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I thank my lucky stars I was a lonely child bookworm who enjoyed writing stories in the 1970s, when I could read and write about whatever struck my fancy. Otherwise, I'd have been stuck writing only about white, disabled children from the Midwest instead of imagining other worlds. And I never would have graduated with a degree in English Literature had I been forced to read political screeds instead of actual novels that deepened my understanding of the human race.

Of course, we must all address societal inequities and historical wrongs. But Viet Thanh Nguyen's idea that literature is ONLY “the kind of critical and political work that unsettles whiteness and reveals the legacies of colonialism” insults and disgusts me to my core. I am glad the author of this piece compares the far left to the moral majority because their intolerance and smug righteousness is as disgusting to me as those on the right.

In the current climate, I feel caught in a vise between the far right and far left and I can't stand either of them.

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As a biologist, I long chose to simply avoid what seemed to me a borderline-lunatic furore within the more esoteric circles of literary criticism. Unfortunately I now see this weird aberration as a dangerously toxic illiberal movement, reminiscent of the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era. Indeed, it seems to have spilled not only into the entire academic community, but now infecting the entire society. I found Mr Trump intolerable, but I see this new attack by the left-wing thought police as just as dangerous. My suspicion is that a very small fraction even within academia really believes it, but a much larger group chooses to accede to its demands.

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Finally, someone articulate and thorough wrote this so I don't have to. (I've had the rough draft in my head for about a year, but I think it was a much more convoluted version .) Something I may expand upon in a full article in the future: There is an imbalance now in the media we all read. Too many of us are inundated with tweets, nonfiction, news stories, and even essays like this. Even reading a piece of challenging literature for adults with complex characters and moral ambiguities is a fairly rare event. I went through a Faulkner phase a while ago and each book left me thinking, wow, this would definitely not get published now! If we don't exercise our "adult reading" muscles by engaging in work that shows, but does not condone, morally ambiguous and difficult behavior, the culture at large will be increasingly less prepared to deal with these works and will not trust the adults to be prepared to understand the difference between art and propaganda. As literature falls more and more to the wayside in an economically anxious world full of digitally-driven media, hysteria over heretical literature will increase.

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As I read this essay over morning coffee I’m reminded of part of my plan for retirement: read classic literature I never read when I was a voracious teenaged reader in the 1970s and reread classic literature I read once but need to see again with adult eyes. I know creative writers who are grappling with this world of sensitivity readers and online mobs. In the past week, a friend of mine was directed to resign from an editorial board, accused tacitly—though with great care, not explicitly—by his white editor of racism.

Very unfortunately, these left-wing authoritarian moves vindicate the fears of right-wing authoritarians about the changing demographics of the US. More open queers and people of color? A more multicultural America? For years, as a women's studies professor, I said: there's nothing to be afraid of. Although in the short run, yes, diversity brings some more conflict as people work out different ways of seeing the world and different cultural practices, in the long run diversity is a benefit. I said those things and more. But it turns out I was wrong. I didn't count on a movement of, ostensibly, "my" people bent on ruining anyone who didn't hew to their ideology. My lack of foresight is on me.

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This is all well and good. But it's old news at this point. The question is, what's to be done about it? I'd like to hear battle plans.

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Thanks for this essay. I wish I weren't worried about these examples of what supporters describe as simply changing norms for a good cause. But I am. I think people too often forget that we can annotate and comment on texts that are out-dated. When I taught cultural anthropology, I would often have occasion to quote in lectures passages of older texts that needed updating (e.g., I would change 'mankind' to 'humanity') or to gently correct inappropriate language (e.g., I would explain on student papers why 'primitive' and 'Oriental' aren't used now in anthropology). If I am reading aloud a children's book that contains the term 'Eskimo,' can't I just say "we don't use that term any more; let's make it 'Inuit'." These days it seems as if people want to hide what makes us uncomfortable or embarrassed.

