Do you ever feel like throwing back your head and howling like a forlorn dog? I've been feeling like that a lot recently, which has made it difficult to write.
There's been a fair amount of fuss lately about a forthcoming edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the work of a (white?) academic, which replaces the 219 uses of the word "nigger" with the word "slave." I don't like bowdlerization either, but much of the criticism ginned up in the liberal blogosphere has been pointless. It's not as if this edition, published by a small regional press, is going to cause the standard version to disappear. That didn't happen when John Wallace, a school staff member in Virginia, published an edition of Huck Finn with the very same substitution twenty-five years ago; I doubt it will happen now. Does such a revision constitute "censorship"? Only in the tiniest technical sense, as far as I can see. Even if every school in the nation supplied its students with the New South edition for study purposes, the standard version would still be all over the place. Even removing Huck Finn from the curriculum wouldn't be censorship, since literally dozens of books are not in the curriculum, which changes from generation to generation. There have been at least two literary retellings of Huck Finn, both of which dealt with the issues it raises in different ways -- I was about to say, "by de-gaying" it, though that's not quite right, since it isn't gay. But ever since Professor Leslie Fiedler pointed in 1948 to the "homoeroticism" in the original (and in so much classic American fiction), many critics have tried to get rid of it. Is that "censorship"?
And I am impressed to see how many white people are quite comfortable telling black kids that they should toughen up and deal with it when white kids call them "nigger." Or even that, since they have encountered the word many times already in their lives, a few more times won't hurt. After all, they've heard the word many times in hiphop, so why should it bother them if it turns up in Huck Finn? On the whole, I'm inclined to agree with Toni Morrison's take (PDF) that trying to excise the N-word is "a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children" -- though appeasing adults instead of educating children is just what the American school system has largely evolved to do. And brushing off the problem by saying that the teacher should be able to deal with it, while in principle correct, is also ignoring the difficulties teachers face. Mark Twain's handling of race doesn't fit well into the multiple-choice tests that have taken over so much of American school time, thanks not to teachers but to various bureaucrats (and of course the highly lucrative testing industry). Just about everyone who derisively opposes the NewSouth edition seems determined not to think about the problems Huck Finn poses.
Some writers (sorry, I'm too burned out to supply enough links -- will try try to fix it later) accused the editor of the NewSouth edition of thinking that if we just eliminate the n-word, that will be enough to stop racism. I think that's a straw man; I haven't seen anything to support the claim. I don't believe, when I pick on people for using "faggot" and other homophobic epithets, that stopping their use is all that's needed to eliminate antigay bigotry. But since their use is a sign of bigotry, attacking those who use them is one small part of working against bigotry. I've argued before that the best way for gay people to deal with the epithets is to reclaim them, but in the meantime, anyone who uses them in the traditional way should expect to be confronted. (As The Onion once put it: if we don't have free speech, how will we know who the assholes are?)
Come to think of it, I think I detect some kind of connection between this jumping on the bandwagon against the NewSouth edition and some recent attempts by ostensible progressives / leftists to rehabilitate the word "faggot" as a pejorative for what one of them called "kneelers." And one of John Caruso's commenters who was especially furious about removing the n-word from Huck Finn also seems to be concerned with establishing Ralph Nader's bonafides as a manly man rather than a "shrinking violet." But of course there couldn't possibly be a connection. If there comes a day when white racism really is not a problem in the US, then it will be possible to teach Huck Finn as a purely historical document, whose language can simply be glossed by teachers. The trouble is that things haven't yet changed enough.
For that matter, as several commenters at Racialicious asked rhetorically, if Huck Finn is taught to teach white students the humanity of black people (the very kind of "politically correct" approach to literature that the critics of the NewSouth edition condemn out of the other side of their mouths), wouldn't books by black authors do the job even better? Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, for example. As Toni Morrison suggests, trying to turn Huck Finn into an anti-racist tract does as much injury to its complexity (and as she shows, its incoherence on many levels) as denouncing it as a "racist tract" would do. In the good old days beloved of many white people my age and older, books by black authors about black experience were not in the curriculum. That's no longer the case, thanks to "politically correct" demands of "identity politics" that a wider range of voices need to be heard, and taught. But the gains that have been made are always in danger of being lost, and the threat comes from all over the political spectrum.
We all have our blind spots, though, and John Caruso wrote a much better post on the US media distortion of the Wikileaks controversy. But even he weaseled, just a tiny bit, on the accusation that Julian Assange "stole" documents.
It's true that Assange didn't personally "steal" the material Wikileaks has been publishing, but if I'm not mistaken it's also illegal to fence stolen goods: the fact that you didn't personally steal them doesn't exculpate you. And it's also true, as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out, that reporters not only receive leaked material, they encourage sources to get that material for them. The reason why so many Americans are having tantrums about Wikileaks is not that they consider government secrets to be sacrosanct -- they have no objection to the US spying on other countries to steal their secrets, for example, and would probably be happy if even Wikileaks published "stolen" material about their own pet conspiracy theories -- but because they don't want to know the bad things their government is doing. So while it's true that, in a narrow sense, neither Assange nor Wikileaks "stole" those documents, it's somewhat a waste of energy to defend them against the accusation. If Assange had personally entered the corridors of the Pentagon, rifled the file drawers, and walked out with the materials Wikileaks has been publishing, he'd be a hero even if he was legally a thief.
I was struck by a deranged commenter to one of Greenwald's posts who wrote that Assange "received stole [sic] property and should not have made them public, instead he could have shown real backbone by notifying the ones who were robbed (the American people) and returned them." That's exactly what Wikileaks did, of course: notified the American people that their military and their government were hiding these things from them, and let them know some (a very small part, since Wikileaks can only publish what others leak to them) of what their government was illegitimately withholding from them.
And ah, then, there's my RWA1 on Facebook, who linked to an attack on Hugo Chavez with the comment, "The American Left has disgraced itself by apologizing for this incipient Mussolini." Oh, come on! If Chavez really were a Mussolini, neither RWA1 nor most Americans would have any objection to him. Hell, the US got along with the Mussolini at first: he was good for business and hostile to labor, which is what matters for good relations with the US, right or far-right. When Venezuela was ruled by a dictatorship, the American Right was perfectly comfortable with it. Saddam Hussein got along just fine with the US, until we no longer needed him.
A good many years ago I confronted RWA1 on just this point. Like many conservatives he tended to get green around the gills when reminded what his tax dollars were paying for in Latin America and elsewhere, but he rallied. At first he blustered about "those goddamned Latin American generals!" I reminded him that those goddamned Latin American generals were trained, paid, and equipped by the US government, and wouldn't last a week without our support. Well, he said glumly, we had to do something to stop those countries from going Communist. (Which is neither here nor there, since the US has supported coups to overturn elected social-democratic governments that that nothing to do with Communism.)
So it goes. What has me wanting to bang my head against the wall, you see, is not the great unwashed, the illiterate, the know-nothing Teabaggers, or Fox News; it's highly educated, politically progressive (except for RWA1 of course) people who are supposedly on the same side I am, but who (among other matters) throw hissyfits over trivial matters like the NewSouth edition of Huck Finn, who feel it necessary to exonerate Julian Assange of accusations of theft. And contrary to RWA1, much of what he would consider "the American left" has been trying to distance itself from any appearance of defending, let alone apologizing for, Hugo Chavez.
