Don’t be so sure of that.
But why? Because SHE did anything racist or promulgated racist ideas? Not so much. The characters in her book may have been racist, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about her as a writer.
That’s my point- it’s not, as far as I can tell, about anything SHE specifically did as herself that was racist, but about some of the content in her historical fiction novel. Which is absurd- you can’t really have decent historical fiction that isn’t, you know, historical. Warts and all, racism and all, etc… How realistic of a novel set in frontier Wisconsin in the 1870s would it have been if it was completely Native American friendly by 2020 standards? Not very, I suspect.
Why? I would say because she is being held as a role model for people to look up to. She has an award named after her because her book was considered to be really good. By giving an award, we are saying that we would like to see more books like that one.
It’s not as if they are banning her books, nor censoring them or anything. They are just saying that that is not the type of book that we are looking for future authors to write.
Keep in mind. She is dead. She doesn’t care. It is only those of us still with breathe in our lungs that this matters to. We are not punishing her by changing the name of the award, we are simply updating our expectations of authors.
ETA: and that is not to get into criticism of her work as having been rather stereotyped and unrealistic portrayals of Native Americans and Blacks. They may have been realistic to her contemporaries, but we now know how ignorant she was, and how much of that ignorance she passed on in her books.
Is Huck Finn censored? Or is there a version of Huck Finn out there that has changed some of the words to be more “family friendly”?
I have a copy of the Bible that removes most of the references to genocide and rape and such, meant for kids. Does the existence of that Bible mean that the Bible is censored?
Until or unless it becomes much harder to get ahold of a copy of Huck Finn with the original wording than the sanitized version, censorship hasn’t even started to happen. As long as we know that there is an original version of Huck Finn out there, then censorship hasn’t worked.
Right, well, we weren’t talking about that at all, were we? In response to an article about changing the name of a literary award, you said “If nothing else, something like the terms used in “Huckleberry Finn” or the attitudes in “Little House in the Big Woods” ought to be a bit shocking, as we’ve hopefully moved past that, but they shouldn’t be censored just because those of us today are offended by the idea that someone was racist in the past.”
If you want to talk about changing the text of Huckleberry Finn we can, but that’s not what this thread was about (though I admit to not picking up that you were referring to this one bit of almost decade-old trivia at first glance).
Also, it’s worth noting that Huckleberry Finn is in the public domain, and you or I or anyone can edit that text anyway we want and publish it. Replace all the people with zombies- no problem!
That one guy working with one publishing house ten years ago edited a version without the n-word in it is a bit of a non-story. You can find his edition, if you go hunting for it, but it sits buried among countless other editions with plenty of n-word to go around.
And, even at the time, it seems that consensus was that, while Gribben had decent intent (to make H.Finn acceptable to schools and institutions that had banned the book for use of the n-word), it was a poor decision and most critics and scholars denounced the choice.
How this single story from 2010-2011, in which a publisher’s edited version of an old text is met with a generally dismissive attitude by scholars and pundits alike, supports your position that we’re embroiled in a PC, censorship-happy culture is beyond me.
The reason we have a “macro” scale to be visible is because we have too much of this crap that has been ignored for too long. If a reckoning is coming, it’s past overdue. Suddenly we find the impetus to make a ton of changes because the mood has shifted, awareness is at hand, and people are finally motivated to see a more inclusive America.
That hardly presages a turn toward a constant rewriting of history to make sure the “party” is always right. No one is removing history, erasing it or changing it or pushing us to forget it. What is happening is an effort being made to shift the focus of what we hold up as valuable. Civil War Southern generals - not valuable. Racist caricatures - not valuable. What is valuable? How about honoring some other great Americans, like NASA renaming the the headquarters building in Washington, D.C., after Mary W. Jackson, the Black woman engineer depicted in the movie “Hidden Figures”.
This ridiculous notion that taking down statues and renaming brands is somehow an attack on history, or “white heritage”, is nonsense. The idea that somehow this shows a trend toward massive revisionism is ridiculous.
If you are worried about that kind of thing, you should be far more worried by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Trump lies about everything. He lies about coronavirus while we are fighting a pandemic. He lies about racism while we are engaged in a culture war to eliminate it. He lies about the crimes of his supporters, then lies about the folks he has cover up the crimes. And the Republican Party goes right along with everything like there’s nothing wrong, this is all good and it’s just party politics out to get him that challenges his lies.
