The Little Madhouse on the
Prairie
How ironic that, as Freedom To Read Week winds up in Canada, and Read Across America Day is being celebrated in the U.S., libraries are celebrating by censoring children's literature. Even old favourites like Laura Ingalls Wilder aren't immune: because some groups didn't like her “portrayals of Native Americans” the American Library Association removed her name in 2018 from its lifetime achievement award list.
Meanwhile, there have been calls to “Burn Babar” (that terrible racist white-supremacist elephant), and six Dr. Seuss titles have just been de-published by their own publisher, Dr. Seuss Enterprises. The six books in question “align with Orientalism”, says the company. Whatever Orientalism may be, we know censorship when we see it, and see it selectively applied: “... because the majority of characters in Dr. Seuss books are White, his works ... center Whiteness and White supremacy”, says the publisher, without clarifying whether books with black characters center Black supremacy, and align with Occidentalism.
Dr. Seuss books are language-teaching, literacy-inducing open-hearted comic rhymes of tolerance and universalism, presenting these things decades before the present “equity” movement of social justice warriors had even got started.
Now, Horton Hears a “Who on Earth is running the libraries these days?” Certainly not anyone who values freedom of speech. Once banned, Will the Cat In the Hat Ever Come Back?
