The shrieking crybullies behind this movement will see to it that those historical figures they want us to revere will be exempt from scrutiny -- or else.

Look at Woodrow Wilson, who was honored by the KKK for having ordered the segregation of the federal civil service. Histories don't talk about that.

Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc.

I am sure you protested the removal of Huckleberry Finn from schools, too, so this is not new.

It is evidence of a continued desperation to deny that the real world absolutely discriminates, because the practice is actually a survival mechanism.

Look at Woodrow Wilson, who was honored by the KKK for having ordered the segregation of the federal civil service. Histories don't talk about that.

jdgalt at June 26, 2018 9:29 PM

Yes. Harry Truman didn’t integrate the miltary. He reintegrated it after Woodrow Wilson segregated it.

I read those books over ad over when I was little. And eventually I picked up on the racist stuff. The person who says that line is a guy named Scott, and he is portrayed as unreasonable. It is very clear that the Ingalls are on illegal land, as they get kicked off at the end.

The way they deal with it is subtle.

There's one scene where Laura asks, "But where will the Indians go" and her parents reply, "They go west, they always do", and she replies, "But won't it make the Indians upset that-" "Be quiet, Laura".

Or something like that, which when I re-read as an older kid I found pretty interesting. They know, and they make themselves not think about it and be quiet about it.

I think it is a very good series and it makes you think about the mentality people had back then and the way they had to suppress certain thoughts.

Laura also sees her first black person in that book... a doctor who saves her life.

I think going back and taking out the racist bits would be whitewashing history. People need to know that this is how people were, that it was common, not just a few bad apples. Our history is what it is.

There are no well-developped Indian characters, so if you want to read them as a counterpoint a series has been written called The Birchbark House which could be read in parallel.

The nost racist one in the series is "Little House on the Prairie", the second book, maybe followed by "The Long Winter" when a friendly but very stereotypical Indian warns them that a bad winter is coming.

When I argue with people who want to whitewash history I agree with them, and then point out once there is no longer any evidence of people in the past being racist, no one in the present can be called racist for anything, and with no evidence of past racism there is no basis for arguing about systemic racism, or past injustices

It would be interesting to see what it will be like 100 years from now, to see how they judge this generation.

Of course, barring some incredible new advancements in the medical field, none of us will be here to see it. And even if they did make such advancements, I wouldn't be interested in hanging around that long just to see what the new morality will be then.

I hold out hope that we will be better, but I'm afraid we'll be worse. Someone who says "I identify as a hamster" will live in an era where medical advances will be sufficient to turn him into one.

What bothers me about this is that Laura Ingalls Wilder isn't necessarily expressing prejudicial views, but assigning them to her characters.

Isn't that what writers are supposed to do? I didn't see the movie, but I have read Stephen King's "It" (which, among its other failings as a novel, depicts a preteen gangbang as a logical, even essential measure).

And in it he depicts a brutal homophobic assault and takes a fairly believable jaunt into the mind of John Webber Garton, who batters a child-like and rather effeminate gay man named Adrian Mellon and then throws him off a bridge where he is killed by It.

He also depicts a racist character whose hatred is so obsessive, he's willing to attempt murder. This would not only bar Stephen King from ever having his name put on any awards, despite his unrivalled success as a horror writer, but today's SJWs would fault him for writing from the perspective of a black man, Michael Hanlon, the object of Henry Bowers' racist hatred.

Exactly, Patrick! Mr. Scott is very racist, Ma is racist, Pa is more reasonable but still squatting on the lands, Laura questions the situation.

Great points, Nicole -- on the nuances. The black doctor saves Laura's life, the Birchbark series for the counterpoint on Indians.

No one wants to be reminded that their ancestors were considered sub-human and hated; or were less scientifically, politically, or culturally advanced than the Western world. But that's reality.

How can we understand the attitudes of the time if we can't read them?

Sidenote:

"The only good Indian is a dead Indian" supposedly was coined by Phil Sheridan. The story goes that Comanche Chief Tosawi told Sheridan that he was a "good Indian." To which Sheridan is supposed to have replied "The only good Indians I ever met were dead." He denied ever saying it or anything similar.

Sheridan was a harsh governor of the military district that included Louisiana and Texas during Reconstruction, firing the mayor New Orleans outright, and having once quipped, "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell." That one, he did not deny.

Later, as head of the Department of the Missouri, Sheridan was tasked with subduing the Plains Indians. His forces were spread too thin to be effective. As a result, he conceived that his only available strategy was to deny the Indians their food sources. He turned buffalo hunters loose and attacked the Indians in their winter quarters where he could steal their food. As such, the legend of his uttering "the only good Indian..." seemed to fit with his ruthless manner of waging war and was accepted as true.

