Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Political Correctness


Last week the American Library Association changed its Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to something else due to suddenly discovering that Ingalls’ books did not represent their core values.  The books were published in the 1930’s and 40’s so I am not quite sure why they only now have discovered something inappropriate (to them) in these books on Ingalls’ personal family experiences.
It is ridiculous really.  Below I send some links which outline the stories so called inappropriateness.  I am not alone in finding this particular case especially annoying, even outrageous. 
I have googled various banned and censored book lists but found it so dysfunctional and mind blogging to realize how absolutely unreasonable some people are that I felt my best course is to ask readers, if they are interested in pursuing this, to do their own looking.
Which now leads me to the main purpose of this article.  Questioning people’s common sense in their assessment of what one ought to do about a book that is objectionable to them.  To my mind, if you don’t like the book, stop reading it.  It’s not your business to stop other people from reading it by getting the book banned from their public library.  We are adults, we ought to know what is good reading and what is questionable. We all have our own standards and we don’t need Mrs. Smith to tell us what we are allowed to read.  Furthermore we are (generally speaking) quite capable of recognizing inappropriate words or themes but sometimes, just maybe, that is the whole point of the book.
One community banned “Charlotte’s Web” because the animals were talking.  Are you seriously upset about a children’s book where animals talk?  Is your little Susie so stupid she doesn’t understand fantasy?  And yet I bet you let her watch “The Simpsons” because it is so alright to listen to that family.  That community would probably have a heart attack if they read “Animal Farm”; in fact they would die before they got through the first chapter.  Heaven help them if they got to the final chapter.  They would likely ban glue from their schools and make sure every child ate a lot of ham sandwiches.  J
I have trouble with censorship and I have even more trouble with society flipping out about things that actually happened in history and somehow trying to make out like it wasn’t real.  There are plenty of events that get altered, ignored or are tiptoed around in history.  I have to give my Grade 11 history teacher credit for having her students’ enact the Louis Riel trial with a very different outcome at the end of it.  Living in Winnipeg we were close to where it all happened.  Canada has its share of rotten history but it is not taught very well (if at all) in schools.  I know my younger siblings did not even learn about Louis Riel because they were mostly taught in Alberta or Ontario.  I wonder if students in B.C. get a different version of history with respect to the Japanese internment in WWII.  Or Italians in Toronto or Germans in Kitchener may get some other lessons that we wouldn’t get. 
Sadly Canada’s history is not written in a very exciting way so we yawn our way through our courses and then we miss out on the inequities and outrage we ought to be experiencing.  But later on we can find books that recount the stories in a more honest way.
It’s not good censoring books – that’s how we learn. 


1 comment:

  1. One day Disney is going to regret not having provided Donald Duck with trousers.

    ReplyDelete