Showing posts with label huckleberry finn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label huckleberry finn. Show all posts
Bang Head Against Wall. Repeat As Necessary.
Labels:
huckleberry finn,
hugo chavez,
mussolini,
rwa1,
the n-word,
wikileaks
Bang Head Against Wall. Repeat As Necessary.
Do you ever feel like throwing back your head and howling like a forlorn dog? I've been feeling like that a lot recently, which has made it difficult to write.
There's been a fair amount of fuss lately about a forthcoming edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the work of a (white?) academic, which replaces the 219 uses of the word "nigger" with the word "slave." I don't like bowdlerization either, but much of the criticism ginned up in the liberal blogosphere has been pointless. It's not as if this edition, published by a small regional press, is going to cause the standard version to disappear. That didn't happen when John Wallace, a school staff member in Virginia, published an edition of Huck Finn with the very same substitution twenty-five years ago; I doubt it will happen now. Does such a revision constitute "censorship"? Only in the tiniest technical sense, as far as I can see. Even if every school in the nation supplied its students with the New South edition for study purposes, the standard version would still be all over the place. Even removing Huck Finn from the curriculum wouldn't be censorship, since literally dozens of books are not in the curriculum, which changes from generation to generation. There have been at least two literary retellings of Huck Finn, both of which dealt with the issues it raises in different ways -- I was about to say, "by de-gaying" it, though that's not quite right, since it isn't gay. But ever since Professor Leslie Fiedler pointed in 1948 to the "homoeroticism" in the original (and in so much classic American fiction), many critics have tried to get rid of it. Is that "censorship"?
And I am impressed to see how many white people are quite comfortable telling black kids that they should toughen up and deal with it when white kids call them "nigger." Or even that, since they have encountered the word many times already in their lives, a few more times won't hurt. After all, they've heard the word many times in hiphop, so why should it bother them if it turns up in Huck Finn? On the whole, I'm inclined to agree with Toni Morrison's take (PDF) that trying to excise the N-word is "a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children" -- though appeasing adults instead of educating children is just what the American school system has largely evolved to do. And brushing off the problem by saying that the teacher should be able to deal with it, while in principle correct, is also ignoring the difficulties teachers face. Mark Twain's handling of race doesn't fit well into the multiple-choice tests that have taken over so much of American school time, thanks not to teachers but to various bureaucrats (and of course the highly lucrative testing industry). Just about everyone who derisively opposes the NewSouth edition seems determined not to think about the problems Huck Finn poses.
Some writers (sorry, I'm too burned out to supply enough links -- will try try to fix it later) accused the editor of the NewSouth edition of thinking that if we just eliminate the n-word, that will be enough to stop racism. I think that's a straw man; I haven't seen anything to support the claim. I don't believe, when I pick on people for using "faggot" and other homophobic epithets, that stopping their use is all that's needed to eliminate antigay bigotry. But since their use is a sign of bigotry, attacking those who use them is one small part of working against bigotry. I've argued before that the best way for gay people to deal with the epithets is to reclaim them, but in the meantime, anyone who uses them in the traditional way should expect to be confronted. (As The Onion once put it: if we don't have free speech, how will we know who the assholes are?)
Come to think of it, I think I detect some kind of connection between this jumping on the bandwagon against the NewSouth edition and some recent attempts by ostensible progressives / leftists to rehabilitate the word "faggot" as a pejorative for what one of them called "kneelers." And one of John Caruso's commenters who was especially furious about removing the n-word from Huck Finn also seems to be concerned with establishing Ralph Nader's bonafides as a manly man rather than a "shrinking violet." But of course there couldn't possibly be a connection. If there comes a day when white racism really is not a problem in the US, then it will be possible to teach Huck Finn as a purely historical document, whose language can simply be glossed by teachers. The trouble is that things haven't yet changed enough.
For that matter, as several commenters at Racialicious asked rhetorically, if Huck Finn is taught to teach white students the humanity of black people (the very kind of "politically correct" approach to literature that the critics of the NewSouth edition condemn out of the other side of their mouths), wouldn't books by black authors do the job even better? Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, for example. As Toni Morrison suggests, trying to turn Huck Finn into an anti-racist tract does as much injury to its complexity (and as she shows, its incoherence on many levels) as denouncing it as a "racist tract" would do. In the good old days beloved of many white people my age and older, books by black authors about black experience were not in the curriculum. That's no longer the case, thanks to "politically correct" demands of "identity politics" that a wider range of voices need to be heard, and taught. But the gains that have been made are always in danger of being lost, and the threat comes from all over the political spectrum.
We all have our blind spots, though, and John Caruso wrote a much better post on the US media distortion of the Wikileaks controversy. But even he weaseled, just a tiny bit, on the accusation that Julian Assange "stole" documents.
It's true that Assange didn't personally "steal" the material Wikileaks has been publishing, but if I'm not mistaken it's also illegal to fence stolen goods: the fact that you didn't personally steal them doesn't exculpate you. And it's also true, as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out, that reporters not only receive leaked material, they encourage sources to get that material for them. The reason why so many Americans are having tantrums about Wikileaks is not that they consider government secrets to be sacrosanct -- they have no objection to the US spying on other countries to steal their secrets, for example, and would probably be happy if even Wikileaks published "stolen" material about their own pet conspiracy theories -- but because they don't want to know the bad things their government is doing. So while it's true that, in a narrow sense, neither Assange nor Wikileaks "stole" those documents, it's somewhat a waste of energy to defend them against the accusation. If Assange had personally entered the corridors of the Pentagon, rifled the file drawers, and walked out with the materials Wikileaks has been publishing, he'd be a hero even if he was legally a thief.
I was struck by a deranged commenter to one of Greenwald's posts who wrote that Assange "received stole [sic] property and should not have made them public, instead he could have shown real backbone by notifying the ones who were robbed (the American people) and returned them." That's exactly what Wikileaks did, of course: notified the American people that their military and their government were hiding these things from them, and let them know some (a very small part, since Wikileaks can only publish what others leak to them) of what their government was illegitimately withholding from them.
And ah, then, there's my RWA1 on Facebook, who linked to an attack on Hugo Chavez with the comment, "The American Left has disgraced itself by apologizing for this incipient Mussolini." Oh, come on! If Chavez really were a Mussolini, neither RWA1 nor most Americans would have any objection to him. Hell, the US got along with the Mussolini at first: he was good for business and hostile to labor, which is what matters for good relations with the US, right or far-right. When Venezuela was ruled by a dictatorship, the American Right was perfectly comfortable with it. Saddam Hussein got along just fine with the US, until we no longer needed him.
A good many years ago I confronted RWA1 on just this point. Like many conservatives he tended to get green around the gills when reminded what his tax dollars were paying for in Latin America and elsewhere, but he rallied. At first he blustered about "those goddamned Latin American generals!" I reminded him that those goddamned Latin American generals were trained, paid, and equipped by the US government, and wouldn't last a week without our support. Well, he said glumly, we had to do something to stop those countries from going Communist. (Which is neither here nor there, since the US has supported coups to overturn elected social-democratic governments that that nothing to do with Communism.)
So it goes. What has me wanting to bang my head against the wall, you see, is not the great unwashed, the illiterate, the know-nothing Teabaggers, or Fox News; it's highly educated, politically progressive (except for RWA1 of course) people who are supposedly on the same side I am, but who (among other matters) throw hissyfits over trivial matters like the NewSouth edition of Huck Finn, who feel it necessary to exonerate Julian Assange of accusations of theft. And contrary to RWA1, much of what he would consider "the American left" has been trying to distance itself from any appearance of defending, let alone apologizing for, Hugo Chavez.