As for black people in the Old West: There were only 10 cavalry regiments guarding the entire Western frontier, two of them Buffalo Soldier regiments (the 9th and 10th). There were some infantry regiments as well, but the distances involved limited them mostly to garrison duty. At full strength, a regiment then was about 800 men. Frontier cavalry regiments were seldom at full strength (e.g., Custer led ≈700 at Little Bighorn where 5 of the 7th Cavalry's 12 companies were wiped out). Movies seldom portray that 20% of the defense of the frontier was in the hands of black soldiers. The exception seems to be John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge.

"Isn't that what writers are supposed to do? "

Of course, according to the New Orthodoxy in literature, writers can only write about themselves. Therefore, any views expressed by any character are held to be the views of the writer. And oh by the way, any white writer attempting to write about a non-white character is inherently racist.

"I think going back and taking out the racist bits would be whitewashing history. People need to know that this is how people were, that it was common, not just a few bad apples. Our history is what it is."

There is the saying these days that young leftists and SJWs think that history began the day they were born. I'm realizing that that saying is not quite right: what they think is that humanity began the day they were born. All of history before that was an unbroken plain of evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Thus, history itself is a subject that should scarcely be spoken about, other than to remind the out-groups of their evil roots.

I think adults should be able to read past literature and understand that times change and culture changes. The only other alternative is that we only read books written in 2018 that have been carefully vetted by a committee of SJWs--just kidding! Even SJWs can't agree on what is triggering! Give up reading, that is the cure.

I know it will make the Left short-circuit, but no people or writers are pure as the driven snow, including themselves. There are no humans who have not hated or had bad opinions of others. World history is simply full of wars, oppression, and conquest. And not all by white people (believe it or not). The Aztecs were brutal empire builders to give just one example.

One scene that went completely over my head as a kid: the minstrel show in "Little Town on the Prairie." I didn't realize the black makeup meant that Pa - or his co-players - was portraying a black man, in part because the word "darky," a word I had never heard before, gets used ONLY with regard to that scene, and NOT with regard to the doctor in "Little House on the Prairie." So I thought "darky" just meant a clown with black makeup. Or something like that. Anyway, I think it's notable that we never hear any of the jokes in that sketch - only the words from "Mulligan Guards," and anyone could argue THOSE are not racist. So Laura was clearly trying to be realistic but no more offensive than necessary.

But, as it happens, she DID have to change something regarding LHotP. From the WaPo:

_____________________________________

...Laura Ingalls Wilder was on the brink of having an award named in her honor, from the Association for Library Service to Children, when in 1952 a reader complained to the publisher of “Little House on the Prairie” about what the reader found to be a deeply offensive statement about Native Americans.

The reader pointed specifically to the book’s opening chapter, “Going West.” The 1935 tale of a pioneering family seeking unvarnished, unoccupied land opens with a character named Pa, modeled after Wilder’s own father, who tells of his desire to go “where the wild animals lived without being afraid.” Where “the land was level, and there were no trees.”

And where “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.”

The editor at Harper’s who received the reader’s complaint wrote back saying it was “unbelievable” to her that not a single person at Harper’s ever noticed, for nearly 20 years, that the sentence appeared to imply that Native Americans were not people, according to a 2007 biography of Wilder by Pamela Smith Hill.

Yet Harper’s decision in 1953 to change “people” to “settlers” in the offending sentence did little to quell the critics in later decades, who began describing Wilder’s depictions of Native Americans and some African Americans — and her story lines evoking white settlers’ Manifest Destiny beliefs — as racist....
____________________________________

Here's what I said in January:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2018/01/28/movie_critic_ar.html

Even in the original, there are things that seem contrived. First of all, we all "know" lovable Pa would never do anything wrong, government-sanctioned or not, so why, at the end of the chapter "The Tall Indian," does Laura question what the white adults are doing? (That scene likely never happened, because in real life, Laura and her family went back to Wisconsin when she was three.) See here:

“When white settlers come into a country, the Indians have to move on. The government is going to move these Indians farther west, any time now. That's why we're here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick. Now do you understand?”

“Yes, Pa,” Laura said. “But, Pa, I thought this was Indian Territory. Won't it make the Indians mad to have to—”

“No more questions, Laura,” Pa said, firmly. "Go to sleep."

