Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Problem with Canceling History
The past several months, I’ve been reading the Little House books with my older two kids. As we’ve been reading, I’ve come upon descriptions of Native Americans and thought to myself, “well, this is awfully problematic.” The way Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family discussed Native Americans, their ownership of the land, and their basic humanity is, thank God, not how we would discuss them today. There have been several instances where I’ve had to stop and explain to my children that, while Laura’s mother used to say “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” we would never, ever say that. And also please, never, ever say that.
Last year the BBC reported that because of language like that, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her books have been canceled (I just saw the report today, however). They explain,
The US Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) has removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from one of its awards over racist views and language.
The association had received complaints for years over the Little House on the Prairie author’s “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work”.
The ALSC board voted unanimously on Saturday to remove Wilder’s name from the children’s literature award.
The medal will be renamed as the Children’s Literature Legacy award.
The ALSC, a division of the American Library Association, said Wilder’s novels and “expressions of stereotypical attitudes” were “inconsistent with ALSC’s core values”.
Wilder’s children’s novels about pioneer life in the American West have been criticised for language that dehumanises indigenous peoples and people of colour.
We are following the homeschooling philosophy of Charlotte Mason, and this topic comes up quite frequently. Why are we still reading these books? And what is their value?
Charlotte Mason believed in reading “living books” — books that ignite the imagination, books written about a time period from that time period. We will never be able to read a book like Wilders’, written for children by someone who lived in the time period she lived in, that is up to our “woke” standards of today.
Unfortunately, this is a part of our history and that’s something we have to accept. That doesn’t mean it should be erased; quite the contrary, they should be kept sacrosanct. Wilders’ books give a window into how people thought at the time, and they illustrate how and why these people believed what they did. They weren’t racist caricatures, they were real and complex people, and their views evolved. Seeing this progression helps show children how our society’s way of thinking has developed over time, from one viewpoint to another. It shows them that even good people can believe bad things, without even realizing they are bad. It can help spur some really deep conversations about our present-day society, and what we may do that future generations find abhorrent (I can think of a few things…).
Within Wilders’ books themselves, while Native Americans are not uniformly discussed in the most respectful manner, some of the Native American characters are central “good guys” in the plots of several books, saving the Ingalls family on more than one occasion. In our house, I had a wonderful conversation with my five- and four-year-olds about Ma’s view that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” and if they thought that was true, given their heroic actions.
In one scene, the Ingalls family built a shanty on a piece of land they had just claimed, unable to withstand a strong storm. While Laura’s father was in town, a Native American came into the store and warned those assembled that the winter would be extraordinarily harsh; with seven months of blizzards ahead. His warning spurred the Ingalls family to move from the shanty on the claim to a much sturdier building that Laura’s father had already built in town.
The scene created a great conversation in our home: What might have happened to the Ingalls family if there were no Indians on the prairie? Would they have survived in the claim shanty that winter? How did the Native American know that a strong winter was coming? Ingalls’ books may have contained racist elements, but they also contained the tools necessary to explain and delegitimize that racism.
Published in General
Bethany isn’t passing guilt on to her children or anyone else. She’s just teaching them that certain things are not nice things to say. Good grief, if someone read from a book where a character says that the world would be a better place if all white people were dead and the narrator tells the kids that “We don’t say that,” would that book reader also be anti-conservative?
That is not what happened here.
“Well, technically, the –philia suffix simply means ‘friendship’. It doesn’t become a disorder unless it’s pederasty, where the –erasty suffix means ‘sexual love’.”
;-)
People who play with fire risk getting flamed.
I don’t know whether to laugh (and thereby encourage) your pedantry or head slap you.
Like a child saying something ridiculously inappropriate but accurate…
It’s a bit closer to a good lawyer is a dead lawyer.
The joke has been around a while. We would only correct a child on that one when it’s out of his mouth while daddy is consulting with one on a legal matter.
Okay, I read through the piece a few more times to make sure I was not missing something.
She thought to herself that the phrase was problematic. She told her (4 & 5 year old) kids not to use the language that the people in the book did. She used the book to explain that sometimes a good person thinks something bad without realizing it. This is how to undermine cancel culture.
Leftists say a person who is engaging in wrongthink is a monster and must be condemned. We can say Jefferson had some bad ideas (I think his views of religion are garbage) while admiring the genius in the Declaration and his grasp of Liberty. Stonewall Jackson fought for the wrong side, but he was a man of honor & faith. The Left cannot process this.
She said the books should be kept sacrosanct. How that equals cancellation is something I cannot comprehend.
I know about the trend of Conservative Case for Liberal Garbage. This is not a case for cancelling, or anything anti-conservative. I am looking for it and I cannot see it.
She concedes it’s bad think without any consideration for the realities of that time period.
If a black person actually grew up in the 1960s and had a negative view of white people, we would explain his animus to our kids, justifying his negative view.
But a white person from the 1880s expressing a negative view of native Americans is bad think… even though she is still a good person who has bad ideas.
Or how about we, you know, point out that not every experience white people had with natives was Thanksgiving Dinner?
Well, if they had “smoke in their gun” they were shooting at the settlers. Hang ’em high.
