This story is presented as part of The Stranger’s Art + Performance Quarterly, Winter 2018-19 edition.
Zadie Smith, the famous novelist and essayist, politely (and wisely) declined to be interviewed for this article.
Who could blame her? When I e-mailed her requesting an interview, I made the terrible mistake of being honest. What I should have said was that I was interested in talking about her work in advance of her appearance in Seattle (Wednesday, February 27, at Benaroya Hall). Instead, I wrote that I was interested in talking with her about call-out culture and the purity politics of the American left.
If you spend any time on social media, you know what I’m talking about with the term “call-out culture”: a teenage girl wears a culturally appropriated prom dress, a cis actor gets cast to play a trans character, a white poet publishes a poem from the point of view of a person of color—and Twitter is set aflame with righteous indignation. The offender must be reeducated, immediately. The online left increasingly runs on outrage like this, and the reason I wanted to talk to Zadie Smith about the phenomenon is because she’s written about it.
