Can you prove you’re not a racist?

After an essay in this month’s Prospect about literature and freedom of speech, it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’. Now, I rather fancy being a ‘provocateur’. But as for the adjective…

Someone can call you ‘stupid’, and that’s just one person’s opinion. It doesn’t seem true because a single childish naysayer has impugned your intellectual prowess. Yet hitherto, the tag ‘racist’ has tended to stick. And it’s self-verifying. Why ever would anyone call you a racist if you weren’t one? In our current climate of sensitivity about race (and everything else), finger-pointers wield enormous power.

A sole review of my last novel — amid perhaps a hundred — characterised The Mandibles (hence also its author) as ‘racist’. The evidence: my Latino US president of 2029 speaks ‘with a lisp’, a description of the reviewer’s invention. The review also took a snapshot out of context. A secondary character — who married into a white family and happens to be black, but is more pertinently suffering from advanced early-onset dementia — is part of a midnight trek to a refugee encampment. To prevent the confused, often violent woman from wandering off in a dangerous city, the family leads her by a leash. (How else would they control her?) By inference, Shriver wants to bring back slavery. Great.

One malefactor resorting to the nuclear option can set off a chain reaction. When I made the mistake of analysing the weak support for this allegation in a widely publicised speech, the R-word bounced merrily around social media. Aspersions were cast on my moral integrity on the webpage of none other than the New Yorker, where a contributing writer admitted that — like so many fatwa brandishers who’ve never come within a mile of The Satanic Verses — she hadn’t read my book.