There's been a fair amount of fuss lately about a forthcoming edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the work of a (white?) academic, which replaces the 219 uses of the word "nigger" with the word "slave." I don't like bowdlerization either, but much of the criticism ginned up in the liberal blogosphere has been pointless. It's not as if this edition, published by a small regional press, is going to cause the standard version to disappear. That didn't happen when John Wallace, a school staff member in Virginia, published an edition of Huck Finn with the very same substitution twenty-five years ago; I doubt it will happen now. Does such a revision constitute "censorship"? Only in the tiniest technical sense, as far as I can see. Even if every school in the nation supplied its students with the New South edition for study purposes, the standard version would still be all over the place. Even removing Huck Finn from the curriculum wouldn't be censorship, since literally dozens of books are not in the curriculum, which changes from generation to generation. There have been at least two literary retellings of Huck Finn, both of which dealt with the issues it raises in different ways -- I was about to say, "by de-gaying" it, though that's not quite right, since it isn't gay. But ever since Professor Leslie Fiedler pointed in 1948 to the "homoeroticism" in the original (and in so much classic American fiction), many critics have tried to get rid of it. Is that "censorship"?
And I am impressed to see how many white people are quite comfortable telling black kids that they should toughen up and deal with it when white kids call them "nigger." Or even that, since they have encountered the word many times already in their lives, a few more times won't hurt. After all, they've heard the word many times in hiphop, so why should it bother them if it turns up in Huck Finn? On the whole, I'm inclined to agree with Toni Morrison's take (PDF) that trying to excise the N-word is "a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children" -- though appeasing adults instead of educating children is just what the American school system has largely evolved to do. And brushing off the problem by saying that the teacher should be able to deal with it, while in principle correct, is also ignoring the difficulties teachers face. Mark Twain's handling of race doesn't fit well into the multiple-choice tests that have taken over so much of American school time, thanks not to teachers but to various bureaucrats (and of course the highly lucrative testing industry). Just about everyone who derisively opposes the NewSouth edition seems determined not to think about the problems Huck Finn poses.
Some writers (sorry, I'm too burned out to supply enough links -- will try try to fix it later) accused the editor of the NewSouth edition of thinking that if we just eliminate the n-word, that will be enough to stop racism. I think that's a straw man; I haven't seen anything to support the claim. I don't believe, when I pick on people for using "faggot" and other homophobic epithets, that stopping their use is all that's needed to eliminate antigay bigotry. But since their use is a sign of bigotry, attacking those who use them is one small part of working against bigotry. I've argued before that the best way for gay people to deal with the epithets is to reclaim them, but in the meantime, anyone who uses them in the traditional way should expect to be confronted. (As The Onion once put it: if we don't have free speech, how will we know who the assholes are?)
Come to think of it, I think I detect some kind of connection between this jumping on the bandwagon against the NewSouth edition and some recent attempts by ostensible progressives / leftists to rehabilitate the word "faggot" as a pejorative for what one of them called "kneelers." And one of John Caruso's commenters who was especially furious about removing the n-word from Huck Finn also seems to be concerned with establishing Ralph Nader's bonafides as a manly man rather than a "shrinking violet." But of course there couldn't possibly be a connection. If there comes a day when white racism really is not a problem in the US, then it will be possible to teach Huck Finn as a purely historical document, whose language can simply be glossed by teachers. The trouble is that things haven't yet changed enough.
For that matter, as several commenters at Racialicious asked rhetorically, if Huck Finn is taught to teach white students the humanity of black people (the very kind of "politically correct" approach to literature that the critics of the NewSouth edition condemn out of the other side of their mouths), wouldn't books by black authors do the job even better? Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, for example. As Toni Morrison suggests, trying to turn Huck Finn into an anti-racist tract does as much injury to its complexity (and as she shows, its incoherence on many levels) as denouncing it as a "racist tract" would do. In the good old days beloved of many white people my age and older, books by black authors about black experience were not in the curriculum. That's no longer the case, thanks to "politically correct" demands of "identity politics" that a wider range of voices need to be heard, and taught. But the gains that have been made are always in danger of being lost, and the threat comes from all over the political spectrum.
We all have our blind spots, though, and John Caruso wrote a much better post on the US media distortion of the Wikileaks controversy. But even he weaseled, just a tiny bit, on the accusation that Julian Assange "stole" documents.
It's true that Assange didn't personally "steal" the material Wikileaks has been publishing, but if I'm not mistaken it's also illegal to fence stolen goods: the fact that you didn't personally steal them doesn't exculpate you. And it's also true, as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out, that reporters not only receive leaked material, they encourage sources to get that material for them. The reason why so many Americans are having tantrums about Wikileaks is not that they consider government secrets to be sacrosanct -- they have no objection to the US spying on other countries to steal their secrets, for example, and would probably be happy if even Wikileaks published "stolen" material about their own pet conspiracy theories -- but because they don't want to know the bad things their government is doing. So while it's true that, in a narrow sense, neither Assange nor Wikileaks "stole" those documents, it's somewhat a waste of energy to defend them against the accusation. If Assange had personally entered the corridors of the Pentagon, rifled the file drawers, and walked out with the materials Wikileaks has been publishing, he'd be a hero even if he was legally a thief.
I was struck by a deranged commenter to one of Greenwald's posts who wrote that Assange "received stole [sic] property and should not have made them public, instead he could have shown real backbone by notifying the ones who were robbed (the American people) and returned them." That's exactly what Wikileaks did, of course: notified the American people that their military and their government were hiding these things from them, and let them know some (a very small part, since Wikileaks can only publish what others leak to them) of what their government was illegitimately withholding from them.
And ah, then, there's my RWA1 on Facebook, who linked to an attack on Hugo Chavez with the comment, "The American Left has disgraced itself by apologizing for this incipient Mussolini." Oh, come on! If Chavez really were a Mussolini, neither RWA1 nor most Americans would have any objection to him. Hell, the US got along with the Mussolini at first: he was good for business and hostile to labor, which is what matters for good relations with the US, right or far-right. When Venezuela was ruled by a dictatorship, the American Right was perfectly comfortable with it. Saddam Hussein got along just fine with the US, until we no longer needed him.
A good many years ago I confronted RWA1 on just this point. Like many conservatives he tended to get green around the gills when reminded what his tax dollars were paying for in Latin America and elsewhere, but he rallied. At first he blustered about "those goddamned Latin American generals!" I reminded him that those goddamned Latin American generals were trained, paid, and equipped by the US government, and wouldn't last a week without our support. Well, he said glumly, we had to do something to stop those countries from going Communist. (Which is neither here nor there, since the US has supported coups to overturn elected social-democratic governments that that nothing to do with Communism.)
So it goes. What has me wanting to bang my head against the wall, you see, is not the great unwashed, the illiterate, the know-nothing Teabaggers, or Fox News; it's highly educated, politically progressive (except for RWA1 of course) people who are supposedly on the same side I am, but who (among other matters) throw hissyfits over trivial matters like the NewSouth edition of Huck Finn, who feel it necessary to exonerate Julian Assange of accusations of theft. And contrary to RWA1, much of what he would consider "the American left" has been trying to distance itself from any appearance of defending, let alone apologizing for, Hugo Chavez.