It’s Fox and Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and Hannity and the right wing stupidity factory that tries to rewrite what is going on, distort the picture of events. It’s Putin and his Russian troll farms hacking American culture to feed the divisiveness, and Trump and his cronies buying every bit of nonsense pumped out.
Yes, things need to be edited, changed, removed, and renamed to fit what the present-day wants. The present day doesn’t want slavery. The present day doesn’t want Jim Crow. The present day doesn’t want white supremacists marching the streets unopposed. The present day doesn’t want to sanction oppression of minorities. The present day doesn’t want to glorify the fiction of the Nobel South. The present day doesn’t want to honor the generals who fought to keep blacks enslaved. It doesn’t want to keep statues erected as a symbol to show blacks they are forever second class. The present day wants to stop waving the banners of the racists traitors who fought a war to rebel against the USA. The present day wants Gays and Lesbians and Transgender people to feel welcome in society.
Absolutely!
Things don’t work that way. Keeping the statues everywhere, even in a defaced and vandalized state, still shows the cause as something to be celebrated - something worthy of a statue. Far better to make new statues of hope and equality.
Preserve in what way? Are you saying to capture the essence of the movement to reject the relics of the past and the ideas they stand for? Fine, make some artwork that captures that spirit. Do something that immortalizes the moment of change, not the ideas that we’re trying to change.
The Ottomans and Constantinople are an unnecessary distraction from this conversation. It was a silly and inaccurate attempt to put the changing of the name of a sports team in perspective.
North Carolina residents want the Confederate monuments to stay 65-35. So by your own argument, the monuments should stay, no?
A poll from this month, nationwide: 44-keep them, 32-remove, 23-no opinion:
@ultravires
Does what the statues stand for – glorifying the men and women who fought and died to keep black people enslaved and treated as sub human – matter to you at all? Does the fact that these statues are a daily reminder to African Americans that many of their neighbors find them sub human to this day not weigh into the equation of keeping them or not?
Sure, if you take a vote, you’ll probably get a majority wanting to keep the statues and monuments. The Black population of North Carolina is only about 22%. Too many White people are caught up in the Lost Cause myth. Plus, there is an natural tendency to favor the status quo. What’s that we say, “It’s taking longer than we thought.”
But the momentum is on the side of “take them down”, and the long term tend is toward the values of equality and inclusion. Those statues were explicitly erected to remind Blacks they are second class citizens.
Right now is a pivotal moment in our nation’s history where we have the opportunity to stand up for our nation’s claimed values.
But this thread isn’t really about why we should or shouldn’t take them down. The OP is concerned about the impression that people are trying to erase history, to pretend it didn’t happen. No one is saying we can never talk about the Civil War again - far from it. The purpose is not to create an atmosphere that the government is always right. It is to stop celebrating the subjugation of blacks and other minorities.
That’s the state of North Carolina. It’s also an old poll, not taking into account the current climate. A 7 month old poll is not always irrelevant, but enough has happened since it was taken that it does not reflect.
In the cities where the statues actually are, people feel a bit differently. The people who live under these statues would like them removed or altered.
The people of the state, who do not live in the cities where these actually statues are, are overriding the wishes of the people who actually do live where they are.
That is why people are taking to extra legal actions in removing these. They are being imposed on the city by those from without. Imposing your will on a population that disagrees with your imposition is oppression.
If the city votes to remove a statue, but the state blocks it, do you side with the wishes of the state, over the wishes of the people actually affected?
I also note, that, according to the same poll, the majority of respondents incorrectly said that the Civil War was not about slavery. Those who are ignorant of that fact, and those who wish for statues to stay up in cities they do not live in are probably a pretty close to a 1 for 1 correspondence.
Bit of a tangent, but – are the twin demons of ignorance and propaganda so strong in these places that people ACTUALLY believe this, or (as i suspect) do people KNOW that the Civil War was about slavery but refuse to admit it to others (or even themselves) because they can’t quite stomach being on THAT side of history?
I think that some statues and names and images are easy, low-hanging fruit. Confederate statues are easy picking.
Some stereotypical images, too.
But, the Lincoln statue made by former slaves? Washington statues? Cervantes? Junipero Serra?
