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Literary Experts: It's Must Meet Children With "Racist" Works | Israel today

2021-03-05T11:31:40.666Z


Dr. Shai Rodin, Literary Researcher: “Censorship impairs a child’s intelligence. There is a lot of hypocrisy about works written in the spirit of their time "| Israel This Week - Political Supplement


U.S. political correctness battalions have found a victim on duty: Dr. Suss' books, which "do not consider all types of communities"

  • Died in 1991, and has been suffering from constant American censorship ever since.

    Theodore Sos Geisel ("Doctor Horse"), in a photograph from 1957

    Photo: 

    GettyImages

The last to fall victim to the politically correct culture was a prank cat. Or Theodore Horse Geisel - Doctor Horse, for you. Last week was the birthday of the famous children's author (who died in 1991), who also signed the classic "If you go out you come to wonderful places". The event has been marked in a way that only the last few years can provide: a genizah of six of his books, by the Society Believing in Preserving His Professional Heritage. 



The reason? Racist images found in some of Dr. Horse's books, including "Strawberry Street, Not a Simple Story," "Wants to Be a Zoo Manager," and "The Beauty of a Scrambled Omelet." "These books present people in an abusive and false manner," the company said in a statement. The decision, it was written, was made after consultation with experts and educators. "The cessation of their sale is only part of our broad commitment and program to ensure that Dr. Horse's work catalog represents and supports all types of communities and families." 



The doctor has been in the spotlight for a long time. The American National Education Association, which founded the Read Across America Day in 1998 on Geisel's birthday, has in recent years chosen to stay away from his works, placing less emphasis on his books and instead offering a reading list for children that contains more representations of different cultures.



At a school in Virginia, teachers were instructed to refrain from associating Reading Day with Doctor Horse. In 2017, it was a Massachusetts librarian who criticized a gift given to the library by then-First Lady Melania Trump, in the form of ten books in the series, claiming they were "full of racist propaganda, cartoons and offensive stereotypes." That same year, the Doctor Horse Museum removed a mural that contained Asian stereotypes, after three writers refused to visit the museum.



And it does not end there. Recent times have marked the entry of a culture of representation and political correctness into the field of children's literature. The name of Laura Ingles, author of "A Little House in the Arava," has been deleted from the list of winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the American Library Association, in light of what is now perceived as a problematic representation of Native Americans in her book. 



Even Tintin, the protagonist of the Belgian comic book series, has been accused of being a representation of white masculinity, after in one of his books he becomes during a visit to the Congo the object of worship of an African tribe. In another passage in the book, he resolves a conflict between the members of the tribe (with a straw hat in the center), and receives a dubious compliment: "The white lord is very fair. He is a very good white man." 



"Genesis or censorship of works communicates in research a phenomenon that I call the 'erasure of the abusive past,'" says Assaf Saadon, a doctoral student in the program for commentary and cultural studies at Bar-Ilan University. Saadon has been researching the phenomenon of political correctness for five years, and cases like that of Doctor Horse only confirm his conclusions. 



He said, "Political correctness is not just erasing expressions or behaviors that are perceived as offensive only in the present, but there is some aspiration to erase those expressions from history as well. In practice, deleting the past helps condemn political correctness to be more credible, that is, if I condemn you for an abusive phrase you uttered, I should treat the phrase as if it was never okay to say it, and the possibility of doing so rests on deleting the past. "Dehistoricization". 



Why wait for Michael?



What appears on the surface as a new phenomenon, is in fact nothing more than a reincarnation of rather old practices. "It does not begin in the 21st century; Dr. Doolittle also had to be rewritten, about 60 years ago," says the editor and translator of the children's books Atara Ofek. "The first book has a chapter on a black prince who wants his face to be white. Author Hugh Lofting has been accused of portraying the African characters in his books in an insulting way, and has been forced to rewrite the entire episode. In place of the passage where the Doctor whitens the face of the Black Prince, a parrot enters that helps them through hypnosis. The new version is much less entertaining. " 



Ofek believes that" we are in the midst of a process in which all kinds of muted groups are beginning to be aware of the fact that they have rights, including ethnic groups. Once it was only among the black community, now more groups are joining, and children literature is being treated accordingly. Some parents are unwilling to call their children Miriam Yellen-Shtaklis, because 'I waited I waited, I cried I cried, and who did not come? Michael '. I had a heated argument with a parent who did not want his child to think she should wait for some Michael. " 



Before that it was Mark Twain's" Huckleberry Finn. "On the one hand - an undisputed literary classic. On the other hand - a book that provoked quite a bit of controversy and was accused of racism and stereotyping. Even before that, "Oliver Twist" and the character of the Jew in it, who received a barrage of criticism. The examples throughout the history of rewriting a work for reasons of consideration for many other feelings. This of course does not mean that this is the right approach. 



Pluralism remains in the network



Dr. Shai Rodin, researcher Children's Literature at the Gordon Academy in Haifa, believes that when it comes to works for children - the coercion of the politically correct culture on them only creates the opposite action. "Censoring, deleting and taking works off the shelf mainly hurts a child's intelligence," he says, "there is a great deal of hypocrisy about works written in the spirit of their time, because I can not make the Bible feminist. The period described in it is a non-feminist period. "



Rodin claims that the solution is" not to hide the racism or misogyny from the children, but on the contrary - to encourage them to subversive reading. Because how does a child grow up? From being exposed to different ideas. It is a mistake to think that only if we expose children to books that talk about 'accepting the other' will we raise pluralistic children. A child needs to be exposed to works that have racism or engage in it, in order to encounter different thought processes. There is a genre of biographies for children. "In the United States, many of the biographies of black successful people erase the fact that they are grandchildren of slaves and slaves. That is a wrong thing in my eyes. To falsely write a history of a minority is the problem." 



And there is, of course, an economic interest at the heart of the storm. "Censorship is often limited to public relations," Saadon explains. "Doctor Horse's works will probably not be shelved, I found them in a second on the net. For the Gunzens, there is a double benefit here: they present themselves as updated and boast the prestige of political correctness, and also raise the value of exit. Here, just today I read a book by Doctor Horse I forgot about his existence; they probably succeeded. " 

Source: israelhayom

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