Allow me to hold forth on some unstructured thinky-thoughts that have been brewing in my head and came to an absolute boil when I checked Twitter this morning.
The Durham District School Board is currently engaged in a US-style school book banning, and one of the books that it pulled from its shelves is
The Great Bear by Cree author David A. Robertson. I haven't read it as it targets a younger age group than I teach, but I have several of Robertson's other works and attended his talks and I can not possibly overemphasize how significant he is as an author and educator. His work speaks to young people, Indigenous and settler, in an accessible, direct, and authentic way. His work is particularly important for young people who struggle with reading. He's an absolute
gift to English teachers.
Their rationale for censoring this book (sorry,
conducting a fulsome review) is as follows:
An email, obtained by the Star, that was sent by the board to school principals says the books “do not align with the recently updated DDSB Indigenous Education policy and procedure.”
Ooookay then. Robertson thinks it's because the main character gets bullied and cuts off his braid. Which is an experience that many Indigenous youth have had. Then he regrows his hair as he gains self-confidence and connects with his culture.
In other words, the bean-counters don't like that a book by an Indigenous author might expose children to a specific trauma experienced by Indigenous children on a regular basis. Won't someone think of the children?
I am increasingly concerned about the weaponization of social justice language to achieve aims that are antithetical to social justice, particularly but not exclusively by institutions like school boards. In order to protect children from ever encountering a negative or uncomfortable emotion, the reading list has to be sanitized and purged of authentic experiences.
In the US, this looks like Don't Say Gay bills, the Critical Race Theory scare, and
banning Maus because of its depiction of mouse genitalia. In Canada, of course, we are Enlightened Progressives. So school boards, for example, do not want teachers using materials that have the N-word in them, because that might traumatize Black students. Except that this means I can't use films like
I Am Not Your Negro or
The Skin We're In, both of which are brilliant films by Black creators and centre the authentic experiences of Black people, and both of which use the N-word. The rhetoric used to justify this in Canada is always about social justice, anti-racism, equity, and diversity, but it's really about legal liability and the result is the silencing of important diverse voices.
Tangentially,
I am absolutely fascinated by this excellent post about antis in fandom. The protection of theoretical children (in fandom, this means anyone in their 20s or even older, depending on their physical appearance) has taken on a hysterical tone in recent years, where some people are demanding protection from encountering work that may make them upset. These demands take the form of large-scale harassment campaigns, and notably, the targets of these campaigns are frequently labelled pedophiles.
At the root of most censorship campaigns, the urge to protect children from pedophiles (frequently combined with Satanists and/or Jews, depending on whether the quiet part is being said out loud or not) features prominently. It's notable to me that the "groomer" meme is weaponized both in fandom spaces, by ostensibly queer and marginalized young people for purposes of, supposedly, social justice, and by the far-right in demonizing queer and trans people. Obviously the latter group has much more political and legal clout, not to mention a higher body count, but the underlying impulse and structures are the same.
Protect me from the thing that makes me, personally, uncomfortable, by making it unavailable to everyone. And use rhetoric about children and pedophiles to do so.If you know me, you know that I'm quite far from being a free-speech absolutist. But I lean more in that direction when it comes to literature, because in general it's better to be able to have these works accessible and critiqued than to remove them from the discourse. And I am very skeptical when social justice language is severed from its meaning, which is to strive for a better, more just world. I am skeptical that school boards are in any way qualified to determine which texts can be taught in service of achieving that better, more just world. If you are so twisted up in your own rhetoric that you silence marginalized voices in your quest for safety, you are on the wrong side of history.
P.S. I am banning the word "fulsome," though. Along with "kind."
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