Two, why does Ma, of all people, feel "so let down" when the Osages leave? Or Pa, for that matter? (I do think, though, that one reason Ma hated them so much was that it was just easier for her to be angry at them for acting as though they had any human rights, than to be angry at Pa for moving them into an obviously dangerous place.) Especially given that the next chapter starts with "After the Indians had gone, a great peace settled on the prairie."

Btw, in real life, Laura's family didn't get kicked off the land by the government - they just went home because they couldn't sell their Wisconsin house. (There may have been more to it - I don't remember.)

Some books I found just now, when I searched for the above scene between Pa and Laura (in order of relevance, according to Google):

A Political Companion to Herman Melville by Jason Frank - 2013

Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder by Ann Romines, 1997.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture by John E. Miller - 2008

Laura Ingalls Wilder: American Writer on the Prairie by Sallie Ketcham - 2014

If any one of us, including the most justicey-of-social-justice proponents, were put into suspended animation today, they would find that at least some of their beliefs and knowledge base were in great disrepute upon awaking. Perhaps in as few as 4 or 5 years. My personal prediction is that things will advance much further down the de-genderization road. Twenty years from now it may be thought disgusting and bigoted to give your baby a gendered name and to refer to them from birth as male or female.

I'll also say that I suspect the real goal for many students - and sometimes their parents - is for teachers to stop making kids read any literature at all (as opposed to math, which clearly everyone needs to know up until the eighth grade, at least) since plenty of PARENTS don't read for fun, whether to themselves or to their kids; they don't feel deprived because of that, so many of them don't see why anyone should have to do book reports after age ten or so.

From Aesop: "The ignorant despise what is precious only because they cannot understand it."

Others, of course, just want good grades without actually having to work on that subject. The kids don't want to have to read at their actual grade level, since that would be haaaarrrrrd. (That includes college students, such as those want to write poetry but who refuse to read Ovid - they can't ALL find his books traumatic to read. Likely, they're mostly lazy students.)

But, first of all, the "Little House" books are clearly going to be traumatic for Native American children. Second, they're undeniably sentimental, and we could all use less sentimentality in our lives. Third, despite the amount of violence, details on loading a rifle and building things, and excitement (like the panther chase), at least some little boys find the books "just awful," since the focus is mainly on the girls. (Unlike in the TV series, where the hero is clearly Pa.) Fourth, just because a book is widely loved and maybe critically esteemed doesn't mean it automatically deserves a place in the classroom; there are obvious reasons why you don't hear arguments for making teens read the Pulitzer-winning "Gone with the Wind" in school. (Unlike "Huckleberry Finn.")

So, given that there are tons of good books to choose from, there are more every year, and teachers can't possibly assign them all, why not allow teachers, at least, to use discretion so as not to hurt certain students unnecessarily? It's also important to remember that while it would be great if kids CARED about reading all the old, famous books that have never been out of print, that doesn't change the fact that kids who don't learn to like reading for its own sake will not read outside of school and will not remember much of what they're FORCED to read either. Making boys, especially, read a huge stack of books they can't stand before they're allowed to read anything else in school could be called a great way to turn them away from reading - permanently.

Cousin Dave:

Of course, according to the New Orthodoxy in literature, writers can only write about themselves. Therefore, any views expressed by any character are held to be the views of the writer. And oh by the way, any white writer attempting to write about a non-white character is inherently racist.

That's more or less what I was referring to when I mentioned Stephen King's character of Michael Hanlon from "It," who is a main character of the novel and black. And King often rights from his perspective, even under the racism directed at him.

There is now a cottage industry of SJWs who majored in non-marketable fields, such as gender studies, who insist that any person writing about someone other than their own racial/gender/sexuality demographic must consult with one of those who majored in such fields to make sure the characters are presented appropriately.

"Twenty years from now it may be thought disgusting and bigoted to give your baby a gendered name and to refer to them from birth as male or female."

Every generation thinks it is the pinnacle of human achievement. This may have happened during the reign of a Pharoah, but considered so insignificant it was not reported.
You describe a society likely to be populated by milennials. How effectual can that be, as a small fraction of the rest of the world - which remains out of their sight?
There is apparently a small segment of American society which thinks self-defense with a gun is an abhorrent task, to be avoided at all cost. Smart money says they're not surviving tough times.

"There is now a cottage industry of SJWs who majored in non-marketable fields, such as gender studies, who insist that any person writing about someone other than their own racial/gender/sexuality demographic must consult with one of those who majored in such fields to make sure the characters are presented appropriately."

Right. When you get down to it, it's nothing more than rent-seeking.