Labels:
huckleberry finn,
hugo chavez,
mussolini,
rwa1,
the n-word,
wikileaks
The Best Banned in the Land
Actually, I was already primed to go off on a rant about "Political Correctness" when I encountered Mark Peters's article about the word "gay." Earlier that day I'd had a dispute with a coworker about the banning of books from public schools; I now think her concern had been inspired by an article on the subject in USA Today. Anyway, she was displeased by what she called "Political Correctness" which led to the "banning" of Huckleberry Finn, though what I think she meant was controversy over its use in the curriculum -- when I pressed her on that, she seemed unsure.
She jumped to the case of Little Black Sambo, which she also claimed was the victim of PC even though it was a very nice story and didn't mean any harm. She claimed that a few years ago she'd tried to get a copy of Little Black Sambo but you couldn't even get it in the US because of PC. I wasn't able to pursue that point with her, but a look at Amazon.com shows that LBS is still in print in numerous editions, and a search of the local public library shows that they have the original version and two retellings, including Julius Lester's. In those days, she said (apparently meaning her childhood and mine, we're very close in age), nobody objected to Little Black Sambo or Huckleberry Finn or Uncle Tom's Cabin. But now they're banned! (As someone said to me in another context, Oh, they are not!)
In those days, I countered sternly, racism was normal in the United States. She didn't have an answer to that, and in fact she was wrong. African Americans have been complaining about Little Black Sambo almost since it was first published in 1899. It was excluded from some American libraries immediately after World War II, before my coworker and I were born. Of course, we're both from Indiana, a state not famous for its racial sensitivity. What she meant, of course, was that nobody who mattered was complaining.
This weekend I've been browsing through the history of Huck Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin as school texts. They've both been controversial for a long time, and one thing I wasn't able to find out (though I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, probably in printed matter) was how long those books have actually been taught in schools. When they were still new, they wouldn't have been taught because they weren't Classics; it wasn't until after the 1930s or so, partly due to the efforts of Matthiessen's American Renaissance, that American literature was taught even at the university level in the US. (Barbarians at the gates!)
Y'see, when I was in school (roughly 1957 to 1969), our reading texts were textbooks -- first of the Dick and Jane variety, then anthologies assembled by textbook publishers, with few if any novel-length texts included. We were never given copies of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick, or Tropic of Cancer (just kidding! -- though I did read Henry Miller on my own during my junior and senior years) and told to read them -- not even in high school. My high school French teacher lent me what must have been her college copy of an anthology of French short stories so I could read Camus. Even in senior English our assignments came from the twelfth-grade Scott, Foresman textbook; I seem to remember reading the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in a modernized version.
Anything outside of the textbooks wasn't assigned reading, and I was virtually the only kid in my elementary school, as far as I know, who dug into the "library" shelves at the back of the classrooms and read books I didn't have to read. (A weirdo even then, you see!) I don't remember anyone but me reading the books (the Autobiography of Malcolm X!? how did that get on the shelves?) in the high-school library either, though surely someone else must have... But I'm wandering afield here.
The point is that while some large cities must have had advanced classes for elite students in their public schools, and perhaps elite private schools might have used real books instead of textbooks, in the ordinary public schools the textbooks ruled. If, despite the publishers' vigilance, something controversial got into the textbooks, the teachers probably would not have assigned it, and there was little danger that most students would read anything in the texts that hadn't been assigned. So the whole question of "PC" in this connection is a red herring, because the textbook and school systems were set up to avoid controversial material -- and the books I'm talking about have always been controversial. Uncle Tom's Cabin stirred up a major shitstorm in its day, prompting a counterpropaganda campaign from the slave states. Its enduring popularity after the Confederate Rebellion was the product of stage productions, including minstrel shows, which reduced it to sensationalism: "In fact," Darryl Lorenzo Wellington wrote in The Nation in 2006, "there were 'Tom shows' in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story's antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements." (You say you want a revolution ... )
Huckleberry Finn similarly had its critics long before "political correctness" was a gleam in Nat Hentoff's eye. As this contemporary white high-school teacher says,
Just a few days before I had this exchange with my co-worker, I had one on Facebook about the movie Heathers with an old friend there. She claimed that Heathers couldn't be made today because of "PC" , since the Columbine High School shootings were so similar to some of the events in the movie. I asked her what PC had to do with it. Movies like Heathers were not exactly a dime a dozen in the 1980s either, and it was made not by a mainstream Hollywood production company (which wouldn't have touched such a project) but by a small, financially troubled company that went belly up shortly after Heathers was released. One reason it could be made was that the filmmakers didn't have marketing people breathing down their necks, worried about how it would play in Peoria. When I first saw it in a theater in 1989, I kept asking myself how such a dark, disturbing film had ever been made and released.
My friend replied:
But the really revealing thing is her definition of political correctness as "offending mainstream sensibilities": she has it exactly backwards. Mainstream sensibilities aren't offended by fag jokes, misogynist jokes, or racist jokes; mainstream sensibilities are offended when someone objects to sexism, racism, and antigay bigotry -- it's those objections which are called "PC." Or, to put it another way, if it offends you, you're being PC; if it offends me, I'm just tired of being kicked in the face by feminazis, radical fairies, America-haters, and blacks constantly playing the race card. At most, what is called "political correctness" is the mainstream's guilty conscience: mainstream Americans are aware that there have been some less-than-nice, even downright embarrassing aspects to American culture in the past, and they're prepared to make a few cosmetic adjustments so they can pretend to themselves that things have changed. (Having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is a great boon to many of them, because they can believe that it cancels out everything that happened before 2008; others feel that equality is all very well, but having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is Going Too Far.) But at bottom they don't really get it, they don't really view The Other as fully human, and wish that all these uppity Others would shut up and go away. All they want is to have America to themselves, like they did in the 1950s, when everybody was happy and there wasn't all this PC -- is that so wrong?
So, back to Mark Peters and his foolish article about "gay." Peters is presumably heterosexual, or at least adopting a heterosexual male stance. If a mainstream American major motion picture has a character declare that electric cars are gay, and if mainstream Americans go berserk because the line is cut from the trailer -- not the film itself, mind you, but from the trailer -- then that shows that any objections to the joke (which wasn't really a joke at all, according to Peters) are oversensitive. Again, as I said earlier, this would make no sense if "political correctness" referred to what offends mainstream America, because it's fairly obvious that mainstream America wasn't offended by the joke at all. Saying that electric cars are gay is not, contrary to Peters, the same as saying that they're "lame." It means they're unmanly, and cars are for American heterosexual males a vital phallic symbol: they go vrooom, they are powerful, they are fast, they spurt out stinky smoke (or did, until PC environmentalists made them stop). If you're going to make a normal heterosexual male drive a faggy electric car, why not go the whole nine yards and cut off his balls? It's as gay as your parents chaperoning the dance, as Vince Vaughan went on to say by way of "clarification." Because only a fag wouldn't mind his parents being at the dance, keeping him from any chance of getting any pussy.... Maybe I'm overinterpreting, but I don't think so, because I can't see a contemporary Hollywood film giving Vaughan's line to, say, Cameron Diaz or Judi Dench addressing a group of women.
