The Language Police: Censorship from the Left · 2:58am May 16th, 2021
Now that we have covered how a far-right movement that was barely alive for more than three decades, one that came & went quickly, was still enough to leave a lasting impact on children’s literature, we will now discuss the political spectrum that has been calling for censorship long before & long after a mere three decades: The Left.
It is by no means a surprise that the Left & the Right both push for censorship, because "Both right-wingers and left-wingers demand that publishers shield children from words and ideas that contain what they deem the "wrong" models for living." (Ravitch, pg 79) Both groups believe that if children read certain content, things will continue existing in the same standards, & thus the hope for censorship is to create change. However, "does it really matter if a child never reads a textbook story with strong males or disobedient children, never encounters the word mankind or images of the occult, if that same child also watches television or sees movies where such images prevail?" (Ravitch, pg 79)
What’s really interesting is that "the left-wing groups that have been most active in campaigns to change textbooks are militantly feminist and militantly liberal." (Ravitch, pg 79) These are Left-wing groups that should, in theory, understand why censorship is at worst culturally dangerous & at best absolutely pointless. In practice, what has been observed by “Joan DelFattore, in What Johnny Shouldn’t Read, writes that political correctness, taken to its extreme, ‘denotes a form of intellectual terrorism in which people who express ideas that are offensive to any group other than white males of European heritage may be punished, regardless of the accuracy or relevance of what they say.’ The censors from the left and right, she says, compel writers, editors, and public officials to suppress honest questions and to alter facts ‘solely to shape opinion.” Once a society begins limiting freedom of expression to somepoints of view, then ‘all that remains is a trial of strength’ to see whos sensibilities will prevail.” (Ravitch, pgs 79-80)
Huckleberry Finn has been a target for censorship among the Left for a notoriously obvious reason, but one that should be addressed properly. The frequent use of the word is because most of the book’s characters are uneducated, & to illustrate racism as it truly was at the time period. However, the frequent use of a racially derogatory word has been sufficient enough for many efforts to get it banned. “In 1982, in one of the most ironic moments in the history of censorship, the principlal of the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax County, Virginia, attempted to remove the book, calling it ‘racist trash’.” (Ravitch, pg 80) What is ironic about it is that “Twain was not racist; on the contrary, he was one of the most powerful voices of his age against racism and social injustice.” (Ravitch, pg 81) In fact, “The Literary Critic Lionel Trilling insisted that the book should be read as Twain wrote it, including that word: ‘This is the only word for a Negro that a boy like Huck would know in his place and time – that is, an ignorant boy in the South before the Civil War’.” (Ravitch, pg 81)
None of this has been lost on one scholar in particular, Jocelyn Chandwick-Joshua, who said “the Slave Jim, she point out, is a man of great dignity, integrity, and humanity in a world full of scoundrels and hypocrties; as a black man (and an escaped slave), he knows when to wear a mask and when to disguise his voice.” (Ravitch, pg 81)
Like the far right, the far left has had organizations that were technically short-lived but had lasting impacts. One of these was the Council on Interracial Books for Children, otherwise known as the CIBC. Their efforts were able to last long because they achieved them by means of “Directing its critiques not as much to the general public as to the publishing industry & educators, CIBC issued publications and conducted seminars for librarians and teachers to raise their consciousness about racism and sexism.” (Ravitch, pg 81) So despite their life as an organization ending in the early 1990s, they & those who adhered to their standards were able to make a gigantic impact upon education. In fact, “they were the original template for the detailed bias guidelies that are now pervasive in the education publishing industry and that ban specific words, phrases, roles, activities, and images in textbooks and on tests.” (Ravitch, pg 82) It started out mild enough, simply providing awards to minority writers, but this only lasted a few short years. When the mid-1960s came, the CIBC changed with events around them. Rather than simply adopt Dr. Martin Luther King's doctrine of equality, they embraced the side of the riots in New York. "Its goal shifted from racial assertiveness, from the pursuit of racial harmony, to angry rhetoric about colonialism & the 'educational slaughter' of minority children." (Ravitch, pg 82)