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Art is transcendent. Politics is debased. We need to keep them separate.

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A beautiful book or a beautiful story is a rare thing. Our young have not read many if any, so they simply do not know the flavor of delight. Oh Taste and See. Banned beauty is most beautiful of all. Good teachers whisper the names of good books to their best students. I certainly do.

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“None of this is to say that the inequities of our time can’t be addressed by other means—through economics and elections, through debate and compromise.”

That’s the key point! All the fretting about Dr. Seuss and corporate workshops uncovering participants’ own ‘white supremist’ thinking are really diversions from the hard work of actually changing police practices and fashioning a more equitable economy.

I classify these type of narrow-minded ‘leftists’ as reactionary idealists. They want to change literature (or condemn whole books) so they don’t reflect the sometimes primitive ideas of the times in which they were written. Is that supposed to erase bigotry and racism in the human species? Or does it merely disarm students from facing reality as adults? In the same vein, white people didn’t come out by the thousands in support of Black Lives Matter because they went to a corporate workshop on race. They responded to an unjustified killing they saw on TV, in their own living rooms, an object lesson in abuse.

Up until four years ago, white supremists meant the KKK, Nazis and far right militia groups not the original sin of being white. To most of us, it still does. A simple question: who do these woke people think they are?

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It also seems a bit overwrought. How can anyone be that worried about teenage bookworms becoming radicalized by an insufficiently progressive YA novel? I suspect that there weren't a lot of voracious readers (of books) present at the Capitol riot. I doubt we'll be hearing about Derek Chauvin's penchant for problematic nineteenth-century literature at his trial.

I'm anti-moral-panic, but if we want to have a moral panic about something, it seems like Twitter, Facebook, and cable news¹ would be the better candidates---not books that are likely to have AT BEST a few hundred thousand mostly introverted, contemplative readers.

We're engaging in censorship and speech-policing in areas where doing so won't even have much of an impact and where the cultural value is often at its apogee. Dismantling Facebook would, probably, yield some social good, and the direct loss would be nearly zero, seeing as Facebook content is about as valuable as a Denham's Dentifrice ad. Even then, I'm still opposed to government censorship because of externalities, unintended consequences, precedents, etc. But to censor books, where the cost of a "problematic book" is so low and the potential cultural and intellectual value of books is so high is, to me, doubly wrong.

The Chicago Library decision is especially disappointing. Librarians tend to be about as absolutist as one can be on free speech: consider anti-porn filters and opposition to Bush-era spying. That even they are caving to this neoteric ideology is unfortunate.

¹Especially right-wing cable news: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001/oso-9780190923624

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Common humanity with common pain, joy, loss, fear, love, death, justice, injustice, rage, history... Has no currency under the regime of grievance

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Why for the love of God do you live in Portland?

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"Is this frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm, how we’ll correct current disparities and historical wrongs?"

There is less an expansion of the definition of "harm," than a rejection of Western culture's acceptance/valorization of suffering as necessary and redemptive.

Western culture is grounded in part in the notion that suffering/harm has beneficial effects, and is necessary for advancement. As the culture rejects Abrahamic conceptions of the world, e.g., a creator deity with a plan that must be obeyed even if suffering ensues as a result of obedience, people are re-evaluating their understanding of harm/suffering. People no longer see themselves as broken/fallen creatures who need to atone for their brokenness by conforming to a supernatural blueprint (and accepting suffering/harm as the price they must pay). A Buddhist understanding is emerging, where the priority is on acting with compassion and not obeying a divine plan.

To some people, this prioritizing of compassion will appear as an expanding definition of harm, whereby certain actions (and their associated suffering/harm) are now viewed differently. What was once understood as harmful, but redemptive (with redemption mitigating the harm), is now viewed as straight up harm.

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Nguyen's family came to America because they were fleeing the victory of people who were (legitimately) anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist--abd were also murderous dictators. Life's complicated.

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