Tuesday's postcard, and a big story, illuminated by a compelling small story

May 9, 2023

Young mule deer buck, in morning light, west Spokane

The New Culture War, in leaps and bounds…

My writing time is cramped today because (so I’m told) I’m getting older and my calendar and circumstances bark at me to visit doctors and dentists. There’s a part of my brain that insists I’m forever 29. Lessor organs and joints groan at this delusion and push me toward waiting rooms, scales, co-pays, etc. So today is one of those days.

That said there are a couple pieces that emerged in the past day or so that illuminate a larger story—not just about overt censorship but the invisible hand of market censorship. One is a big story, the other a small one, or so it might seem. Yet the two are powerfully connected, and I thought it important to flag them.

The first story is from Jonathan Chait, one of the current masters of long-form journalism. Chait’s latest, in New York magazine is entitled: “Indoctrination Nation: Convinced schools are brainwashing kids to be left-wingers, conservatives are seizing control of the American classroom.”

The second is from the New York Times, about how a young writer, Maggie Tokuda-Hall. Hall has called out a major book distributor that conditioned a contract upon her going along with their censorship of the author’s note that is part of her children’s book, Love in the Library, a story about how her Japanese-American grandparents met at an incarceration camp in Idaho and fell in love.

Chait’s piece is at least a 20 minute read, in part because he takes the time to report and reflect upon the depth of the subject and offer a well-balanced account of the history of the culture conflict over curriculum, academic freedom, and the role public and school libraries play in distributing books. As you might expect, the immediate focus is on Florida which, under Governor Ron DeSantis (an unannounced but clearly aspiring 2024 Presidential candidate) has all but declared a war on “woke” culture, which I’ll venture to describe as trying to quell discussion of racism, homosexuality and sexual identity issues that make (some) straight people uncomfortable or worse.

Here’s a short excerpt from Chait’s article:

“In Florida, HB 1467 — a law requiring all books in schools to be “suited to student needs” — prompted school libraries across the state to frantically pull texts for fear they would violate the new regime. The Florida Freedom to Read Project reported that some 20 school districts in the state eliminated books to comply with this law or DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” and Stop WOKE acts. School officials in two counties covered up all the books in the library until the entire catalogue could be vetted for compliance. “There appears to be confusion over what books or materials could actually lead to a criminal charge,” conceded a report in National Review. Citing DeSantis’s HB 1557, what critics called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, the Lake County district removed And Tango Makes Three, which tells the true story of two male penguins who had built a nest together in the Central Park Zoo, then, when provided an egg by the zookeeper, raised the baby penguin. The book contains no sexual content, not even between consenting penguins.”

As to the reach of this controversy, beyond the Sunshine State, Chait writes:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

As Chait describes, there is something head-spinning about this turn toward the big purge. It seems only hours ago that conservative politicians and activists were wailing about “cancel culture” and protecting academic freedom, and free speech on campus.

“But now members of the party elite have fully invested themselves in this objective [to suppress views they regard as too liberal.] They have only just begun to explore their powers, and their statements on the matter recognize no theoretical limit as to how far they might go. In retrospect, Trump’s late embrace of the crusade to purify the schools was not a fleeting interest but a new turn, the first shots fired in what we now see is a full-scale war.”

Ms. Tokuda-Hall’s protest speaks to the larger reach of this rolling purge and literary cleansing—the less visible shock-wave through our culture and economy.

She was thrilled to learn that Scholastic—which (according to the Times) distributes books and resource materials to 90 percent of U.S. schools—chose to distribute her book. The offer came with one condition: that she delete references to racism she’d included in the author’s note Tokuda-Hall had included in the book, apart from the story.

“When Tokuda-Hall read the details of the offer,” the Times reports, “she felt deflated — then outraged.” The article contains the actual image of the red-lining of the author’s note by Scholastic. The visual helps. As a writer it helped me better imagine how her stomach must have felt when she read it for the first time.

She refused to make the change, and went public in a statement that went viral to millions of readers on the internet. In the face of the blow-back, Scholastic apologized to both Tokuda-Hall and the book’s illustrator. Still, she refused to sign the contract.

“We all see what’s happening with this rising culture of book bans,” Tokuda-Hall told the Times. “If we all know that the largest children’s publisher in the country, the one with the most access to schools, is capitulating behind closed doors and asking authors to change their works to accommodate those kinds of demands, there’s no way you as a marginalized author can find an audience.”

—tjc