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.
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.
ReplyDeleteThere is an easy way to read almost all paywalled articles, just save link at archive.ph and enjoy full version - https://archive.ph/2agLi !
ReplyDelete