Though I think making Leftist goons cancel other Leftists is a fun idea. Divide & conquer. Surprised that Trump hasn’t pulled that one already.
I’m sure you can’t.
I see no evidence that she has no consideration for the realities of that time period. And the reality of that period is that there were huge differences of opinion on how Indians should be thought of. Most of the sympathy for the Native Americans came from regions where Indians had already been defeated and/or expelled, but it was never as clearcut as that, either.
She literally said people can think “bad things”.
Is the sentiment truly a bad sentiment for the time? Or is assessing it as bad indicative of a cultural divide between then and now?
Can we teach our kids these things without giving moral legitimacy to the left’s hair-brained ideas of bad-think?
Is it possible to cultivate in our kids the ability to discern right from wrong in the choices presented to them today, regardless of the cultural baggage contributing to the current situation, some of which might have originated from immoral choices, but can’t be changed by this current choice?
Is it wrong for a homesteading man to greet an indian on his land with a loaded rifle, when the indian considers it HIS land? Or is it wrong for a man to not defend his young family because someone, somewhere, made bad choices that made this stand-off possible?
I have been chagrined to realize that I have thought bad things about people and about groups of people. I have had views that I would not have wanted my kids to have. I don’t see what’s so unusual about that.
I think it was my grandfather who gave me a copy of The Adventures of Hedvig and Lolly when I was a little tyke. Maybe he read it to me, maybe I read it to myself, or maybe both.
It was about some of the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, and I think rather religiously moralistic. When my older kids got to the right age, I started to read it to them. I was horrified to find I was reading a chapter in which some of the men went out on a defensive mission, and came back reporting rather casually that they had killed a few Indians, no big deal.
I could tell from my kids’ silence that they were as disgusted as I was. We put the book away and never got it out again.
The problem wasn’t that there was violent conflict with Indians that resulted in killing. It was the historically inaccurate portrayal of the conflict and the dehumanizing way the Indians were portrayed. The two went together. Even though I had looked forward to reading it to my kids, I would never recommend that book now. I would, however, wholeheartedly recommend the Little House books, and I would also recommend having some of the discussion that Bethany Mandel had with her children, either while reading the book or at some other time (though I did not have that type of discussion with mine).
If this post was not on the main feed and had no chance of going there, I might give some personal anecdotes to explain better. No, on second thought I probably wouldn’t put them in writing. But I learned at a very young age that people I love and respect could be guilty of badthink that I would would warn my children away from, just as I was by other people that I love and respect. It is important to understand the milieu in which people came to their bad opinions, as a way to understand but not excuse.
One of the things I learned on our recent tour of Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home was how such things happened in his own early life. It gave me a new appreciation of him.
Sigh. I’m sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed English literature as much as I did if my mother had to warn me along the way, “Little Jeannie, don’t think like that!”, Little Jeannie, see, that’s a bad man because he said that, right?”. I must’ve been a child prodigy since I was able to divine the ridiculous racial stereotypes in The Bobbsey Twins all on my own. Kids don’t learn values by stopping stories and books to lecture on bad think.
When we read Huckleberry Finn in school, nobody had to gasp in horror and point out that the “N” word is bad. Because nobody had to tell us that the book took place in a bygone era.
I would guess that some do and some don’t. It’s tricky to do it in a way that doesn’t backfire, but I would bet Ms Mandel is one of those who might do it well. My own preference was to read and not lecture, but I have seen other people do such things better than I do.
It’s important to know your audience when doing such things. This is why I oppose things like Common Core and prefer to allow local discretion. Parents probably know their children best of all, and have some idea of what they need to be told and what is better for them to learn in other ways.
There were also huge differerences in how Indians behaved. Now that we have them on reservations it’s easy to think of them as ‘the Indians’ but they never were and still aren’t. They were tribes and nations unto themselves. Any interaction between a settler and an Indian would depend very much on who felt threatened or offended (or desperate), and how the given Indian of a given tribe’s specific cultural RoEs shaped his actions.
When I was a child reading these books or having them read to me, it wasn’t practically unacceptable to believe it was often good people who could be deeply prejudiced against people of another race or culture. Today, kids are conditioned to believe racial or cultural prejudice against people who are not white or culturally Christian, and the belief that one’s culture is superior to other cultures (if one happens to be both white and culturally Christian) is always racism and is rooted in deliberate wickedness.
Kids are now conditioned to see racism as a more fundamental evil than it was previously thought of as being. Today, even Atticus Finch is unacceptable, because he was standing against injustice not racism. When I was, say, ten, good people thought that if you ended racial injustice the racism would eventually greatly diminish on its own.
http://ricochet.com/678947/the-problem-with-canceling-history/comment-page-2/#comment-4582572
I don’t know if I copied this correctly, Ansonia, I tried to copy part of your comment but it seems it’s only a web link?
Kids are also now conditioned to see racism everywhere, in everything, in everybody who doesn’t think the “correct” way. I feel so sorry for kids today, even the 1990s seem like halcyon days for children. Such a burden to leave our children.
Ending/diminishing injustice is something within our control, and is the business of our legal system. Ending/diminishing racism (where it doesn’t directly touch legal issues) less so on both counts.