Do I think that the line should be taken out of the movie altogether? Hell, I don't think it should have been taken out of the trailer. Since it was in the trailer, I can suppose it to be representative of the movie's general tone, and I'd rather know that in advance so that I can avoid the film altogether. (I wouldn't have wanted the trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry sanitized either; it would have been false advertising.) Movies about overaged boys who confuse their cars with their dicks are very rarely worth my money or my time. And that brings me to the next point about "PC": it isn't just organized campaigns against bigoted attitudes that offend mainstream America, but any individual dissent at all. In my experience, I am not even supposed to say that a movie is sexist, or that a joke is racist, or that a song lyric is misogynist, because it shows that I'm a PC tyrant who doesn't want mainstream America to have any harmless fun. And where is the harm in saying that electric cars are gay, huh? Nobody's killed by that. If I refuse to spend my money to support infantile Hollywood comedies in order to show how open-minded I am, that's my right (though just barely), but at least I can shut up about my objections. In that sense my friend is right: nobody is as Politically Correct, in the sense of not being able to tolerate disagreement with their political stance, as mainstream Americans.
She jumped to the case of Little Black Sambo, which she also claimed was the victim of PC even though it was a very nice story and didn't mean any harm. She claimed that a few years ago she'd tried to get a copy of Little Black Sambo but you couldn't even get it in the US because of PC. I wasn't able to pursue that point with her, but a look at Amazon.com shows that LBS is still in print in numerous editions, and a search of the local public library shows that they have the original version and two retellings, including Julius Lester's. In those days, she said (apparently meaning her childhood and mine, we're very close in age), nobody objected to Little Black Sambo or Huckleberry Finn or Uncle Tom's Cabin. But now they're banned! (As someone said to me in another context, Oh, they are not!)
In those days, I countered sternly, racism was normal in the United States. She didn't have an answer to that, and in fact she was wrong. African Americans have been complaining about Little Black Sambo almost since it was first published in 1899. It was excluded from some American libraries immediately after World War II, before my coworker and I were born. Of course, we're both from Indiana, a state not famous for its racial sensitivity. What she meant, of course, was that nobody who mattered was complaining.
This weekend I've been browsing through the history of Huck Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin as school texts. They've both been controversial for a long time, and one thing I wasn't able to find out (though I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, probably in printed matter) was how long those books have actually been taught in schools. When they were still new, they wouldn't have been taught because they weren't Classics; it wasn't until after the 1930s or so, partly due to the efforts of Matthiessen's American Renaissance, that American literature was taught even at the university level in the US. (Barbarians at the gates!)
Y'see, when I was in school (roughly 1957 to 1969), our reading texts were textbooks -- first of the Dick and Jane variety, then anthologies assembled by textbook publishers, with few if any novel-length texts included. We were never given copies of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick, or Tropic of Cancer (just kidding! -- though I did read Henry Miller on my own during my junior and senior years) and told to read them -- not even in high school. My high school French teacher lent me what must have been her college copy of an anthology of French short stories so I could read Camus. Even in senior English our assignments came from the twelfth-grade Scott, Foresman textbook; I seem to remember reading the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in a modernized version.
Anything outside of the textbooks wasn't assigned reading, and I was virtually the only kid in my elementary school, as far as I know, who dug into the "library" shelves at the back of the classrooms and read books I didn't have to read. (A weirdo even then, you see!) I don't remember anyone but me reading the books (the Autobiography of Malcolm X!? how did that get on the shelves?) in the high-school library either, though surely someone else must have... But I'm wandering afield here.
The point is that while some large cities must have had advanced classes for elite students in their public schools, and perhaps elite private schools might have used real books instead of textbooks, in the ordinary public schools the textbooks ruled. If, despite the publishers' vigilance, something controversial got into the textbooks, the teachers probably would not have assigned it, and there was little danger that most students would read anything in the texts that hadn't been assigned. So the whole question of "PC" in this connection is a red herring, because the textbook and school systems were set up to avoid controversial material -- and the books I'm talking about have always been controversial. Uncle Tom's Cabin stirred up a major shitstorm in its day, prompting a counterpropaganda campaign from the slave states. Its enduring popularity after the Confederate Rebellion was the product of stage productions, including minstrel shows, which reduced it to sensationalism: "In fact," Darryl Lorenzo Wellington wrote in The Nation in 2006, "there were 'Tom shows' in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story's antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements." (You say you want a revolution ... )
Huckleberry Finn similarly had its critics long before "political correctness" was a gleam in Nat Hentoff's eye. As this contemporary white high-school teacher says,
It is quite surprising to students that the concerns that people had in the 1800s when the book was published had little to do with race, little to do with language, but much more to do with deportment, much more to do with how a young person was supposed to behave. That opens their eyes to how the book stays the same but the attitudes toward it change.According to Jonathan Arac, "It was only after the Second World War that Huckleberry Finn achieved massive canonicity in the schools ... ; yet these same years were the time that the assertion of African American civil rights, most strongly symbolized in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), brought new voices into play concerning the relations of whites and blacks" (21). My co-worker is unaware of the reactions black students have had to Huck Finn and to white students' response to it, and she seems not to care, or at least not to see this as a problem. What matters is that white students should have the right to be exposed to this great book, and in school -- they shouldn't have to read it on their own. As Arac writes, "It would seem that if you are an African-American child who does not like to go to school because some other students feel empowered to talk like the hero of the assigned book and call you 'nigger,' that is your sickness, not a matter of public concern" (ibid.). As I told my co-worker, I'm all in favor of teaching the conflicts and encouraging students to understand the complexities of the treatment of race in books like Huck Finn, but I wonder how many teachers are competent to do that, or have time to do so now that so much of their time has to be spent prepping their students for standardized tests.
Just a few days before I had this exchange with my co-worker, I had one on Facebook about the movie Heathers with an old friend there. She claimed that Heathers couldn't be made today because of "PC" , since the Columbine High School shootings were so similar to some of the events in the movie. I asked her what PC had to do with it. Movies like Heathers were not exactly a dime a dozen in the 1980s either, and it was made not by a mainstream Hollywood production company (which wouldn't have touched such a project) but by a small, financially troubled company that went belly up shortly after Heathers was released. One reason it could be made was that the filmmakers didn't have marketing people breathing down their necks, worried about how it would play in Peoria. When I first saw it in a theater in 1989, I kept asking myself how such a dark, disturbing film had ever been made and released.
My friend replied:
Duncan, I'm using "PC" in the broader sense of offending mainstream sensibilities. I agree that Heathers was clearly in the realm of fantasy, as was "Rock 'n' Roll High School," and a number of other cult movies that did feature blowing up... a school (even an empty one). Some of the violence is actually cartoonish, and it's obviously fantasy. But a lot of people would be protesting, instead of laughing, even ones who might have smirked at these earlier movies (but wouldn't admit that now). I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates. I do think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate toward entertainment that seems ... dark ... then you need to explore what the attraction is. Columbine could have been prevented, if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into a garage in suburban Colorado, after all.It's at least as true that Columbine could have been prevented if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into the harassment, bullying and persecution of non-conformists that was going on Columbine High School, as it does in schools everywhere to this day. (Usually the people who are hurt or killed are not the bullies.) I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates either, but I think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate towards "entertainment" that consists of slamming their classmates against lockers, kicking them in the stomach, and urinating on them, then you need to explore what the attraction is. (If a fascination with "... dark ..." entertainment were a warning signal of outbreaks of violence, then we'd have seen one, two, many Columbines in the past twenty years and more.) The fact that my friend could write such things just as American media were romanticizing gay-youth suicide and wringing their hands about bullying is, I think, a revealing statement about mainstream Christian America in itself.
