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If you believe the legacy media’s narrative… well, God help you. But, I digress. If you believe the narrative, you’ll be firmly convinced that drooling, Bible-toting rednecks are busily banning books about the Holocaust. Because, well, they’re Nazsties, and that’s just what they do. Duh.
But which books are really being banned schools (not just in America)? And who is banning them?
English undegraduates at Leeds are being told Anna Sewell‘s 1877 novel Black Beauty contains “depictions of cruelty to animals”. Daniel Defoe‘s 1719 adventure tale Robinson Crusoe “discusses race and slavery” and has “attitudes typical of its time”. And Edgar Rice Burroughs‘s 1912 classic Tarzan Of The Apes is said to contain “expressions of racism”.
Express
“Attitudes typical of its time”? Well, I’ll be buggered.
It might be suspected, though, that the real reason the discussions of slavery in Robinson Crusoe are upsetting to leftist academics is because it discusses an uncomfortable historical truth: the systemic slavery of whites by African Muslims. On his first trading adventure, Crusoe is captured and enslaved by Moorish slavers off the coast of Africa. The text makes clear that enslaving Europeans was common in Muslim North Africa.
Of course, that doesn’t stop Crusoe buying a negro slave of his own, after his liberation. Nor wishing to enslave “two or three savages” after his shipwreck.
Which might, to a more enlightened reader, be much food for thought. But thought is not much encouraged at universities, these days.
Because, who reading Black Beauty could possibly come to the conclusion that cruelty to animals is to be admired? After all, the book is told from the point of view of a horse, so deploring cruelty to animals would rather seem to be the point. Moreover, the subtext of the story, in which a noble, black creature sold into drudgery and misery, might again be food for thought — at least, for anyone but an academic.
And Tarzan of the Apes? It might be worth remembering that the whole plot is set in motion when Tarzan’s father is sent to investigate reports of “the unfair treatment of black British subjects by the officers of a friendly European power”. Indeed, John Clayton is concerned that “these poor blacks were held in virtual slavery”. On first glimpsing white men, Tarzan observes that they are no different to Africans: “no more civilized than the apes—no less cruel than Sabor”.
But these are not the only books being banned by right-on leftist academics.
Schools in Burbank will no longer be able to teach a handful of classic novels, including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, following concerns raised by parents over racism […]
Until further notice, teachers in the area will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee‘s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain‘s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck‘s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor‘s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor‘s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
In fact, just four parents complained. Three of them are “Black” (note that only blacks get the honour of upper-casing their skin colour; whites have to remain firmly lower-case), and at least one of them is peddling the kind of implausible “Just So” stories that proliferate on social media.
Carmenita Helligar said her daughter, Destiny, was approached by a white student in math class using a racial taunt including the N-word, which he’d learned from reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry while both attended the David Starr Jordan Middle School.
Newsweek
“And then everybody clapped.”
But Helligar’s apocryphal story raises an interesting question: if America really is as “systemically racist” as the left claim, then how is that white boys only become aware of the word “nigger” by reading a half-century-old book, written by a black woman?
