Purging and propagandizing
A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.
Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”
Now just a god damn minute. The reason Shakespeare shouldn’t be dumped into the bin labeled “Evil Hate-monger From the Past” and forgotten is nothing to do with “academic excellence.” Fun fact: he wasn’t considered an elite taste in his own day, but rather one of those vulgar players, who wrote some of their vulgar plays himself. Gabriel Harvey pointed out as a matter of surprise that he appealed to both classes, but Ben Jonson considered him much too pop and too little erudite…until he sat down to read the First Folio in preparation for writing an introductory poem. The reason Shakespeare shouldn’t be dumped is because many of his plays are simply brilliant. Ignoring him would be like going to the Grand Canyon and carefully staying in the car the whole time, looking in the opposite direction.
Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”
Mmyes, good point. Everything written before 1950 is evil shit. Definitely.
Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.”
An online horde descended, accused Ms. Cluess of racism and “violence,” and demanded that Penguin Random House cancel her contract. The publisher hasn’t complied, perhaps because Ms. Cluess tweeted a ritual self-denunciation: “I take full responsibility for my unprovoked anger toward Lorena Germán. . . . I am committed to learning more about Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts. . . . I will strive to do better.” That didn’t stop Ms. Cluess’s literary agent, Brooks Sherman, from denouncing her “racist and unacceptable” opinions and terminating their professional relationship.
The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.” The English Department chairman of Lawrence Public Schools, Richard Gorham, didn’t respond to emails.
What about keeping the Odyssey in your curriculum and including the “we wouldn’t do that now” stuff in the discussion? It does of course have a lot of such stuff, because it’s about war and warriors and the domestic life of warriors, many centuries before the Geneva Convention and the UDHR and feminism. It features slaves, and war crimes, and mass murder. It’s a harsh world. But it’s worth reading.
Hmm. Vernacular: the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region.
This would make publishing a book a nightmare, requiring not only foreign language editions but one for every village, town, and city that has a school, in every country in which the book is to be sold, because local dialects can and do have minor differences in places that are quite literally next to each other. The kids who live on the largely middle-class housing development near to me have a different vernacular to those from the council estate that is immediately adjacent with just the width of a street seperating them. Worse still is that they all attend the same schools, so will they require segregation for reading lessons?
Soooo, like, with that said and everything, I can, like, not imagine? like anything worse? than like reading books? and that, that have been, like, written? in the like modern [drop voice to vocal fry with fade-out] way of talking. Totes like no way? and that.
It bothers me enough that kids are not read classic fairy tales nowadays, so that people don’t know why I’m talking about princesses and peas, but to not teach things like the Odyssey is horrifying. (Also, “embrace the long haul” like Odysseus? Odysseus tries to get home ASAP. It’s folly that extends his journey. And he tried to avoid going to war in the first place, pretending madness by sowing his own fields with salt. Methinks someone hasn’t actually read the Odyssey and only reveals ignorant hubris by calling it trash.)
I hate it, but all those conservatives whining that college students were running amok and it’d be the doom of education several years ago were right. Should’ve listened…
Except, of course, Blood Knight, many of the conservatives were mostly interested in imposing THEIR version of censorship and groupthink.
(See the Scopes Trial, for example).
This is properly deranged. And terrifying. For lots of reasons but here’s one we’re no doubt all too familiar with at the moment: reading about people being treated awfully, for bad reasons, is one of the ways we develop empathy. It’s one of the ways we develop critical thinking skills. It’s one of the ways we learn to tell right from wrong and recognise the shades in between.
A lot of the problems we’re facing right now seem rooted in the idea that opposing points of view are evil and must be forbidden. I’m willing to bet that those of us with (I hope) a slightly more critical and nuanced view of the world owe it in part to finding injustice to be angry about in the language and stories of literature.
Oh dear. First step taken down a long, slippery, winding and circuitous road.
“Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”
OR: history needs a bit of airbrushing-out of facts unpalatable to us today, just as a fruit tree is pruned perhaps. So what the youth will get is a censored and sanitised story, edited to encourage adoption of the values, not of modernity, but of merely one sectional interest within it.
So, into the school libraries we go, purging them of ‘stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm” …’ Get that bonfire going.
If we’re lucky, that leaves us with A Child’s Garden of Verses and maybe the works of Enid Blyton. Mind you, the jury is still out on them, and when it returns will perhaps need instruction to retire yet again until a preferred verdict is reached.
I’m reminded for some reason now to go re-read Middlemarch again. I’m betting it still holds up.
@Brian M #4:
As usual conservatives are right for all the wrong reasons, but even with that caveat they’ve been right disturbingly often.
I’d hazard a guess that 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World are all waiting in the Bastille at this moment. Mustn’t let anyone read the warnings about where we were headed.