But the really revealing thing is her definition of political correctness as "offending mainstream sensibilities": she has it exactly backwards. Mainstream sensibilities aren't offended by fag jokes, misogynist jokes, or racist jokes; mainstream sensibilities are offended when someone objects to sexism, racism, and antigay bigotry -- it's those objections which are called "PC." Or, to put it another way, if it offends you, you're being PC; if it offends me, I'm just tired of being kicked in the face by feminazis, radical fairies, America-haters, and blacks constantly playing the race card. At most, what is called "political correctness" is the mainstream's guilty conscience: mainstream Americans are aware that there have been some less-than-nice, even downright embarrassing aspects to American culture in the past, and they're prepared to make a few cosmetic adjustments so they can pretend to themselves that things have changed. (Having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is a great boon to many of them, because they can believe that it cancels out everything that happened before 2008; others feel that equality is all very well, but having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is Going Too Far.) But at bottom they don't really get it, they don't really view The Other as fully human, and wish that all these uppity Others would shut up and go away. All they want is to have America to themselves, like they did in the 1950s, when everybody was happy and there wasn't all this PC -- is that so wrong?
So, back to Mark Peters and his foolish article about "gay." Peters is presumably heterosexual, or at least adopting a heterosexual male stance. If a mainstream American major motion picture has a character declare that electric cars are gay, and if mainstream Americans go berserk because the line is cut from the trailer -- not the film itself, mind you, but from the trailer -- then that shows that any objections to the joke (which wasn't really a joke at all, according to Peters) are oversensitive. Again, as I said earlier, this would make no sense if "political correctness" referred to what offends mainstream America, because it's fairly obvious that mainstream America wasn't offended by the joke at all. Saying that electric cars are gay is not, contrary to Peters, the same as saying that they're "lame." It means they're unmanly, and cars are for American heterosexual males a vital phallic symbol: they go vrooom, they are powerful, they are fast, they spurt out stinky smoke (or did, until PC environmentalists made them stop). If you're going to make a normal heterosexual male drive a faggy electric car, why not go the whole nine yards and cut off his balls? It's as gay as your parents chaperoning the dance, as Vince Vaughan went on to say by way of "clarification." Because only a fag wouldn't mind his parents being at the dance, keeping him from any chance of getting any pussy.... Maybe I'm overinterpreting, but I don't think so, because I can't see a contemporary Hollywood film giving Vaughan's line to, say, Cameron Diaz or Judi Dench addressing a group of women.
Do I think that the line should be taken out of the movie altogether? Hell, I don't think it should have been taken out of the trailer. Since it was in the trailer, I can suppose it to be representative of the movie's general tone, and I'd rather know that in advance so that I can avoid the film altogether. (I wouldn't have wanted the trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry sanitized either; it would have been false advertising.) Movies about overaged boys who confuse their cars with their dicks are very rarely worth my money or my time. And that brings me to the next point about "PC": it isn't just organized campaigns against bigoted attitudes that offend mainstream America, but any individual dissent at all. In my experience, I am not even supposed to say that a movie is sexist, or that a joke is racist, or that a song lyric is misogynist, because it shows that I'm a PC tyrant who doesn't want mainstream America to have any harmless fun. And where is the harm in saying that electric cars are gay, huh? Nobody's killed by that. If I refuse to spend my money to support infantile Hollywood comedies in order to show how open-minded I am, that's my right (though just barely), but at least I can shut up about my objections. In that sense my friend is right: nobody is as Politically Correct, in the sense of not being able to tolerate disagreement with their political stance, as mainstream Americans.
The Best Banned in the Land
Actually, I was already primed to go off on a rant about "Political Correctness" when I encountered Mark Peters's article about the word "gay." Earlier that day I'd had a dispute with a coworker about the banning of books from public schools; I now think her concern had been inspired by an article on the subject in USA Today. Anyway, she was displeased by what she called "Political Correctness" which led to the "banning" of Huckleberry Finn, though what I think she meant was controversy over its use in the curriculum -- when I pressed her on that, she seemed unsure.
She jumped to the case of Little Black Sambo, which she also claimed was the victim of PC even though it was a very nice story and didn't mean any harm. She claimed that a few years ago she'd tried to get a copy of Little Black Sambo but you couldn't even get it in the US because of PC. I wasn't able to pursue that point with her, but a look at Amazon.com shows that LBS is still in print in numerous editions, and a search of the local public library shows that they have the original version and two retellings, including Julius Lester's. In those days, she said (apparently meaning her childhood and mine, we're very close in age), nobody objected to Little Black Sambo or Huckleberry Finn or Uncle Tom's Cabin. But now they're banned! (As someone said to me in another context, Oh, they are not!)
In those days, I countered sternly, racism was normal in the United States. She didn't have an answer to that, and in fact she was wrong. African Americans have been complaining about Little Black Sambo almost since it was first published in 1899. It was excluded from some American libraries immediately after World War II, before my coworker and I were born. Of course, we're both from Indiana, a state not famous for its racial sensitivity. What she meant, of course, was that nobody who mattered was complaining.
This weekend I've been browsing through the history of Huck Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin as school texts. They've both been controversial for a long time, and one thing I wasn't able to find out (though I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, probably in printed matter) was how long those books have actually been taught in schools. When they were still new, they wouldn't have been taught because they weren't Classics; it wasn't until after the 1930s or so, partly due to the efforts of Matthiessen's American Renaissance, that American literature was taught even at the university level in the US. (Barbarians at the gates!)
Y'see, when I was in school (roughly 1957 to 1969), our reading texts were textbooks -- first of the Dick and Jane variety, then anthologies assembled by textbook publishers, with few if any novel-length texts included. We were never given copies of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick, or Tropic of Cancer (just kidding! -- though I did read Henry Miller on my own during my junior and senior years) and told to read them -- not even in high school. My high school French teacher lent me what must have been her college copy of an anthology of French short stories so I could read Camus. Even in senior English our assignments came from the twelfth-grade Scott, Foresman textbook; I seem to remember reading the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in a modernized version.
Anything outside of the textbooks wasn't assigned reading, and I was virtually the only kid in my elementary school, as far as I know, who dug into the "library" shelves at the back of the classrooms and read books I didn't have to read. (A weirdo even then, you see!) I don't remember anyone but me reading the books (the Autobiography of Malcolm X!? how did that get on the shelves?) in the high-school library either, though surely someone else must have... But I'm wandering afield here.
