article updated 11/27/2018 to include the “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” condemnation
Laura Ingalls Wilder: welcome, iconic American author, to the ever-more whitewashed (the antithetical reality of what has been loosely termed the Diversity movement) and condemned creative contributor roster. It’s my understanding that Dr Seuss, Theodor Geisel, is next…. Meantime, count Charles Schulz’s A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973), where the beloved lil outsiders gather together for popcorn and jelly beans, as the latest condemned work….
The Mass’s Citizens United, the collective voice of social media-addicted anonymous folk with too much free time on their thumbs, continues its censorial erasure campaign to rip apart the very fabric, knots, flaws and all, that is Western and American culture. In the face of mob-appeasement erasure, one occasionally finds a courageous individual who dares speak up and out against this. This op-ed is by a retired academic, appearing in the Chicago Tribune: Stripping Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Name from an Award is Close-Minded & Short-Sighted
I ask those zealots who support the censorial re-writing of history: How can we educate if original source materials no longer exist?
Read more on this issue at The Daily Wire, from which I quote at the close of this post:
and here:
and here
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/06/24/association-removes-laura-ingalls-wilders-name-from-award.html
and here
My email to the ALSC, the Association of the Library Service to Children, follows:
I am writing to lament your organization’s bowing to the blanket, systematic censorial white washing of history and its chronicling of society – its reflection and ongoing evolution – via its quashing of the literary legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
All cultures over time have endured conflict and biases as they crossed paths. No culture is innocent of this, including those cultures overtaken through history. It is what it is.
History is a collection of facts over time and how Man’s roles were played in them – which has never been a static element. This whitewashing seeks to suggest this via ridiculously utopianistic erasure of all conflict and conquest over time, be it a historically relegated child’s uninformed perspective, be it the timeline of the Westernization of our – mine and your – nation.
By pretending that what was never existed, we only set a sanctioned stage for more pretense today. This is cowardly and dangerous, and eliminates one of the greatest functions of the Arts – literary Arts – to reflect us with honesty, for better and for worse, aka accurately.
These trends of erasure and censorship worry me on so many levels, as this door to condemnation might appear like restitution via appeasement, but is in fact the lid of Pandora’s box being thrown wide, and officially, open.
If both content and authors are equal targets, where will this end? The words and works and legacy of such as Thomas Jefferson come to mind.
Further: American settlers, immigrants who braved oceanic stretches of untamed lands, were equal as innocent and mis-informed counterparts to “native” American tribal members. They struggled equally to survive and build lives for themselves and their families. American settlers were also victims, brutally and randomly attacked by American “natives” (all cultures are nomadic; hence, the quotation marks). But now, appeasement trends demand that the American settlers are defamed and whitewashed, while “native” Americans are aggressively restitutionalized via censorship and historical re-writes. These attacks now reach into the legacies of American literary icon Laura Ingalls Wilder and fellow settlers. This is denialism of what was and limits all perspectives.
The right of American settlers’ to their personal perspectives, whether flawed or formed by logical conclusions based on their experiences as they sought safe passage, happiness and security for themselves and their families, should also remain valid as their factually based prerogative, and relevant as having been their slice in Time.
As noted in the Daily Wire article, linked at the top of this post:
…in today’s woke era, Wilder’s work is considered “controversial,” because of how she speaks of her family’s fear of Native American attacks, and her era-specific views on blacks. Intellectuals and historians might teach Wilder’s works in the context of her upbringing, but, apparently, children’s librarians are incapable of the same level of nuance.
kimann schultz: issues, advocacy, current affairs 