This impact was achieved as follows; Open Court was a publishing organization that shot for the best balance of diversity & focus on Anglo culture, all while teaching children to read effectively. However, there was a problem when they were introduced to California, which had concerns for the representation, or rather, lacktherof of various minorities and that of women as well (ironic given that Anglo-Western culture is probably the most likely culture to analyze, short of perhaps French culture, to have multiple minority groups & women largely represented), to the point where it was taken to court: “The state considered the books derogatory toward these groups because they did not have equal numbers of males and females and did not portray them in roles of equal status, especially in myths and fairy tales; the same went for ethnic groups, who were seldom included in European fairy tales and Greek myths.” This did not merely apply to fairy tales, however, for “although the books contained references to women such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Pocahontas, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc, Anne Frank, Shirley Chisholm, Edith Cavell, and Mhalia Jackson, there were far more male heroes in the classic tales.” (Ravitch, pg 94)
This was upsetting to Leftist advocacy groups, who wanted an exact equal number of women in this book as men, if not more women, out of concern that the somewhat fewer male heroes would result in less belief in female power among female students. They tried to get as many as they could to solve the problem, so “these groups identified stories about female heroes, including Elizabeth Blackwell, Marian Anderson, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Jane Addams, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth I, and Ameia Earhart, which were incorporated into the new edition of the readers.” (Ravitch, pg 94) However, even this was not enough, because “while Open Court was revising, its reading series came under attack in Teaneck, New Jersey, where one group of parents charged that the books were racist and sexist, whilst other parents praised them, saying that their children were learning to read well.” (Ravitch, pg 94) Women in household roles was especially upsetting to them, but “Open Court appealed the decision, complaining that the state unfairly objected to any portrayal of women in any household role, and ‘further, one of these objections pertains to a quick reference to Mother Hubbard….It is our belief that California law does not proscribe representation of traditional folk tals….We therefore are not sure that Mother Hubbard can be accurately described as a stereotyped figure’.” (Ravitch, 94) Open Court’s respresentatives remained stubborn, because “they were insistent that the books would ‘remain securely anchored in Western culture, particularly Anglo-Western culture,’ and that their content would distinguish them from other mass-market readers, which they called ‘the same old mush’.” (Ravitch, pg 95)
These changes were not lost on outside critics: “In 1979, the Gablers’ ‘Recommended Textbook List for Private Schools praised Open Court’s phonetic reading methods but criticized the content: ‘During the 1960s the content was very good. However, we understand that the content was changed somewhat for the worse (evolution, integration, etc.) beginning with the 1970s edition. The greatest change came with the 1976 edition which added “realistic” content (negative and depressing) and changed many of the pictures to gaudy “contemporarily” illustrations’.” (Ravitch, pg 95)
One basically cannot reasonably assimilate politically correct literature & expect it to be good. “Blouke Carus discovered how difficult it was to create reading textbooks that consitented of strong literature: ‘What really does present an obstacle to better readers,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘are the racial/ethnic/gender “balance” requirements of the state and district legal compliance commissions. The classics of the culture just simply were not “fair” in our modern sense’.” (Ravitch, pg 95)
“Stories written before 1970 had to be carefully screened for compliance with the bias guidelines; those written after 1970 were unlikely to be in compliance unless written for a textbook publisher.” (Ravitch, pg 96) A common far Leftist goal was, contrary to conspiracy theorists, not to replace or eradicate the white race – but rather, the far Left can be a serious threat for a very different reason. In this case, they thought that white supremacism was so culturally ingrained that the only way to remove racism & to make everybody see each other as equal was to remove the presence of white people in texts rather than simply show all races cooperating & being happy. It seldom occurred to them that they just could have sometimes showed all races getting along & it would have probably been even more effective than reversing the racial powers of prior texts.
snores real loudly
As immorality grows, the slavery to the passions of the heart of man become visible in his the slavery to the state.