The point is that while some large cities must have had advanced classes for elite students in their public schools, and perhaps elite private schools might have used real books instead of textbooks, in the ordinary public schools the textbooks ruled. If, despite the publishers' vigilance, something controversial got into the textbooks, the teachers probably would not have assigned it, and there was little danger that most students would read anything in the texts that hadn't been assigned. So the whole question of "PC" in this connection is a red herring, because the textbook and school systems were set up to avoid controversial material -- and the books I'm talking about have always been controversial. Uncle Tom's Cabin stirred up a major shitstorm in its day, prompting a counterpropaganda campaign from the slave states. Its enduring popularity after the Confederate Rebellion was the product of stage productions, including minstrel shows, which reduced it to sensationalism: "In fact," Darryl Lorenzo Wellington wrote in The Nation in 2006, "there were 'Tom shows' in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story's antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements." (You say you want a revolution ... )
Huckleberry Finn similarly had its critics long before "political correctness" was a gleam in Nat Hentoff's eye. As this contemporary white high-school teacher says,
Just a few days before I had this exchange with my co-worker, I had one on Facebook about the movie Heathers with an old friend there. She claimed that Heathers couldn't be made today because of "PC" , since the Columbine High School shootings were so similar to some of the events in the movie. I asked her what PC had to do with it. Movies like Heathers were not exactly a dime a dozen in the 1980s either, and it was made not by a mainstream Hollywood production company (which wouldn't have touched such a project) but by a small, financially troubled company that went belly up shortly after Heathers was released. One reason it could be made was that the filmmakers didn't have marketing people breathing down their necks, worried about how it would play in Peoria. When I first saw it in a theater in 1989, I kept asking myself how such a dark, disturbing film had ever been made and released.
My friend replied:
But the really revealing thing is her definition of political correctness as "offending mainstream sensibilities": she has it exactly backwards. Mainstream sensibilities aren't offended by fag jokes, misogynist jokes, or racist jokes; mainstream sensibilities are offended when someone objects to sexism, racism, and antigay bigotry -- it's those objections which are called "PC." Or, to put it another way, if it offends you, you're being PC; if it offends me, I'm just tired of being kicked in the face by feminazis, radical fairies, America-haters, and blacks constantly playing the race card. At most, what is called "political correctness" is the mainstream's guilty conscience: mainstream Americans are aware that there have been some less-than-nice, even downright embarrassing aspects to American culture in the past, and they're prepared to make a few cosmetic adjustments so they can pretend to themselves that things have changed. (Having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is a great boon to many of them, because they can believe that it cancels out everything that happened before 2008; others feel that equality is all very well, but having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is Going Too Far.) But at bottom they don't really get it, they don't really view The Other as fully human, and wish that all these uppity Others would shut up and go away. All they want is to have America to themselves, like they did in the 1950s, when everybody was happy and there wasn't all this PC -- is that so wrong?
So, back to Mark Peters and his foolish article about "gay." Peters is presumably heterosexual, or at least adopting a heterosexual male stance. If a mainstream American major motion picture has a character declare that electric cars are gay, and if mainstream Americans go berserk because the line is cut from the trailer -- not the film itself, mind you, but from the trailer -- then that shows that any objections to the joke (which wasn't really a joke at all, according to Peters) are oversensitive. Again, as I said earlier, this would make no sense if "political correctness" referred to what offends mainstream America, because it's fairly obvious that mainstream America wasn't offended by the joke at all. Saying that electric cars are gay is not, contrary to Peters, the same as saying that they're "lame." It means they're unmanly, and cars are for American heterosexual males a vital phallic symbol: they go vrooom, they are powerful, they are fast, they spurt out stinky smoke (or did, until PC environmentalists made them stop). If you're going to make a normal heterosexual male drive a faggy electric car, why not go the whole nine yards and cut off his balls? It's as gay as your parents chaperoning the dance, as Vince Vaughan went on to say by way of "clarification." Because only a fag wouldn't mind his parents being at the dance, keeping him from any chance of getting any pussy.... Maybe I'm overinterpreting, but I don't think so, because I can't see a contemporary Hollywood film giving Vaughan's line to, say, Cameron Diaz or Judi Dench addressing a group of women.
Do I think that the line should be taken out of the movie altogether? Hell, I don't think it should have been taken out of the trailer. Since it was in the trailer, I can suppose it to be representative of the movie's general tone, and I'd rather know that in advance so that I can avoid the film altogether. (I wouldn't have wanted the trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry sanitized either; it would have been false advertising.) Movies about overaged boys who confuse their cars with their dicks are very rarely worth my money or my time. And that brings me to the next point about "PC": it isn't just organized campaigns against bigoted attitudes that offend mainstream America, but any individual dissent at all. In my experience, I am not even supposed to say that a movie is sexist, or that a joke is racist, or that a song lyric is misogynist, because it shows that I'm a PC tyrant who doesn't want mainstream America to have any harmless fun. And where is the harm in saying that electric cars are gay, huh? Nobody's killed by that. If I refuse to spend my money to support infantile Hollywood comedies in order to show how open-minded I am, that's my right (though just barely), but at least I can shut up about my objections. In that sense my friend is right: nobody is as Politically Correct, in the sense of not being able to tolerate disagreement with their political stance, as mainstream Americans.
She jumped to the case of Little Black Sambo, which she also claimed was the victim of PC even though it was a very nice story and didn't mean any harm. She claimed that a few years ago she'd tried to get a copy of Little Black Sambo but you couldn't even get it in the US because of PC. I wasn't able to pursue that point with her, but a look at Amazon.com shows that LBS is still in print in numerous editions, and a search of the local public library shows that they have the original version and two retellings, including Julius Lester's. In those days, she said (apparently meaning her childhood and mine, we're very close in age), nobody objected to Little Black Sambo or Huckleberry Finn or Uncle Tom's Cabin. But now they're banned! (As someone said to me in another context, Oh, they are not!)
In those days, I countered sternly, racism was normal in the United States. She didn't have an answer to that, and in fact she was wrong. African Americans have been complaining about Little Black Sambo almost since it was first published in 1899. It was excluded from some American libraries immediately after World War II, before my coworker and I were born. Of course, we're both from Indiana, a state not famous for its racial sensitivity. What she meant, of course, was that nobody who mattered was complaining.
This weekend I've been browsing through the history of Huck Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin as school texts. They've both been controversial for a long time, and one thing I wasn't able to find out (though I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, probably in printed matter) was how long those books have actually been taught in schools. When they were still new, they wouldn't have been taught because they weren't Classics; it wasn't until after the 1930s or so, partly due to the efforts of Matthiessen's American Renaissance, that American literature was taught even at the university level in the US. (Barbarians at the gates!)
Y'see, when I was in school (roughly 1957 to 1969), our reading texts were textbooks -- first of the Dick and Jane variety, then anthologies assembled by textbook publishers, with few if any novel-length texts included. We were never given copies of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick, or Tropic of Cancer (just kidding! -- though I did read Henry Miller on my own during my junior and senior years) and told to read them -- not even in high school. My high school French teacher lent me what must have been her college copy of an anthology of French short stories so I could read Camus. Even in senior English our assignments came from the twelfth-grade Scott, Foresman textbook; I seem to remember reading the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in a modernized version.
Anything outside of the textbooks wasn't assigned reading, and I was virtually the only kid in my elementary school, as far as I know, who dug into the "library" shelves at the back of the classrooms and read books I didn't have to read. (A weirdo even then, you see!) I don't remember anyone but me reading the books (the Autobiography of Malcolm X!? how did that get on the shelves?) in the high-school library either, though surely someone else must have... But I'm wandering afield here.