This clearly doesn’t go far enough. They should be #DisruptHistory-ing, because what can we learn from all those unenlightened brutes of the past? And #DisruptScience-ing, because it was mostly made by dead white men who didn’t have our current enlightened values. And of course we should be #DisruptMath-ing, because anything that can’t be written as the ratio of integers is considered either irrational or imaginary.
I re-read it quite recently, for about the 10th time. It holds up like crazy.
You know, I read Shakespeare in high school and college; I never had one teacher, not a single one, use it to try to impose an idea of white superiority, the superiority of English, or anything else horrifying. We discussed it like intelligent adults (yes, my 7th grade teacher who assigned us Romeo and Juliet was willing to treat us like we could think) and didn’t suggest that the plays represented life lessons in how we should be. They encouraged us to think about things and process them, and when we were rightfully horrified at ideas we read in the early literature, it helped us learn that these things had happened, not that they should happen. I don’t know a single person of my acquaintance who learned racism from Shakespeare…or any others, for that matter. Most of them learned it at home.
Nullius, so right on. Why can’t people see that? Why do people get things so wrong? Are thinking and reading comprehension dead arts?
This sounds like a fucked up mix of Luther, Goebbels, and Mao.
My high school had a course called “combined” for juniors. It combined English and History. As we were studying a particular time in history (US history, if memory serves), we read literature from that period. A significant portion of the English “part” of the class was discussion of how the literature was influenced by or commented on the times in which it was written. How did the history give context to what the author was writing. Where was the author “coming from”. What kind of insight did the literature give to what were the prevailing attitudes of the time.
The cultural revolutionaries were giving the cancellation of George Orwell a go over the summer as part of the War On Math. The whole “2+2=5” thing was so obviously Orwellian that they tried to discredit Orwell in order to discredit the criticism.
iknklast: As far as I can see, yes. All that matters is that the conclusion fits the political in-group and has high truthiness. Especially if the material is difficult.
If something’s hard to read, people won’t read it, and what is “hard” keeps getting easier. I mean, I was advised to avoid using colons in my short fiction because they’re too academic or something. Colons: they need a trigger warning.
What a Maroon: Well, we already had #ShutdownSTEM. And ethnomathematics. And 2+2=5. And sex as an invention of white, European colonists. And Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “history that isn’t supposed to be history but we’re totally saying it’s history”.
Had a similar experience myself. I was advised not to use semicolons; I ignored the advice. Some things need a semicolon; some things need a comma. Trying to understand the difference drives a lot of people to drinking, but hey, another excuse for drinking? Go for it. But for the love of Mike, don’t give up on punctuation. It’s important if you want to be understood.
Let’s eat kittens.
Let’s eat, kittens.
iknklast, the way I see it, the semi-colon is there for when a comma is not pause enough but a full-stop is too much.
What is this 2+2 = 5 meme? I missed that one.
My guess is that it might be considered rude and poor form by some TA’s for gender critical types to invoke Orwell when describing the trans demands to control others’ perception of reality. https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/quotes/page/3/
I recall some people also tweeting “There are four lights,” using a more recent version of the same concept, deliberately inspired by 1984, from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk3EsXgXcyQ
Semicolons are used to separate commands in scripts and command line interfaces, terminate lines in dozens if not hundreds of languages, and denote comments for still others. :)
Let’s eat; kittens.
I do think its time to retire the apostrophe, not because its not helpful when used correctly (to indicate a contraction) but because its overuse has led to confusion (it all started with someone thinking that the genitive “s” was a contraction of “his”) and further overuse.
But the semicolon? Never; it is my favorite punctuation mark.
Yes, I like them too. I think I was told I overuse them, either in school or at university. I don’t think I paid much attention.
Brian M: The Addition War began near the middle of July 2020 and raged for some weeks. Small pockets of violence still seethe and roil.
It can be summed up thus: 2+2=4 is a perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values. Once you can accept that there are people who really do think like that, well, it’s clear what will happen. Decolonize math, they cry!
iknklast:
Elision of otherwise repeated verbiage in a parallelism is probably my favorite use for the blessed squiggle.
Some things need a semicolon; some, a comma.
They used to call that kind of censorship “Bowdlerization.” “Bowlerization” came to be regarded as a pejorative.
Also: what about allowing Shakespeare to be his true authentic artistic self? Why deny Twain his “lived experience”? Don’t people get to declare themselves in any terms they desire?
Huh, I was reading a piece on the young adult fiction community just yesterday which alleged that many agents are actively gatekeeping based on perceived purity (or conformity to these new standards).
Nullius @23:
I like the symmetry of my formulation. Symmetry is a hallmark of my OCD.