The full story and their apology is here. Maybe they were hoping to sell a bunch in Florida-allegedly they were concerned teachers might fear reprisals for using it, which is terrible on its own.
Yes, this was a depressing story. In her account, the author sounds so authentic and forthright, and the publisher sounds… just the opposite.
As we know, right-wing state authorities are giving schoolbooks particularly intense scrutiny these days, leading educational publishers to turn their texts into pablum. Still, I wonder: Could it be that attempts at neutering text such as this one also routinely arose in, say, the late Seventies, when I was reading Scholastic books, and authors back then simply had no platform by which to announce that they had been censored?
I’m assuming it was difficult to get a book into publication that dealt with real issued back in the 60s and 70s. The one that keeps popping up in my consciousness whenever I think along these lines is The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key, a sci-fi YAish book I read in 4th grade that really nails the narrow-minded hatred and short-sighted provicial attitudes I already knew so well. And send them up nicely, btw.
Here’s a link to the same story from Publisher’s Weekly that gives more details.
So Scholastic started an entire imprint, “Rising Voices Library,” explicitly to “provide students with high-interest texts that celebrate the stories of the historically underrepresented.”
But they want to hush up any mention of the elephant in the room – the reason why those groups have been underrepresented!
Cynical whitewashing.
I can actually see the publisher’s point, when they say
The part they want to remove does strike me as awfully political for an elementary-grade children’s book and could easily narrow its audience.
Sure, there’s room to adjust the precise wording – but according to the author’s blog, what the publisher wanted was that “the word ‘racism’ would be removed from the author’s note altogether.”