The point is that while some large cities must have had advanced classes for elite students in their public schools, and perhaps elite private schools might have used real books instead of textbooks, in the ordinary public schools the textbooks ruled. If, despite the publishers' vigilance, something controversial got into the textbooks, the teachers probably would not have assigned it, and there was little danger that most students would read anything in the texts that hadn't been assigned. So the whole question of "PC" in this connection is a red herring, because the textbook and school systems were set up to avoid controversial material -- and the books I'm talking about have always been controversial. Uncle Tom's Cabin stirred up a major shitstorm in its day, prompting a counterpropaganda campaign from the slave states. Its enduring popularity after the Confederate Rebellion was the product of stage productions, including minstrel shows, which reduced it to sensationalism: "In fact," Darryl Lorenzo Wellington wrote in The Nation in 2006, "there were 'Tom shows' in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story's antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements." (You say you want a revolution ... )
Huckleberry Finn similarly had its critics long before "political correctness" was a gleam in Nat Hentoff's eye. As this contemporary white high-school teacher says,
It is quite surprising to students that the concerns that people had in the 1800s when the book was published had little to do with race, little to do with language, but much more to do with deportment, much more to do with how a young person was supposed to behave. That opens their eyes to how the book stays the same but the attitudes toward it change.According to Jonathan Arac, "It was only after the Second World War that Huckleberry Finn achieved massive canonicity in the schools ... ; yet these same years were the time that the assertion of African American civil rights, most strongly symbolized in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), brought new voices into play concerning the relations of whites and blacks" (21). My co-worker is unaware of the reactions black students have had to Huck Finn and to white students' response to it, and she seems not to care, or at least not to see this as a problem. What matters is that white students should have the right to be exposed to this great book, and in school -- they shouldn't have to read it on their own. As Arac writes, "It would seem that if you are an African-American child who does not like to go to school because some other students feel empowered to talk like the hero of the assigned book and call you 'nigger,' that is your sickness, not a matter of public concern" (ibid.). As I told my co-worker, I'm all in favor of teaching the conflicts and encouraging students to understand the complexities of the treatment of race in books like Huck Finn, but I wonder how many teachers are competent to do that, or have time to do so now that so much of their time has to be spent prepping their students for standardized tests.
Just a few days before I had this exchange with my co-worker, I had one on Facebook about the movie Heathers with an old friend there. She claimed that Heathers couldn't be made today because of "PC" , since the Columbine High School shootings were so similar to some of the events in the movie. I asked her what PC had to do with it. Movies like Heathers were not exactly a dime a dozen in the 1980s either, and it was made not by a mainstream Hollywood production company (which wouldn't have touched such a project) but by a small, financially troubled company that went belly up shortly after Heathers was released. One reason it could be made was that the filmmakers didn't have marketing people breathing down their necks, worried about how it would play in Peoria. When I first saw it in a theater in 1989, I kept asking myself how such a dark, disturbing film had ever been made and released.
My friend replied:
Duncan, I'm using "PC" in the broader sense of offending mainstream sensibilities. I agree that Heathers was clearly in the realm of fantasy, as was "Rock 'n' Roll High School," and a number of other cult movies that did feature blowing up... a school (even an empty one). Some of the violence is actually cartoonish, and it's obviously fantasy. But a lot of people would be protesting, instead of laughing, even ones who might have smirked at these earlier movies (but wouldn't admit that now). I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates. I do think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate toward entertainment that seems ... dark ... then you need to explore what the attraction is. Columbine could have been prevented, if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into a garage in suburban Colorado, after all.It's at least as true that Columbine could have been prevented if only a couple of parents had poked their noses into the harassment, bullying and persecution of non-conformists that was going on Columbine High School, as it does in schools everywhere to this day. (Usually the people who are hurt or killed are not the bullies.) I don't buy the idea that media makes kids do things like blow up or blow away classmates either, but I think that if you are a parent and your kid seems to gravitate towards "entertainment" that consists of slamming their classmates against lockers, kicking them in the stomach, and urinating on them, then you need to explore what the attraction is. (If a fascination with "... dark ..." entertainment were a warning signal of outbreaks of violence, then we'd have seen one, two, many Columbines in the past twenty years and more.) The fact that my friend could write such things just as American media were romanticizing gay-youth suicide and wringing their hands about bullying is, I think, a revealing statement about mainstream Christian America in itself.
But the really revealing thing is her definition of political correctness as "offending mainstream sensibilities": she has it exactly backwards. Mainstream sensibilities aren't offended by fag jokes, misogynist jokes, or racist jokes; mainstream sensibilities are offended when someone objects to sexism, racism, and antigay bigotry -- it's those objections which are called "PC." Or, to put it another way, if it offends you, you're being PC; if it offends me, I'm just tired of being kicked in the face by feminazis, radical fairies, America-haters, and blacks constantly playing the race card. At most, what is called "political correctness" is the mainstream's guilty conscience: mainstream Americans are aware that there have been some less-than-nice, even downright embarrassing aspects to American culture in the past, and they're prepared to make a few cosmetic adjustments so they can pretend to themselves that things have changed. (Having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is a great boon to many of them, because they can believe that it cancels out everything that happened before 2008; others feel that equality is all very well, but having a dark-skinned President with a funny name is Going Too Far.) But at bottom they don't really get it, they don't really view The Other as fully human, and wish that all these uppity Others would shut up and go away. All they want is to have America to themselves, like they did in the 1950s, when everybody was happy and there wasn't all this PC -- is that so wrong?
So, back to Mark Peters and his foolish article about "gay." Peters is presumably heterosexual, or at least adopting a heterosexual male stance. If a mainstream American major motion picture has a character declare that electric cars are gay, and if mainstream Americans go berserk because the line is cut from the trailer -- not the film itself, mind you, but from the trailer -- then that shows that any objections to the joke (which wasn't really a joke at all, according to Peters) are oversensitive. Again, as I said earlier, this would make no sense if "political correctness" referred to what offends mainstream America, because it's fairly obvious that mainstream America wasn't offended by the joke at all. Saying that electric cars are gay is not, contrary to Peters, the same as saying that they're "lame." It means they're unmanly, and cars are for American heterosexual males a vital phallic symbol: they go vrooom, they are powerful, they are fast, they spurt out stinky smoke (or did, until PC environmentalists made them stop). If you're going to make a normal heterosexual male drive a faggy electric car, why not go the whole nine yards and cut off his balls? It's as gay as your parents chaperoning the dance, as Vince Vaughan went on to say by way of "clarification." Because only a fag wouldn't mind his parents being at the dance, keeping him from any chance of getting any pussy.... Maybe I'm overinterpreting, but I don't think so, because I can't see a contemporary Hollywood film giving Vaughan's line to, say, Cameron Diaz or Judi Dench addressing a group of women.
Do I think that the line should be taken out of the movie altogether? Hell, I don't think it should have been taken out of the trailer. Since it was in the trailer, I can suppose it to be representative of the movie's general tone, and I'd rather know that in advance so that I can avoid the film altogether. (I wouldn't have wanted the trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry sanitized either; it would have been false advertising.) Movies about overaged boys who confuse their cars with their dicks are very rarely worth my money or my time. And that brings me to the next point about "PC": it isn't just organized campaigns against bigoted attitudes that offend mainstream America, but any individual dissent at all. In my experience, I am not even supposed to say that a movie is sexist, or that a joke is racist, or that a song lyric is misogynist, because it shows that I'm a PC tyrant who doesn't want mainstream America to have any harmless fun. And where is the harm in saying that electric cars are gay, huh? Nobody's killed by that. If I refuse to spend my money to support infantile Hollywood comedies in order to show how open-minded I am, that's my right (though just barely), but at least I can shut up about my objections. In that sense my friend is right: nobody is as Politically Correct, in the sense of not being able to tolerate disagreement with their political stance, as mainstream Americans.
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