Decolonize yor bookshelveA presentation given as part of Up All Night: Torah for Liberation and Revelation, an online Shavuot study session. I wanted to look at the ethics of reading and promoting racist, misogynistic and homo/transphobic literature, and how we can use Jewish ethics to develop a framework for deciding what to keep on our shelves and in our collections.

 

What we are NOT considering

Whether or not the work is racist/sexist etc. Let’s assume it is.

Whether or not it’s a good book; let’s assume we are only talking about books that are valuable to you for some reason, not simply because they are canon.

Banning/Censoring – Although there is an admittedly slippery slope between refusing to read, perform or own a text and the temptation to keep others from doing so.

 

Examples of Cringe Inducing Writing

Casual use of denigrating terminology and slurs:. –  All of Agatha Christie, Huckleberry Finn, Iris Murdoch, Joseph Conrad, Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Hemingway, many others

Paternalism – White, able bodied, straight men, solve the problems; others have no agency and no power – To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn

Cultural ignorance – clumsy attempts at dialect, inaccurate, fanciful descriptions of clothing, dance, music, folkways  – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, James Michener

The “One Good One” – Nearly all members of marginalized group are stupid, evil, lazy untrustworthy except TOGO who helps out or identifies with the heroes. (“You’re a man’s woman”) –  Last of the  Mohicans, The Horse and His Boy/Last Battle

The Straw Activist  – Portrayed as strident and unreasonable, often a figure of fun, especially women – David Mamet

The Tragic Mulatto/Gay/Trans Person/Mixed Couple – White straight author is sympathetic, but let’s face it, you’re doomed – Imitation of Life, West Side Story, Well of Loneliness, everything James Michener ever wrote

The Holy Fool – Suffering (usually because of racism/sexism etc) brings you closer to God, OR alien culture is inherently mystical, spiritual, in touch with another world, or the “old ones”. – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, most books about Africa or India or Native Americans written by white authors.

 

Possible reasons for removing it

Economic effect – do you want to keep authors from profiting from bigotry?

Cultural impact: keeping it in  your collection reinforces racist, sexist, homo/trans-phobic ideas

Self-image: don’t want to be associated with poisonous ideas, have them in your household

Does having the book on your shelf give it some kind of imprimatur of respectability?

Does it say something about you?

         How will people of color, or LGBTQ folk react to seeing it in your collection?

 

Dealing with the work in public

Should you teach it?

Should you share  it with your children?

Should you review it, recommend it to others?

Should you perform in it, work on productions?

How would you respond to students, children, audience members, readers who feel denigrated and attacked by this work?

 

Different situations, or degrees of “guilt”:

Author wrote one blatantly objectionable work; others less so or not as noticeably so. Do you remove everything by author or just that one work?

Most of the work is fine, but it makes some bigoted assumptions, or uses slurs or stereotypes as a matter of course. Accept as “background noise” OR try to edit out the language?

Work has objectionable content throughout but still beautiful or powerful writing – Remove or accept the complexity?

Writing is not a problem but the author was known to have objectionable beliefs, or engaged in harmful behavior – Remove completely, or can you separate the work from the creator?

 

Questions to ask about the work:

Does the author invite you to be complicit, to accept the objectionable values?

Was the book written as a defense of these values?

Is the author even  aware that these attitudes are objectionable?

Is the author satirizing these values?

Is the author protesting racism/sexism/homo/transphobia but in a clumsy, “white savior” sort of way? (Think Uncle Tom’s Cabin or To Kill a Mockingbird)

Is  racism/sexism/homo/transphobia etc. central to the story?

Does the book have powerful resonance for one marginalized group, while stereotyping or denigrating another? (Ishmael Reed, Sherman Alexie)

What do you learn from this work, even from the objectionable aspects?

 

Questions about the author:

Good intentions, bad execution? Do the author’s intentions matter?

Did the author change over time? For example would you judge Malcolm X by his earlier statements on women, Jews and white people, given the attitudes he adopted at the end of his life?

Is the author part of a marginalized or underrepresented group?

Did the author contribute to social justice in other ways, or other writings?

What good does this book put into the world?

 

Jewish Texts to Consider

“Who is wise?  the one who learns from all people” Pirkei Avot 4:1.

“I disagree with Omar Barghouti on BDS and the existence of a Jewish state”. But I believe the American Jewish community’s habit of talking about Palestinians without talking to Palestinians is pathological. It’s a recipe for ignorance and dehumanization. In Pirkei Avot Ben Zoma asks, ‘Who is wise? The one who learns from all people.’ That’s the principle I’m trying to follow.” – Peter Beinert

 

Midrash as a form of reader response – The author has no control over the text, and each reader has the right to engage with it, reinterpret it or even change it

 

From “Searching for Meaning in Midrash” by Michael Katz and Gershon Schwartz:

“Drash: “the interpretive meaning.’ The Rabbis believed that the finite verses in the Bible could be interpreted and understood in an almost infinite number of ways. This provided them with the flexibility to find in the Bible a lesson or a teaching to cover almost every possible circumstance.”

