“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
The ideology that never tires of proclaiming its tolerance and how it rejects racism just banned two of the greatest anti-racist novels of 19th and 20th Century because the new religion of anti-racism demands they do so.
During a virtual meeting on Sept. 9, middle and high school English teachers in the Burbank Unified School District received a bit of surprising news: Until further notice, they would not be allowed to teach some of the books on their curriculum.
Five novels had been challenged in Burbank: Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Theodore Taylor’s “The Cay” and Mildred D. Taylor’s Newbery Medal-winning young-adult classic “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”
The challenges came from four parents (three of them Black) for alleged potential harm to the public-school district’s roughly 400 Black students [2.6% of the total enrollment]. All but “Huckleberry Finn” have been required reading in the BUSD….
And at its root, it stems from a painful personal story. Destiny Helligar, now 15 and in high school, recently told her mom about an incident that took place when she was a student at David Starr Jordan Middle School. According to Destiny’s mother, Carmenita Helligar, a white student approached Destiny in math class using a racial taunt including the N-word, which he’d learned from reading “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”
Another time, a different boy went up to Destiny and other students and said: “My family used to own your family and now I want a dollar from each of you for the week.” When the principal was notified, the boy’s excuse was that he had read it in class—also in “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.” …
[T]he parents’ objections are not merely over language. They also worry about the way these books portray Black history and the lessons they might impart to modern readers.
“The Cay” and “Huckleberry Finn” feature white children learning from the suffering and wisdom of older Black men. “To Kill a Mockingbird” famously stars Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman. Its white-savior story line reads much differently nearly 60 years after its publication.
“Reads differently” is the new codeword for “offends the sensibilities of the victimhood identity politics left.” To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are two of the greatest antiracist novels in American literature, but that’s not enough for The Wokecult of Antiracism. And the excuse that somebody, somewhere might get their precious feelings hurt is a blank check excuse to ban anything, anywhere, at any time.
Back during the Kavanaugh hearings, many joked that Atticus Finch would be considered the villain of the novel today, because he disbelieved the story of a woman who claimed she had been raped. Little did we know that the left would start banning the novel for even stupider reasons.
If they can ban To Kill A Mockingbird for being racist, they can ban anything for being anything, because words have lost all descriptive power except for what serves the will of the Party at any given moment…