A few weeks ago, it turns out, I had walking pneumonia. Then I was contacted by a journalist for the Deseret Magazine for some comments about the sharp rise of book challenges across the country.
In response to one of his questions, I said something that bordered on incoherence. That happens sometimes when you're quoted. (Maybe it happens more often when you have pneumonia.) I don't blame the author, who doublechecked the recording. I blame me. I conflated two things I think into one mismash that I don't.
In response to one of his questions, I said something that bordered on incoherence. That happens sometimes when you're quoted. (Maybe it happens more often when you have pneumonia.) I don't blame the author, who doublechecked the recording. I blame me. I conflated two things I think into one mismash that I don't.
So I wanted to clarify my comments. I was trying to speak about two kinds of challenges: the ones that try to reduce the real horror of slavery and racism portrayed in Beloved by Toni Morrison to nothing more than "too sexy," and the ones that paint the whole of another work, The Little House in the Prairie books, for instance, as being comprehensively racist, when that isn't the point of those works, either. In the end, most censorship challenges are reductionist, the attempt to whittle a whole work down to a few transparently controversial snippets.
Morrison's works are often challenged by white people who find the frank description of historical racial atrocities "uncomfortable," and would prefer that their almost-grown children not have to think about such things. That's willful ignorance and hypocrisy. This kind of censorship claims that white fragility trumps historical truth, and need not take into account the experience or feelings of Black people, only of white folks.
What's going on when a politician calls into question a list of 850 books because they "might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously?" On the one hand, it represents a wholly disingenuous dismissal of works simply because they dare to provide sympathetic portrayals of LGBTQ or people of color. But I believe that in this case, at this time, it's really political--a coordinated attempt to gin up faux outrage against teachers and librarians as a strategy to win conservative seats in the 2022 elections. It also continues the long attempt of some conservatives to tear apart public institutions in the name of thinly veiled bigotry.
The second kind of challenge comes more from the left. Is there racism in the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder? There are passages, yes, that echo the dominant culture of the time, which did indeed, in the American West of the time in which the novels were set, have anti-Indian stereotypes that masked atrocities. But as with Beloved, this challenge to Little House on the Prairie ignores both deeper and more explicit themes, in this case of family, self-reliance, endurance. Once again, this is about the attempt to recast a work to promote a separate agenda.
I continue to believe that our many problems in this nation do not arise from people reading too much literature. Rather than the mad rush to purge the past of authors whose viewpoints don't square with the prejudices of today, I think we should write new books, reflecting our own insights. Maybe they will prove as enduring as what they counter. Maybe they won't.
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