come along and basically tell them all to fuck off because I was doing it all on my own and long before the high priests came along. I can see where that would irritate the priesthood. And honestly, if the priesthood was not actually harming the very cause we both support, I would just roll my eyes and think, 'OK, whatever: yes you are totally the first people to discover diversity, good for you.' Like when college freshmen all suddenly discover the existence of hypocrisy and then won't shut up about it, as if every single generation of freshmen since the Paleolithic Era hadn't discovered the exact same thing. But the priesthood is in my opinion harming the cause of diversity. They are harming the cause of free speech. They are weakening our moral arguments and leaving us vulnerable to counterattack.

Did you know publishers now use 'sensitivity readers?' They get paid a couple hundred bucks to read a manuscript and point out areas where sensitivities might be rubbed raw. There are African-American sensitivity readers and Latino and gay and trans and Muslim sensitivity readers.

So, question: when some alt-right white group demands to have a sensitivity read, what do we say? No? No only to white people? How is that going to work? What core principle will we appeal to? What do you do when Bill O'Reilly makes an issue of it and some hapless kidlit editor is left sputtering weak excuses on-air? What do you do if Scientologists demand equal treatment and insist on sensitivity reads? Why don't Mormons get a read? Or the Irish for that matter?

Obviously we can marshal arguments about historic (and current) inequities, a long history of blatant racism in publishing, the shameful scarcity of authors of color, the institutional racism that blocks so many young PoC from even getting close to publishing, and so on, but will those arguments be convincing in a country where 46% of people voted for Trump? No. Those arguments look like special pleading. The only argument we can advance to rationalize one sensitivity read as opposed to another, is historical unfairness, to which the counter is that current unfairness does not cure historical unfairness, and that we have no rational basis for deciding that any given group is or is not entitled to have its sensitivities considered.

In the end it would look not like a fight for principle, but a fight for 'our' side. It drags kidlit into partisan political warfare, defining kidlit as not just liberal (which it always has been) but as a part of the far left, out of touch and defending ideas which do not hold up to scrutiny. Placing kidlit on the far left is in my opinion, short-sighted, self-defeating and stupid. It harms the cause of diversity. So I said those things.

And, that's why I am the bad, bad old man of kidlit. Is that why this particular woman here on Goodreads decided to call me a racist and an ableist? Nah. She just read the lies and distortions, the deliberate mis-characterizations others have written, and she bought into those lies. Rather than actually read some portion of what I've actually written, she leapt to the assumption that any random slander she saw on the internet must be true. There's an old saying, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." People love to assume the worst about other people, so despite a massive pile of evidence that I'm actually a fairly decent dude quite obviously committed to diversity, the lie is instantly believed and therefore I am a racist, an ableist, and assumed to be guilty of every other ism as well.

I am a perfect target. I made myself the target precisely because I remain committed to diversity in kidlit, as I have been since the early 90's when I first got to the point of inventing my own characters. The proof of who I am, what I believe, what I stand for is to be found in 150 books, 30,000 pages, something like 6 million words. But I differ from some other advocates of diversity on certain strategies and tactics, and therefore my life's work is dismissed as meaningless and I am called the worst thing I know to call anyone.

I can predict the priesthood's responses. They'll drag out their usual array of dialog-obliterating insults and labels. 'Fragile white person syndrome,' no doubt, as if being accused of the worst thing short of pedophilia or murder is something I should just shrug off. Or I'll get the 'white savior complex' dialog-killer. Scorn will be heaped. Memes will be deployed. Or, as one of these people did not long ago, they'll cherry-pick and distort: did you know that I called Edilio a 'wetback?' and therefore obviously hate Latinos? Say what? You think that was a character not me, and the attitude was clearly treated as wrong, and it was all a necessary part of slowly growing the character of Edilio, revealing his strength and therefore making the point that it would be contemptible to look down on undocumented people? Well, sure, you know that, because you read my books. The people attacking me do not.

And yet, despite everything I have put in books over the course of a 27 year career, and despite what I wrote above, you, reader, will nevertheless walk away carrying a shadow of doubt. That's why I titled this post, "Yes, I Know It's Futile." Once accused, however wrongly, you are never innocent.