Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature

Jonah Winter's article, "Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature," published on 5 February 2024 in The Wall Street Journal, is a sad story of the state of publishing today.

"Children's publishers now live in fear of these activists, terrified of showing up on their radar with a book or author that could be deemed “problematic”—meaning out of alignment with the activists' puritanical code. According to that code, an author's identity must match a book's subject matter. Further, certain books can harm children, the activists believe, and books they deem harmful must be removed. If that sounds similar to the right-wing activists' mission, it's because it is. The only difference is that while right-wing activists merely want certain books removed from particular schools, left-wing activists want the books they target annihilated."

The full article is here, but probably behind a paywall. Jonah Winter has also done a picture book for children (with artist Gary Kelley) on a related topic. It's called Banned Book. Worth a look, and worth supporting.

1 comment:

  1. Further to Winter's point -- there's an important difference in that right-way activism is sporadic and mostly enacted by people with little standing (parents, occasional pastors), while the left-wing activists are the librarians, the publishers' consultants, etc.

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