 

From “A Jewish Reading of the Merchant of Venice”by Aviva Deutch

“Reading The Merchant of Venice as an English Jew is a study in disjuncture. I grew up with a Rabbinic tradition which teaches that two seemingly oppositional truths can co-exist: ‘these and these are the living words of God’ argues the Talmud, and one of the most frequent phrases in Jewish textual commentaries is ‘And another opinion…’ The unsettling complexity of holding opposing views in tension is never more evident for a Jewish literary scholar than when thinking about this particular play. Perhaps it’s due wholly to my readerly identity, but I would argue that a nuanced exploration of The Merchant of Venice confirms that Shakespeare’s writing is at its best when exposing how we are all more than one thing – speaking about principles we don’t always observe ourselves, loving those close to us while mistreating others, at times victim at times perpetrator and, in our complexity, fully human.”

 

Embarrassment, Humiliation and Doing Harm

From Jewish Ethics: Some Basic Concepts and Ideas, My Jewish Learning

“Biblical sensitivity to the harm as well as the good that could be done by speech was unprecedented: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:2 1). Man must be careful not to lie, curse or slander (Leviticus 19:11,14,16), nor to receive a false report or speak evil (Exodus 23: 1, Deuteronomy 19:16-18). The rabbis also condemned the use of flattery, hypocrisy, and obscene speech and urged the practice of clean, pleasant, and non-abusive language.”

 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Vayeshev (5770) – On Not Humiliating 

“The rabbis were acutely sensitive to humiliation. They said, “Whoever shames his neighbour in public, is as if he shed his blood”. “One who publicly humiliates another, forfeits his place in the world to come” (Baba Metzia 58b-59a). “Rabbi Tanchuma taught: Know whom you shame, if you shame your neighbour. [You shame G-d himself, for it is written], “in the image of G-d, He made man” (Bereishith Rabbah 24: 7).

“When Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was about to die, his disciples sat before him and asked, ‘Our teacher, teach us one [fundamental] thing.’ He replied, ‘My children, what can I teach you? Let every one of you go and be very careful of the dignity of others’ (Derekh Eretz Rabbah, 3). The Talmud defines onaat devarim, “verbal oppression”, as reminding a person of a past they may find shameful.Judaism is a religion of words. G-d created the natural world with words. We create – and sometimes destroy – the social world with words. That is one reason why Judaism has so strong an ethic of speech. The other reason, surely, is its concern to protect human dignity. Psychological injury may be no less harmful – is often more so – than physical injury. Hence the rule: never humiliate, never put to shame, never take refuge in the excuse that they were only words, that no physical harm was done.”

 

Do Texts Cause Harm?

 

From “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” delivered February 18, 1975, at the University of Massachusetts. Achebe discusses the racist portrayal of Africans in Heart of Darkness and challenges the novel’s reputation as “a great work of art”.

“The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot…

Whatever Conrad’s problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately, his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as “among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language.” And why it is today perhaps the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English departments of American universities.

There are two probable grounds on which what I have said so far may be contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.”

 

From “No More Mamets”. By Matthew Sekellick  in HowlRound Theatre Commons

HowlRound is a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide that amplifies progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and facilitates connection between diverse practitioners.

“We must help delineate what is in and out of bounds for our communities. Indeed, it is our duty as cultural producers to help define these limits, as we already participate implicitly in their formation. We must say:

No misogynist plays. No racist plays. No xenophobic plays. No homophobic plays. No transphobic plays.

And we can go further

No plays but feminist plays. No plays but anti-racist plays. No plays but inclusive plays. No plays but queer plays.

Like we witness John’s violence in Oleanna, we have seen the misogyny in these plays play out, actualized as violence, in our culture. We must no longer allow that violence to have a voice in the theatre. Mr. Trump, like Mamet, wasn’t really a conservative until a few years ago—when he decided to run for office. They’re both the product of the same culture: a culture which, rather than placing in the spotlight, we must hold the mirror up to.

These plays work insidiously in the service of hateful ideologies—Oleanna, Some Girl(s), and The Shape of Things in service of misogyny, and Race in service of white supremacy. They plant the seeds of these ideas, normalizing them, building a cultural foundation for racism and misogyny to flourish—for stage violence and metaphor to blossom into violence in our communities. To produce these plays or to teach them as masterful, without radical criticism, is to do the work of hateful men. Racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic plays belong in the dustbin of history. Let us put them there. We must draw a line and declare: no more Mamets!”

 

From, “Redefining Censorship Lessons Learned from Teaching The Merchant of Venice in Israel.”  from European Judaism by Esther B. Schupak

“It is important to remember that, as James Shapiro demonstrates in Shakespeare and the Jews, the antisemitic tropes that pervade this drama have historically played a part in the persecution of Jews in Europe.18 Indeed, Shakespeare’s dramas in general and this play in particular were actively used by the Nazi regime to nourish the growth of antisemitism and the eugenically oriented ideology of racial supremacy.19 Even though there was actually a decrease in the number of German productions of Merchant after 1933, these productions were especially prominent and culturally significant and – as the Shakespeare Jarbuch assured its subscribers – refrained from portraying Shylock in an ‘apologetic’ manner.20 Given the troubling performance history of this drama, and its implication in the genocide of European Jewry, I do not believe that we can be sanguine about its effects when taught even by well-meaning individuals.

Indeed, one of my graduate students had studied the play as a teenager in London and recounted the distress she experienced as a result:

To my horror, this grotesque moneylender who demanded the pound of flesh was clearly marked out as ‘the Jew’ throughout the text. To make matters worse, the Shylock in the obligatory theatrical performance which accompanied our learning experience, had a skull cap and looked incredibly Jewish. This embarrassed Jewish teenager sat cringing in her seat wondering what the others in the audience were thinking.

In the view of this pupil, the text itself was bad enough, but attending a performance significantly exacerbated the problem. While a sensitive teacher could perhaps have ameliorated the situation, it is hard to imagine that anyone could have completely eliminated the unpleasant emotions and feelings of exclusion suffered by this student.

Indeed, as I researched the curricular warfare to which this play has been subject, the question that kept bothering me was: why are high school teachers so determined to teach this play? We have thirty-six of Shakespeare’s plays available to us from the First Folio. Have we already taught all of them and have nothing left but Merchant? Why are teachers so keen on teaching a play that has the potential to make their Jewish students acutely uncomfortable? Why are they eager to revisit antisemitic canards that have caused so much persecution and death? We need to interrogate the reasons why this play is so popular in the classroom. Rather than asking why this play should be censored, we should wonder why it should be taught.”

 

From, “Forget Atticus: Why We Should Stop Teaching ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’” Will Menarndt Jan 24, 2018 · Medium

 

When we teach a book in class, that book is given a voice. It is the loudest voice in the room, and it becomes an even higher authority than the teacher. Teachers are the guides leading students through a text, but it is the text that defines the space of the lesson. The n-word is not just written on the page. As students read passages out loud, they say it to each other. They speak Atticus’s words, and they internalize his lessons. To call that experience “uncomfortable” is to disguise the pain of racial violence beneath a mask of euphemism.

To Kill A Mockingbird was revolutionary for its time, but its usefulness in our secondary school curricula has passed. The racism students face today is different than the historical fiction of To Kill A Mockingbird. To continue to teach that text suggests to our students that racism only existed in the past. But turn on your news. Nazis and white supremacists are marching, and white commentators everywhere are crying for “unity” and “understanding,” and that’s no coincidence — compassion for oppressors and the silencing of victims is everything that Atticus Finch represents.

America is Maycomb, the fictional town where To Kill a Mockingbird is set. We tell the victims of oppression agitating for justice that progress takes time. We demand sympathy for racists and Nazis. To the chant of “Black Lives Matter,” we seek to silence those voices with a chorus of “All Lives Matter.” If Atticus Finch is our father-figure, then we are all Scout. We have all learned to serve tea and cookies to racists in our parlors while people of color suffer in our kitchens in silence.

To Kill A Mockingbird finishes with Atticus reading a children’s story to Scout as she falls asleep, and that is what To Kill A Mockingbird is for white readers: a fairy tale we tell ourselves about ourselves as we drift off to sleep.

 

From “What Huck Finn Says To A Black Child”  May 9, 1982 New York Times

 

“Being black, I remember vividly the experience of having read ”Huck Finn” in a predominantly white junior high school in Philadelphia some 30 years ago. I can still recall the anger and pain I felt as my white classmates read aloud the word ”nigger.” In fact, as I write this letter I am getting angry all over again.

I wanted to sink into my seat. Some of the whites snickered, others giggled. I can recall nothing of the literary merits of this work that you term the ”greatest of all American novels.” I only recall the sense of relief I felt when I would flip ahead a few pages and see that the word ”nigger” would not be read that hour.

Why should a learning experience, intended to make children love literature, instead end up inflicting pain upon black children?”

 

From “Huck and Kim: Would Teachers Feel the Same if the Language Were Misogynist?” By Peter Smagrisnsky, English Journal November 2016

The author reviews controversies surrounding the teaching of Huck Finn in the context of racial turmoil in the United States, then presents a revised text that substitutes a misogynist term, c***, for n*****, and makes the character Jim a female, Kim, asking readers to consider the need for empathy in reading.

“In this article I ask White teachers to consider how the act of reading Huck Finn feels to Black stu-dents who have experienced the term n***** when spoken by White people as vile and vituperative over the course of their lives. In school, Huck Finn is often required reading in which offended students’ affective response must be partitioned off so that they may appreciate its satirical critique of slave society. The enormity of the task of turning off an emotional faucet in this fashion, I believe, is underestimated by many of the novel’s admirers who intentionally or not shut down an important dis-cussion of how its language affects adolescent Black readers.

I read the comments in the “Teaching and Learning Forum” with interest. I tried, like other contributors, to respect each speaker’s points, but I kept coming back to the problem of empathy. I found the discussion to be concerned with the literary merit of the work and the social message available through a recognition of the ironic, satirical method through which Twain crafts Huck’s narration. The discus-sion lacked attention to the concern I explore in this article: how Black students feel when they are assigned a novel that includes hundreds of instances of n***** throughout its pages. In many ways, the required reading of Huck Finn in schools could easily be considered a form of microaggression, a term coined by Chester Pierce to account for the seemingly innocuous expressions that unintentionally denigrate people from non-dominant social and cultural groups, and are experienced as routine acts of hostility toward their existence.

By assigning Huck Finn as a required text under the auspices of its stature as perhaps the most important American novel yet produced, are teachers denigrating students who have no recourse but to read it and bear it in spite of how they experience its language?

Would you want to be required to read such a book, and be told to put aside your emotions and recognize the genius behind the satire? Would you want such an experience for your daughter, or your son for that matter? If you’re at all troubled by the answers, and if you’re a member of the teaching field’s predom-inantly White population, then I ask that you put yourself in the shoes of Black students for whom Huck Finn is required reading. What must they feel as the cumulative impact of hearing the Black char-acters referred to as n***** more than 200 times? Perhaps more importantly, how must they feel when told that reading great literature requires them to get over their emotions and become cold literary technicians of the sort presumed in the Common Core State Standards’ emphasis on reading within the four corners of the page while sublimating emotional responses in service of textual analysis?”

 

From “The Value of Teaching From a Racist Classic”, By Lennard J. Davis. Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/19/2006, Vol. 52, Issue 37 

Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English, disability and human development, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Recently an African-American graduate student approached me at the end of class, in the middle of the semester, carrying a small, paperback edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a text in a course I was teaching on obsession. She placed the book on my desk and said: “Professor Davis, you keep it. I’m not going to be reading this anymore.” The student had declared in class that the work was racist and that its portrayals of Africans were stereotyped. I wasn’t surprised: The book is racist, in addition to anti-imperialist — not an unusual combination in books written at the turn of the 20th century.

I had welcomed her comments in class and proceeded to “teach the conflicts” she had raised. In ensuing classes, we discussed the value of reading works that are racist or sexist. I delivered my arguments about the value of freedom of the press and the problems with censorship. I noted that Heart of Darkness is clearly anti-imperialist in its attack on the idea of colonization, embodied in the Belgians’ ruthless quest for ivory in the Congo. Yet I acknowledged that the work is racist at the same time. I asked the students: How do we handle the intersection of progressive and regressive themes in a single work? Do we expect writers of the past to have the same values we do now? And so on.

I’d made these points before, but something different was happening now. In fact, I’d taught Heart of Darkness in my undergraduate course the same semester, and an African woman in the class had had a similar response: At first she had remained silent, and then she expressed her impatience with the book. She was from Africa by way of England and spoke with some personal authority. The attitude of these students of color was not one of anger or outrage, but rather of sadness and weariness. They wondered why this book was assigned so often — they had read it before, in other classes — when it so clearly depicted Africans as nameless, faceless, miserable people without any individual identities. (In the one case of an identifiable African, “The Helmsman,” as Conrad calls him, the character is admirable in some abstract sense but is without a personal name or an individual life.) As the African author and critic Chinua Achebe notes, the natives are routinely depicted as dark, writhing bodies with lolling eyes and primitive chants assembled on the shore of the river up which Marlowe, a fully developed character, journeys on his quest for Kurtz. You’ve got your basic B movie, with pith-helmeted white protagonists set against your black (or black-faced) extras doing an imagined primitive dance and uttering a made-up language.

That critique is not new. But the reactions of my students, whose opinions I respected — their refusal to even read the work and their sadness over the book’s prevalence in their courses — caused me to rethink my position

How would I, a Jew — albeit a secular one — feel if one of the books that was regularly studied in general literature courses used words “kike” and “sheeny” routinely, depicting all Jews as money grubbers with hooked noses and shifty eyes? Even if people told me that the work was actually an attack on capitalism and exploitation of workers, despite its unfortunate stereotypes, I might have trouble with the fact that the work was being widely read and taught. I might feel weary at having to read an anti-Semitic book repeatedly in courses on culture in the Western world.

My original paperback is so underlined and marked up that it resembles a Talmudic commentary. The cover with the bald man has fallen off and is secured with a rubber band, and the less-than-a-dollar price makes the book worthy of historic preservation. Every decade has taught me something about this work, something worth underlining. But my latest learning experience has taught me that this text, which has been mined for so much meaning and inspiration, perhaps needs to be discarded. I can’t underline that point, because the lesson isn’t on the page but in the brain and heart.

I’ve learned a lot from rereading Heart of Darkness all these years. It’s given back to me the efforts of my own curiosity, and it hasn’t necessarily defended itself as a moral or ethical text. It has opened up lines of inquiry, indictments not only of itself but also of the various eras through which it has lived. For my graduate student at the beginning of her career, her rereading of that book has ended. This text will give her nothing back, but other texts will. For me, there is no way I can forget what the book has taught me. But when I reread it next time, I will do so with the face of my student before me. My student will have nothing to do with the book, but the book — at least when next I read it or teach it — will have much to do with her.”

 

From, “Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students Keep Reading Them”, from Code Switch February 26, 2019 7:00 

“In a study published earlier this month in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature,researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens found that only 2 percent of the human characters in Seuss’ books were people of color. And all of those characters, they say, were “depicted through racist caricatures.”Those caricatures have a potent effect, even at an early age. Research shows that even at the age of 3, children begin to form racial biases, and by the age of 7, those biases become fixed.

“One of the reasons for that is the images and experiences that they’re exposed to regarding marginalized groups and people of color,” Stephens says. “And so [Seuss’ books] being mainstream, and being spread out all over the world, has large implications.”

If kids open books and “the images they see [of themselves] are distorted, negative [or] laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society in which they are a part,” Rudine Sims Bishop, a scholar of children’s literature, wrote in a 1990 article.”

 

Additional Thoughts

 

“The ‘Product of Its Time’ Defense: No Excuse for Sexism and Racism”  Noah Berlatsky January 28, 2014 The Atlantic 

Dismissing the classics’ shortcomings as just a reflection of the era’s norms mischaracterizes history and undermines the books’ very relevance.

“The “product of its time” line, then, makes a hard divide between past and present, assuming that the past was completely benighted and that we are completely enlightened. It does this in the name of defending past literature: of morally exculpating Lovecraft, or Orwell, or whoever, on the grounds that they couldn’t be expected to help themselves, living as they did in such a dim and corrupt age.

Rather than defending them, though, this argument threatens to make these creators irrelevant. If, after all, the past was so different than the present, if we know so much more now than then, if we’re so morally superior, then what can these writers teach us? If we have progressed so far beyond Orwell in our understanding of equality and freedom and justice and humanity, then why should we read 1984, which purports to discuss issues such as equality and freedom and justice and humanity?

The answer is that we should still read Orwell not despite the sexism, but in part because of it. The fact that 1984 uses a Manic Pixie Dream Girl doesn’t make it helplessly of its time—MPDGs show up in our contemporary culture with a wearying consistency. Being attentive to Orwell’s sexism is a way to be attentive to ours; it makes 1984 more relevant, not less.”

 

Problematic Classics: Four Questions to Ask When Beloved Books Haven’t Aged Well Matt Mikalatos TOR.com Mon Aug 27, 2018

 

“I recently decided to reread T.H. White’s legendary classic, The Once and Future King. At first, I was delighted by the exact book I remembered from my youth: Wart (young King Arthur) being taught by Merlin, goofy King Pellinore, sullen Kay, a lot of ridiculous adventures, with some anti-war, anti-totalitarian commentary mixed in for good measure.

As I continued, I found some bits I didn’t remember. I hadn’t noticed the occasional asides about the “base Indians.” White says archery was a serious business once, before it was turned over to “Indians and boys.” He talks about the “destructive Indians” who chased the settlers across the plains. I did not feel good about this.

Then I found the n-word. Granted, it was used by a bird—and an unhinged one at that—in a rant where the hawk blames the administration, the politicians, the Bolsheviks, and so on for the state of the world. Another character rebukes him for his comments, though not for using the word specifically. Later in the book, Lancelot uses the same word to describe the Saracen knight, Palomides.

I couldn’t believe it. Not so much that the word was used, but the fact that I didn’t remember it. I was equally shocked that I didn’t remember the denigrating comments about Native Americans. It left me feeling distressed about the book…I had been trying to convince my teenaged daughters to read it. Had that been a mistake?

So what do we do? How can we deal with beloved or transformative books, many of them true classics, that also happen to be prejudiced, or racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or (insert other horrible things here)?

Here are four questions I’ve been using to process this myself.

1. Is this a work I can continue to recommend to others?

Can I, in good conscience, tell a friend, “This book is great, you should read it”? Or does the book possibly require some caveats?

T.H. White…well, I feel torn. I could warn my kids about his views of Native peoples. I could discuss the issue with them, make sure they know that it’s not okay to use the n-word, ever. That could be a possibility: to recommend, but with some major caveats.

When I think about it more, though, I imagine recommending the book to one of my African American friends. What would I say, “Hey, this is a really great book about King Arthur but it says the n-word a couple times for no good reason; I think you’ll really like it…”?

And if I can’t recommend it to my African American friends, or my Native American friends, then how and why am I recommending it to others? So I’ve come to the conclusion that no, I’m not going to suggest The Once and Future King to others.

This is the first question I have to wrestle with and come to a conclusion when it comes to any problematic work. If I say “yes, I can recommend this” and am settled, then fine. If it’s a “no,” then I go on to question two.

2. Is this a work I can continue to enjoy privately?

With folks like White, Tolkien, and Lewis, we see people who are steeped in colonialism and racist assumptions. Thus the defense that gets trotted out whenever these problems are discussed: “They were a product of their time.” This is one of the challenges for all of us as we delve further into the past reading the classics—of course there are assumptions and cultural practices and beliefs that are at odds with our own. Where is the tipping point of not being able to look past these differences, the point where we can no longer enjoy reading these works?

So the question becomes, Am I able to set aside what I know about the author and the racism inherent in the text and still enjoy the book?

I didn’t finish my re-read of The Once and Future King. It was disappointing for me, because I loved the book a lot as a kid. But a lot has changed since then; I’ve changed since then. I also didn’t have any Native American friends, or many African American friends back then, and I have a lot of both now. I didn’t even notice the n-word or those dehumanizing comments about First Nations people when I was a kid. But now I do, and that has altered the book for me. Nostalgia doesn’t counteract the racism of the text. I like and respect my friends better than I like the book, and I don’t feel comfortable reading a book that’s taking aim at my friends. It has lost its magic.

 

3. Is there another work that doesn’t have these problems, but occupies the same space?

In other words, if I can’t read White’s book and enjoy it anymore, is there another retelling of Arthurian legend that might take its place? Or in place of another kind of problematic work, is there a fantasy world I could explore that isn’t full of sexual violence? Are there speculative novels that present a different picture of human society when it comes to women or people of color or sexual orientation or whatever it may be?

There are so many amazing writers producing incredible work, and even more new voices springing up every day, that we shouldn’t ever have to compromise in search of stories that aren’t built on hateful, troubling, and outdated attitudes.”

 

“Art And Moral Taint” From  Practical Ethics

“Our position seems to be that morally tainted art ought to be banned if it is impossible to dissociate from its morally deplorable inspiration, but that it need not be if the art work and its inspiration can be dissociated.”

 

“I am a Snoop Dogg fan. That doesn’t make me less of a feminist”  by Julie Bindel The Guardian May 28 2015

The truth is that, if feminists – especially those of us who prioritise the campaign to end male violence against women – restricted themselves to entertainment that was perfectly non-sexist, perfectly pure, we would be pretty miserable, and have very little to watch or listen to. No football, because of the machismo and sexist chants. A ban on books and TV programmes that are based on violence against women. I would need to throw away all my crime novels, and never watch The Killing again.

As a feminist, under the system of patriarchy, to live a life without contradiction means I would have to wall myself off from the wider world of music, film and literature, something I’m not prepared to do. Life as an activist could be unremittingly hard if you chose to forego such genuine pleasures.

To attempt to be ideologically perfect would not only be boring, but probably impossible. I deflect my guilt by telling myself that I prioritise effecting real and sustainable change for women, because while I may occasionally listen to a sexist song, or watch a film which is miles from passing the Bechdel test, as a feminist activist I never, ever take time off. If judgmental moralists feel that listening to feminist folk music will bring about better change than direct campaigning to end violence against women, so be it. But I know what I would rather concentrate my efforts on.

 

The Amazing Spider XAN tumblr “Why White Women”

Also, I was thinking more about why white women saying they’re boycotting ‘Pacific Rim’ and urge others to do so because it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test and is therefore Terrible for Women and Feminism bothers me so much even though that’s their right to do so and I wouldn’t tell them not to do it, and now I think I know and can put it into words.

It’s really easy to throw away a film because of that test (which is flawed and used incorrectly in a lot of ways) if you’re a white woman and can easily find other films with white women who look like you and represent you, even if that representation isn’t as good in quantity and quality as white men (and yes, I’m specifying WHITE men and not just ‘men’ for good reason). If ‘Pacific Rim’ does nothing for you, there are plenty of other films that will generally do quite well for white women.

But as an East Asian woman, someone like Mako – a well-written Japanese woman who is informed by her culture without being solely defined by it, without being a racial stereotype, and gets to carry the film and have character development – almost NEVER comes along in mainstream Western media. And honestly – someone like her will probably not appear again for a very long time.

So you’ll understand why I can’t throw her and the entire film away as meaning nothing in terms of representation – because she’s all I really have right now. I can expect and push for better while still appreciating what she means to me. Mako Mori means more to me than the Bechdel Test if I have to compromise (and as a WOC, I have to compromise all the damn time, and no, I don’t like it), even if it would have been nice for the film to pass it as well. And don’t fucking dare accuse me of ‘accepting crumbs’ and how that will ‘bring down all women’.

 

“Let’s talk about J.K. Rowling”, by Trans activist and lawyer Sheryl Ring

Today Rowling proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what the trans community has known for years: she is an inveterate, transphobic bigot. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary people are non-binary. All genders and gender identities are valid. And though Rowling purports to play the liberal by saying that “if” trans people were truly oppressed she would march with us, her phrasing reveals her ostensible compassion as nothing more than a racist, transphobic canard. In a world where Black trans women led at Stonewall but remain the most oppressed people on the planet, Rowling chooses to erase both their contributions and their struggle. We should not expect more from a cis white woman whose most notable nonwhite character was named “Cho Chang.”

The idea of womanhood being defined by biological essentialism – i.e., the need to menstruate to be a woman – is as misogynistic and ableist as it is transphobic. Some cis women don’t have ueteruses. Many cis women can’t menstruate. Gender and sex aren’t binary, and science has proven this beyond a reasonable doubt. There is no difference whatsoever between opposing the idea of trans identity and opposing climate science: the science is settled, but you choose to ignore it or cling to conspiracy theories and extremist myths in order to serve an agenda of hate.

But, frankly, none of this is new. Trans people – especially trans people of color – have been telling you who Rowling is for years now. It’s time for the cis world to listen to us. I know that you all like your Harry Potter. But Rowling is using those books and movies to do us active harm. She is using her money to fund causes that are literally killing us. You won’t be hurt if you aren’t allowed to be a Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw anymore. You won’t be harmed by retiring your Hermione memes. But continuing them gives an inveterate bigot more ability to kill trans people. So let me put it as simply as I can: if you are truly a cis ally of trans people, you will boycott Harry Potter.

 

From, “Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us”

The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling.

By Aja Romano@ajaromano Jun 11, 2020, 2:10pm EDT

I’ve thought, written about, and talked about cancel culture a lot over the past few years. People often ask me if I think it really exists — if “canceling” someone can have any meaningful effect, or whether it’s entirely a performative stance. But I think that question flattens cancel culture’s power. To me, “canceling” someone can’t be about punishing one individual or ruining their career; even if humanity could agree on what social crimes were worth punishing, no one wants to live in a world where you can be blacklisted from existence, like in that one episode of Black Mirror.

Instead, I think cancel culture is best treated like a collective decision to minimize the cultural influence a person and their work have moving forward. This approach has already been applied to some 20th-century figures whose art is now almost always foregrounded within the context of what remains problematic about it: White supremacists Ezra Pound and H.P. Lovecraft, and the white supremacist film Birth of a Nation, are the clearest, most well-known examples, but society has also recalibrated the way we discuss more recent creators like Woody Allen and Michael Jackson. In all of these controversial cases, the approach usually winds up being one of compromise: No one wants to lose Cthulhu or “Thriller” or Annie Hall, but we also can no longer talk about any of those stories without making it clear that they were created by bigots or predators.

With J.K. Rowling, we’ve reached that point nearly in real time. Already, we can no longer talk about Harry Potter without foregrounding the prejudice lurking beneath the surface-level morality of Rowling’s stories. Many aspects of Harry Potter are already up for debate and reevaluation. The sad and messy truth is that Rowling’s transphobic comments may have ruined Harry Potter for many of its fans.

But Harry Potter is simply too big a cultural landmark to jettison. I don’t believe anyone wants to mind-wipe Harry Potter’s existence from the world; it means too much to too many of us. (Let’s leave aside the nonsensical whatever of Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts films.) But I also find myself bristling at the jokes that have invaded social media in the wake of Rowling’s comments — the ones fantasizing that the Harry Potter books magically appeared unto us with no author, or that they were written by someone else we like better. Sure, the author is dead, but that idea is about reclaiming agency over our own interpretation of a text. It paradoxically depends on the author having a proprietary interpretation of their own work — one that we can then reject.

That’s important, because despite its flaws, Harry Potter has influenced generations of kids to grow into progressives who then turned out to be more progressive than the books themselves and the woman who authored them. The series embodies what people in fandom mean when we say that fandom is transformative: The fans who sorted themselves into Hogwarts houses, sewed cosplay, wrote fanfic, played Quidditch, stanned Wizard Rock, swarmed stores for midnight book launches — they did all of that, not J.K. Rowling. Their passion made Harry Potter into the cultural phenomenon it is today.

By repudiating Rowling’s anti-trans comments, millions of Harry Potter fans are also turning the series into a symbol of the power of a collective voice to drown out an individual one. The power of fans’ love and empathy for trans people and other vulnerable communities, and their steady rejection of Rowling’s prejudice, is a potent, raw form of cancellation — one undertaken not out of a spirit of scorn and ostracism, but with something closer to real grief — and it deserves to be a part of the story of Harry Potter.

But if we can’t erase Rowling, what can we do instead? We can break up with her.

We can grieve, nurse our wounds, and be sad we loved someone who hurt us so badly. We can celebrate happier times while mourning a relationship we outgrew — one that became toxic — and regretting the time we spent waiting for a problematic fave to change and grow. We can give ourselves time to heal. And we can consider accepting that the microaggressions we may have noticed in Rowling’s books themselves were, perhaps, warning signs obscured by a benevolent, liberal exterior.

Jo can keep the money, and Pottermore and Cormoran Strike, and definitely all of Fantastic Beasts. She can keep the house elves who really love their enslavement, the anti-Semitic goblin stereotypes, Dolores Umbridge, Voldemort, the Dementors, and Rita Skeeter. I’ll take Harry and Hermione and Ron and Draco, Luna and Neville and Dumbledore’s Army. I’ll take Hogwarts and pumpkin pasties and butterbeer and Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, and every other moment of magic and love this series has given me and countless others.

Trans and queer Harry Potter fans get to keep Tonks and Remus and Sirius Black and Charlie Weasley and Draco, because I say so; Harry Potter is ours now, and we make the rules. J.K. Rowling lost custody over her kids and now we can spoil them, let them get tattoos, express themselves however they want, love whomever they want, transition if they want, practice as much radical empathy and anarchy as they want. Harry Potter is Desi now. Hermione Granger is black. The Weasleys are Jewish. Dumbledore’s Army is antifa. They’re anything you want and need them to be, because they were always for you.

As for me, I won’t be reading or rereading Harry Potter anytime soon. I have endless Harry Potter fanfiction and novels written by Harry Potter fans who grew up to explore instead. Above all, I have the Wizarding World that lives on in my heart — queer, genderqueer, deviant, diverse, and currently defunding the Aurors.

That’s the Harry Potter we all created together, without J.K. Rowling. And we all know that’s the version that matters, in the end.

 

From Facebook comment thread  DecolonizeYour Book Shelf, by Ally Henny

Here are four things that you can do to de-colonize your bookshelf this year:

  • Add books written by black, brown, and indigenous people. Try to add at least one book from an author of color for every book written by a White person that you buy this year.
  • Purge books that are racist or written by problematic authors. The goal isn’t to run away from alternative viewpoints or ideas with which we disagree, but these should not be the dominant voices in your library. There are some beloved works that are racist trash and belong in university libraries (where they can be studied for the trash that they are) and not in our personal collections.
  • Don’t pigeonhole authors of color. Black, brown, and indigenous people can do more than talk about race…pick books from your favorite genre written by authors of color.
  • Don’t hold authors of color to a higher standard. Not every book written by a black, brown, or indigenous author will automatically be great and that’s 100% okay. If you have mediocre or crappy books written by white authors, you can also have some mediocre books from people of color on your shelves, too.

 

Response from Lesley Williams

I’m hesitant to enter this thread given its vitriol, but I’d like to express some ideas that have not yet been aired. I’m African American with a biracial daughter, and was a librarian in several urban and suburban public libraries, as well as an English tutor at a racially diverse city college. I am totally in support of reading and supporting as many non-male, nonwhite, non North American, non cis and non straight authors as possible.

 

However, as this discussion shows, defining what is “problematic” is extremely tricky. There are African American male authors who have written openly misogynistic works, and others who have made anti Semitic statements. Many Jewish authors I otherwise admire have written or spoken disparagingly of Palestinians. To remove every author from my shelf who ever wrote a racist, sexist, classist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic or transphobic word; or ever supported destructive ideologies would remove Shakespeare, Malcolm X, Ishmael Reed, C.S Lewis, L. Frank Baum, (author of The Wizard of Oz), Dr. Seuss, George Orwell, Roger Zelazny, James Barrie, (author of Peter Pan), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Ezra Pound, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, James Joyce, John Updike, Philip Roth, Dorothy Parker, Edith Wharton, P.L. Travers (Mary Poppins) Iris Murdoch, Mark Twain,Tom Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy, D H Lawrence, Henry James, Balzac, Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, J D Salinger…in other words many of the greatest authors worth reading.

 

I don’t believe in canons, and there are definitely some “classics” we can stand to lose, not because of their authors’ bigotry but because they simply don’t speak to us any longer. (Personally I’d die happy without ever suffering through another Milton poem.) However, I don’t see what we gain by removing works of incandescent beauty and power from our shelves because some of their authors’ beliefs are repellent. We have learned to embrace intersectionality, that we are never JUST white or JUST gay or JUST female, but that we can be all those things at once, and that these identities are all integral to who we are and how we experience the world. Similarly, a white woman struggling against 19th century sexism can also be racist and antisemitic, but that doesn’t take away from the power of her writing about sexism. An African American man can write searing descriptions of anti black racism, but still abuse the women in his life. A social reformer crusading against child labor can still be blinded by the antisemitism and racism endemic to his culture.

 

I believe in the “yes, and” bookshelf. Yes, I’ll keep and re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, AND Louise Erdrich. I’ll continue to read The Odyssey and The Iliad, AND Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles. I’ll read Amoz Oz’ romantic depictions of Israel , AND Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestine’s Children. I’ll read Isak Dinesen’s colonialist Out of Africa AND King Leopold’s Ghost as well as Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Grace Ogo, Margaret Ogola and other African writers. These narratives are in conversation with each other, and while I don’t suggest that every story is equally “true”, I do believe it’s important to understand how the landscape of bigotry permeated and polluted even the greatest minds. If we agree that we all live in a racist, sexist, homophobic society, how is it possible to expect that our writing will escape that influence?

 

As a parent, I realize that there can be a tipping point, or a point of diminishing returns, when the racism or sexism in a book is so pervasive that it makes it impossible to enjoy the story, and that these stories can cause pain. There are certainly children’s books so cringe-inducing that we’ve tossed them. But that tipping point is not the same for everyone. Likewise I understand the urge not to let bigots profit from their bigotry . But not buying is different from deselecting. You don’t need to purchase new Harry Potter books, but throwing out your childhood copies isn’t going to have much effect on J K Rowling’s net worth.

 

And a bit of humility: remember that the standards of what is unacceptable continue to evolve. That’s a good thing, but beware that it also means authors you love, whom you consider to be progressive and above reproach may be seen differently in the near future. One of my favorite playwrights is August Wilson, whose legendary Pittsburgh Century cycle is one of the greatest portraits of 20th century African American life ever written. His female characters are fully drawn, he treats poor and rich, educated and uneducated with grace and respect. Yet I’ve had students point out an ableism in his work which I had never noticed, a tendency to treat mentally ill or neuro-atypical characters as “holy fools”; mystic prophets who function as symbols rather than fully developed human beings with agency. Does this mean we should no longer teach Wilson, no longer brings students to see his work, and cancel the Wilson monologue competitions? Do we “decolonize” August Wilson, or do we recognize that like all great writers, he had his blindpsots, as do we?

 

So yes, let’s decolonize our bookshelves, not by purging them of every sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic thought, but by denying those ideologies the final word. Read and teach great authors, but admit their shortcomings and bigotry, while providing the necessary context. Teach children to think critically of literature, not by removing everything harmful, but by prodding them to look for the beautiful while rejecting the ugly, even, or especially, in works they love.

 

 

Additional Readings

 

“Shylock, Huckleberry, and Jim: Do They Have a Place in Today’s High Schools?” James Gellert Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 1987, pp. 40-43

What Is the Torah Perspective on Safe Spaces, Trigger Words and Political Correctness? By Yehuda Shurpin Chabad.org 

How Do We Teach “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Honestly Confront Racism? By D.J. Cashmere, Yes Magazine, July 9 2019 

Women in Philosophy: “When Is it Ethical to Consume Sexist Art?” By Adriel M. Trott January 2, 2019  Blog of the APA Online 

“What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” By Claire Dederer  Paris Review 

“Reading Racist Literature” By Elif Batuman, New Yorker April 13, 2015 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/reading-racist-literature

“Surprise: It’s Racist! Unwanted Children’s Book Surprises”. By Betsy Bird, School Library Journal September 25th 2014