It’s the mob mentality that I’m against. If a community doesn’t like the statue, perfect, but “just bring a rope” is not the way to do it. Once “statue I don’t like is the only measure” then you can’t stop the mob.
The things some people consider Orwellian make me wonder if they flush their toilets.
As several posters have already pointed out, taking down a statute that glorifies a racist is the opposite of erasing history. Germany has Holocaust memorials and museums, not statues of Hitler. Nobody is talking about burning down museums of racist artifacts; in fact, I think you’ll find a lot of overlap between those who would take down the statutes and those who would support those museums. Here’s an example: New Racism Museum Reveals the Ugly Truth Behind Aunt Jemima - The Atlantic
“This rope’s made in New York City!”
“NEW YORK CITY!? Get a … errr, never mind.”
It is what they are taught. I don’t know that I can blame someone too much for believing what they are told all their lives to be true, but, once the truth is known, then it becomes a form of willful ignorance.
If you are the sort of person that thinks that having a statue of Jefferson Davis in your town square is swell, then you probably ought to be a big enough fan of his to read his speech on the reasons for secession. If you were to read his speech, you would know that slavery was the foremost reason.
Do they actually believe it? I dunno, but they sure want us to.
I don’t think anyone is so ignorant to think slavery wasn’t involved at all. Rather, they focus on the cause being more about State’s Rights and standing up to tyranny. Thus, the intertwining of Confederate imagery with US Revolutionary War imagery (“Don’t Tread On Me”) and Texas Revolution (“Come And Take Them”). They look at slavery as just a practical manifestation of the principle of State’s Rights. They honor the ancestors who stood up and fought for what they thought was right. It’s not denying slavery happened, but it’s deemphasizing the slavery aspect and stressing the values of freedom and honor and family loyalty.
I agree. We have to find a balance between honoring the leaders who founded the country without excusing or white washing the mistakes they made. Slavery is a stain on the honor of our founding fathers, and racism is an idea we must continue to fight.
Confederate leaders don’t need to be honored. They are a legacy of the past we need to repudiate, not celebrate.
As others have said, pulling down statues of Confederates, and dropping Aunt Jemima isn’t in any way historical revisionism. Its just updating our icons to our modern understanding of race.
I think a subject closer to the Orwellian issue is the removal from distribution of past media that is now deemed offensive. Such things as Song of the South, the censored 11, and removal of the blackface 30 rock episodes.
Unlike 1984 is isn’t the government that is trying to erase evidence but corporations, still I suspect that the motives are similar, in that the goal isn’t so much to promote racial diversity as it is to hide their previous insensitivity and pretend that they never happened. That isn’t to say that some sensitivity shouldn’t be exercised around their distribution. They probably shouldn’t be included in a boxed or kids set alongside Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and broomsticks. but they should be available as historical artifacts the same way birth of a nation is available.
They willfully ignore the core question “a State’s Right to what?”. The Confederacy WASN’T in favor of state’s rights in general, just in favor of a state’s right to be a slave state - not even to decide if it was a free or slave state.This whole line of argument is a good example of actual 1984-style rewriting of history. The people running the confederacy certainly weren’t wishy washy about the fact that they wanted a country based on slavery and white supremacy!
Now you are goalpost shifting. You said in your post that “the present day” doesn’t want these monuments to stand. Now you are saying, “Well, ok, it does, but we are working on it!”
Again, the Lost Cause stuff is bulllshit. But I’ve been a Civil War buff my whole life and I have read books and visited probably every battlefield. It’s good that the North won. But I can still look at some of the ballsy and truly heroic stuff that those guys did, even if the ultimate thing, the thing three steps above what they were personally fighting for is the single worst thing that ever happened in U.S. history.
It’s too simplistic to say that the North was fighting to free slaves and the South was fighting to keep slaves. That was simply the issue du jour. A lot of people still admire the sacrifice to stick a middle finger in the face of the federal government and that underlying purpose is what was celebrated, and still is celebrated, and it should not be tossed aside for an easy and cheap one-liner that these guys were just all about slavery.
There are reasons that these guys should be respected, and it is improper to teach the new generation that they were simply white supremacists. They certain were, but so was Abraham Lincoln, and almost all of the people in the North at the time and especially those in Delaware, Maryland, and West (ern) Virginia who fought for slavery until nearly the end and who Lincoln and the North did nothing to stop.