Tuesday
While I don’t think, for a moment, that today’s leftwing purists are as bad as rightwing fascists when it comes to censorship, they can inflict their own kind of harm. My friend Rebecca Adams, who has been editing my book, alerted me to a dispiriting account by Kate Clanchy, a Scots woman and author of the Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, about such sensitivity police. Since I read the piece right after having encountered the stories about teachers in a Washington state school attacking To Kill a Mockingbird (see my blog post on that here), and after having read a historic piece about Black activists calling poet Robert Hayden an “Uncle Tom” in the 1960s, I wondered whether liberal and leftwing cancel culture wasn’t a bigger deal than I had previously thought. Today’s post is my attempt to sort some of these issues out.
I don’t want to be guilty of a false equivalence here. Liberals are not taking books out of libraries or throwing them into bonfires or even (to cite the Washington state school system policies) forbidding teachers from teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. My quarrel with the Washington state teachers is that they reduced the book to a narrow political point rather than (as they should have done) made the case that there are authors of color who have written far better works dealing with racism than Harper Lee. If, as a teacher, you must pick and choose, why choose Mockingbird instead of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Song of Solomon, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or (to choose a more recent work) Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Nickel Boys?
With regard to Mockingbird, it certainly has problems, including its vision of a white savior (who, for the record, doesn’t actually save). It’s noteworthy, however, that the white savior has joined a racist organization in Harper Lee’s sequel, and it’s not that there aren’t danger signs even in the earlier book. Furthermore, the story of Atticus Finch is not the entire book. When I read Mockingbird as a child, my focus was entirely on Scout and her horror at injustice. By seeing literature as propaganda making a single point, leftwing purists, like their rightwing counterparts, overlook everything else going on in the work.
This is what Scottish author Clanchy discovered from the reader reports of her memoir. Here’s a sampling of the feedback she received:
I am enjoined not to quote from My Ántonia by Willa Cather, as it is “an old novel”; nor to state that homosexuality has historically been taboo in Nepal, as homophobia comes from colonialism; nor to mention that the Taliban were terrorists. Extending the principle of sunny improvement into the present, Wordsearch List [one of her readers] breaks out of their list to make the helpful suggestion that I should remove references to terrorism from across the book, as it “over-sensationalizes such a heavy topic, especially with minors involved.”
Nor should I say that more middle-class than working-class children go to university; nor that Foetal Alcohol Syndrome leaves children unable to progress; nor that a long tight dress restricts movement. All of these things are, for my Readers, “hurtful” notions of mine, not unfortunate facts. Writing, they imply, should represent the world as it ought to be, not as it is.
Clanchy ignored the responses and published the work, which sounds wise. As I read her words, I think of W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, both of whom complained about virtue police in the Black community. Here’s Hughes defending Jean Toomer’s masterpiece Cane:
The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. “Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.
And here’s W.E.B. Du Bois discussing how Black authors are pressured by the Black community to avoid certain inconvenient truths. While the observation comes in an article (“Art Is Propaganda”) that excoriates White authors for engaging in certain racist tropes, Du Bois is so interested in truth that he complains about Black audiences pressuring Black authors. He therefore urges Black authors to stay true to their art:
We [Black readers] are bound by all sorts of customs that have come down as second-hand soul clothes of white patrons. We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it. Our religion holds us in superstition. Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side. In all sorts of ways we are hemmed in and our new young artists have got to fight their way to freedom.
A different kind of pressure was applied to Black artists in the late 1960s, including to Robert Hayden, whose “Those Sunday Mornings” I wrote about recently (here). In an article for The Dispatch, Timothy Sandefur notes that Hayden refused to embrace the Negritude movement, which “supposedly meant emphasizing African traditions, but which in practice meant subordinating artistic concerns to the demands of Marxist revolution.” Sandefur observes that Hayden “had worked too hard perfecting his skill to elevate protest over craftsmanship.”
It’s central to this blog that literature can have a tremendous impact upon readers. Literature, however, operates differently than prose meant to exhort people to action. The latter is necessarily reductive since it must choose one plan amongst multiple possibilities and advocate for it. Literature, on the other hand, is multifaceted. Those politicos who don’t understand this will, upon reading a work, link a theme to something they don’t like, at which point they dismiss the work altogether. Literature that is politically correct propaganda, however, is not literature.
I remember, even as a child, sensing when a work was operating out of an agenda. Such stories often appeared in our school textbooks. In fact, I recall arriving at the conclusion—this as a third grader—that there were two kinds of reading: real reading and the reading one did in school. The latter bored me silly.
Later, when married to Julia, I also remember getting a book from her evangelical brother entitled A Christian Mother Goose, which rewrote the Mother Goose rhymes as Christian parables. I felt ill in the face of what felt like a profanation or a bad joke. Never have I understood Lewis Carroll’s parodies of didactic poetry as well as I did when reading this book. If children at Christian school are being force fed such “literature,” then they risk becoming similarly one-dimensional and will be ill-prepared to negotiate our complex world.
But back to leftwing purists. I imagine, when some of them condemn a novel, they pat themselves on the back for being able to read between the lines and pick up themes. But instead of surveying a forest, all they are seeing is one of the trees. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Alexander Pope famously wrote, and a little knowledge too often shapes their response.