The ‘lived experience’ of ‘Inclusion Ambassadors’ is laughable

The clerk at the Chinese emporium where I buy balloons for my husband thinks I am a laughing-gas addict, I buy so many. My husband blows a few up and pops one each time he hears a chosen phrase on the radio. This week it is lived experience. From the kitchen, his explosions sound like a shooting party. He thinks it’s funny. I am his only audience.

I’ve found a written source to draw on without any balloon-popping. It is from Inclusive Minds, which is credited with helping the publishers of Roald Dahl, who have been rewriting his children’s books. It has a “network of Inclusion Ambassadors” — “young people with many different lived experiences who are willing to share their insight. . . They are not sensitivity readers.” No. “Inclusion Ambassadors can share nuances related to their lived experience as characters are created.”

When publishers are looking to reprint older titles, “those with lived experience can provide valuable input when it comes to reviewing language that can be damaging and perpetuate harmful stereotypes.” “Inclusive Minds do not edit or rewrite texts.” No, indeed. “The publisher [can then] make informed decisions regarding what changes they wish to make.” OK. “Inclusive Minds is here to connect people with relevant lived experience to help in the wider process and do not edit or rewrite text.”

So before republishing Treasure Island, it might be useful to put an editor in touch with an Inclusion Ambassador of a Caribbean pirate background with the “relevant lived experience” of using one leg. Or perhaps it’s Jim Hawkins’s character, a child laborer in a grog shop, who needs the lived experience of a young, groggy Inclusion Ambassador. In his dreams, Jim sees John Silver: “Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body.” If that isn’t “language that can be damaging and perpetuate harmful stereotypes,” I don’t know what is.

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition.