‘Uncomfortable’ language gets To Kill a Mockingbird pulled from Mississippi schools

Yet there are a number of books in the pantheon of American literature that seem destined for endangered-species status due to the uncomfortable historic associations they make, including Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ which is redolent with racial slurs, as is Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ And what about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s groundbreaking work on abolition, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ which practically lit the spark on the Civil War (‘Uncle Tom’ has become a derogatory term used to describe an excessively subservient individual).

By dispatching the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder to the literary cellar – and let’s not kid ourselves, this writer will be ‘disappeared’ from bookshelves in short order – we are close to committing the same despicable act that Winston Smith, the protagonist in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, understood all too well. As a clerk inside of the Ministry of Truth, Smith’s job was to rewrite historical documents to match the party line as dictated by the omnipotent Big Brother. When truth is banished from the historical record, it is substituted with lies and propaganda, and this will do nobody – least of all the oppressed minorities – any favors.

Banishing Wilder’s name from the children’s literary award does not mean that her books have been banned, blacklisted or burned. They have not been – at least not yet. But the writing is certainly on the wall. Her voluminous body of literary work has been forever tainted by America’s social justice warriors, the self-anointed conscience of the nation, who fail to see that Wilder’s collection of books was not written as some sort of Miss Manners’ Guide to Social Etiquette, but rather as a mirror with which to observe a particular historical epoch. There is a great social need for such literature. Books like ‘Little House on the Prairie’ give testimony to the regrettable mindset behind one of the worst genocides in history (Historians estimate that in 1492, at the time of Columbus’ landing in the Caribbean, there were some 10 million indigenous peoples living in what is now the United States. By 1900, the number had dropped to less than 300,000). Shielding readers from unsettling historical nuances out of some contrived morality not only serves to diminish the full scale of tragedy various minority groups have suffered, but practically guarantees another similar event sometime down the road.

In the timely words of philosopher George Santayana: “Those who have forgotten the past are condemned to repeat it.”