They fail to be interesting as writers because actual truth is forbidden.

A number of years ago, I co-founded Through the Magic Door, a children's books business with the mission of helping families creating an environment and choosing the books which would most likely cultivate a life-long habit of enthusiastic reading among their children. Noble mission, wretched economics.

As part of that experience, I became acquainted with the wretchedness of the commercial young adult genre. Great young adult books are few and dar between but magnificent when they emerge.

The practical reality is that the modern young adult genre is mostly garbage. Shallow, uninformed, ideological screeds written by privileged women and read primarily by privileged women. Young adult readers were a tiny portion of the book buyers.

It was a fascinating perversion of language and ideology.

And the young adult listservs and social media sites? What a poisonous concentration of uncontested cognitive pollution. All participants were women 25-45, usually with MFA degrees, with a great novel in them, embittered by the lack of faith of commercial publishers, railing against the system and the man, while sustaining themselves via a high income husband or in a government or academic sinecure. Uninteresting small people with little life experience and no significant accomplishments demanding to be respected and listened. Or so it was easy to feel.

Oh, and a lazy acceptance of every postmodernist, social-justice, crypto-marxist, critical theory claptrap that came along. Beneficiaries of the age of enlightenment precepts of human universalism, human rights, personal freedom and economic freedom viciously preaching totalitarian Statism in the false belief that a rational, controlled, system governed by technocratic Philosopher Kings would increase their own personal status, rewards, and fame.

Ugh. Not every young adult author fits that mold obviously but an astonishing percentage do.

It was also an arena where I became aware of just how racist and sexist the modern left had become. An audience who would deplatform MLK and drown his I have a Dream Speech.

These creatures of privilege were all for judging people by the color of their skin or the nature of their genitalia rather than the content of their character or the patterns of their actions.

Which is apparently still the ethos. From Belittled Women: The Rise of White Guilt Chick Lit by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Saira Rao and Regina Jackson Turner are self-described women of color who make a good living catering to white women. Tickets for their Race 2 Dinner events, which their website describes as a chance for “white women” to participate in a “conversation about how the white women at the table are complicit in the continued injustices of our white supremacist society,” sell for $2,500 a pop.

While Rao and Turner have clearly found a niche for their ideas among the wealthy elite who want to luxuriate in evenings of fine wine and self-flagellation, executives at Penguin Random House believe there is much wider appetite for books that point the finger at readers. In April they signed the pair to write “White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Get Better.”

Their book joins a relatively new but growing genre of works – both fiction and nonfiction, by authors of all races – that aim to educate whites about the deep racism that supports their privileged lives. These woke beach reads infuse the best-selling template of white-bread chick lit with the consciousness of social justice warriors.

This spring brought “A Good Neighborhood” by New York Times best-selling author Therese Anne Fowler, which centers on Xavier, a polite, smart, classical guitar-playing black teenager in North Carolina, who starts dating a rich white neighbor and is falsely accused of raping her by her racist, sexist, pervert, tree-killing (yes, really) stepfather. The boy’s lawyer tells him: “You are a black man accused of raping an underage white girl. If you put yourself in front of a jury, you’ve got twelve strangers who’ll be literally sitting in judgment of you. … Some of those jurors will be women. Some of them will be white. White fathers of teenage girls if the prosecution can manage it.”

At various points, Fowler, who is white, pauses to have characters lecture readers about the racist criminal justice system and the “talk” that many black parents have to have with their children about how the police won’t give them the benefit of the doubt. The novel also adds class concerns to the racial mix. At Xavier’s bail hearing, his mother asks, “So if I happen to have a quarter mill laying around I lose nothing. But if I’m one of the ninety-nine percent who don’t, I forfeit twenty-five grand. That’s a fair system?”

Extended lectures about structural racism have become a regular feature of books that would be placed on a list of “beach reads.” In “Privilege,” the recently published campus novel by Mary Adkins, who is white, a biracial character named Bea recalls staying with the family of a white friend when a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown. “The conversation had left Bea frustrated – mostly with herself for not speaking up. … Was it really that hard for [her friend’s father] to understand that you’re treated differently based on race? Or did he just not want to know it? Was it that hard to know … that racial bias could be subconscious?”

Who cares about unconscious racial bias when the privileged hard left are such enthusiastic practitioners of obvious and self-declared ideological racism.

Shelby Steele, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,” suggests that this current crop of novels are “what happens when someone writes out of an identity rather than out of their individual selves. They squeeze themselves into really bad ideas -- that white males commonly fetishize black women, etc. They seem to be satisfying the terms of a Black Lives Matter black identity rather than exploring their experience as individuals. And, as always, their characterizations and story lines arrive at black victimization as eternal truth. They fail to be interesting as writers because actual truth is forbidden.”