Censorship or rewriting ?

GagaJo

It seems to me that some on this thread are skirting somewhat close to wishing for a return to the 'good old days' where rampant racism, anti semitism, sexism and downright bigotry were allowed and part of everyday life under the guise of freedom of speech.

A person telling a racist/rape/anti semitic joke is showing who they really are.

Dahl wrote racist and anti semitic caricatures because he was an anti semite and a racist. I don't want my grandchildren growing up thinking those attitudes are acceptable.

If we don't teach anti racism and we allow children to read racist/sexist books and watch it on TV/in movies, it becomes their reality. The reality of a 60/70/80 year old grandparent is very different to that of a 10 year old child. The books we read with them should reflect modern attitudes. Not a racist past.

It's not the case that people want a return to the "good old days" and I think that anyone telling racist etc jokes should not get away with it. One might lose a few friends in the process but would you still want to be friends with them?

We used to receive emails from someone we knew that were decidedly racist (this was since moving to France in 2009). My DH responded politely and said we didn't want to receive such emails. We never heard anything further and, if we saw him in the supermarket he would ignore us.

During the next two months our local cinema will be showing broadcasts from the Royal Ballet of Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty. These are considered by some people to be sexist. Do you think that they are? I can see where they are coming from but don't think that they should be cancelled/banned.

"The reality of a 60/70/80 year old grandparent is very different to that of a 10 year old child. The books we read with them should reflect modern attitudes. Not a racist past."

I take issue with this statement. I saw Disney cartoons, went to pantomimes and the circus, had a gollywog, read Grimms Fairy Tales etc etc. Because I am 76 does not mean that I still have the ideas/morals/opinions that I had when I was a child. Most of us change throughout our lives.

In the late 60s we had a Guyanan friend from whom we bought dope. He and we referred to certain others of the same skin colour using the playing card euphemism. It was common parlance then and we weren't being racist but the word fell out of use fairly quickly.

Times change and most of us move with the changes. That does not mean that we should obliterate everything that came before.

NanKate

My son writes children’s books for Penguin/Puffin. A couple of years ago he was given a ‘sensitive editor’ who absolutely watered down his fast moving adventure story. He was so upset and made a complaint that her edition of his book totally ruined it. He clearly got through to them how he felt and his usual editor took over and it was restored to its original form. What a relief for us all.

He says if great authors like Anthony Horowitz can be censored no one is safe.

I'm glad your son got his original work published.

If you were paid to look for ‘sensitive’ phrases and passages in books you would find them.

Bowdlerisation. I think it’s been done to get us to buy more books and scrap the “inappropriate” and “offensive” texts.
They should be as the author wrote them. They are of their time.
If the words are controversial then discuss it with the reader (or listener). If the language is not acceptable today, then they will not be read and we will move on.
Some of the proposed changes affect the literary devices Dahl used (eg ferocious female changed to ferocious woman) Some ruin the deliberately “naughty” language Dahl chose and which children love. Some changes make the previously colourful language just plain boring.
It’ll be self defeating anyway and probably speed up the decline in Dahl’s popularity.

My son writes children’s books for Penguin/Puffin. A couple of years ago he was given a ‘sensitive editor’ who absolutely watered down his fast moving adventure story. He was so upset and made a complaint that her edition of his book totally ruined it. He clearly got through to them how he felt and his usual editor took over and it was restored to its original form. What a relief for us all.

He says if great authors like Anthony Horowitz can be censored no one is safe.

Freedom of speech is essential in a civilised society.

And it is minorities that always always suffer the most when control of speech becomes acceptable.

Skydancer

My goodness...how quick to censor funny books but how slow to censor the disgusting and appalling stuff that many young people read on the internet.

I agree. The internet is more harmful to young minds than Dahl's books could ever be.

My goodness...how quick to censor funny books but how slow to censor the disgusting and appalling stuff that many young people read on the internet.

I've seen the autocorrect but I meant the book referred to in the post that crossed with this one. I'm not going to repeat the corrected word.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, when they were small, I used to get my children books from Letterbox Library as we lived in a very 'white' middle class town, and I wanted them to be aware, even at second hand, that there were children with different lifestyles from theirs. I knew I could trust the books not to be offensive (although I haven't seen them for a long time, and that may no longer be true - I don't know their stance on gender, for instance). They didn't push a political point of view at all - they just had very ordinary stories featuring children who were cared for, or who had two mums, or were dual heritage, or whatever. It wasn't always Daddy who went to work, and not everyone lived in large houses with gardens. Otherwise the stories were not about race or sexuality etc - they just normalised different lifestyles with no fuss or attempts to influence things.

I don't know anyone who reads every book they give their children before buying it, or who buys it then reads it to themselves before reading it to their children - life's too short.
It's reasonable, therefore, to assume that something on sale in the children's section of a mainstream bookshop will be suitable for children, surely? Wyllow that illustration is shocking! I would not have been happy for my children to have a book with that in it, so I'm pleased that someone censored it 20 years before they were born.

Roald Dhal is for quite young children, of an age when parents are likely to want to have an input into what is influencing children. I can't say I worried about mine reading RD, which they did at school, but that doesn't mean that there is nothing wrong with it, and I'm not going to defend it because I didn't pick up on problems at the time, like my own mother used to about Little Black Mambo. She's right that it didn't 'harm' me, but I didn't want my children reading that sort of thing. If this generation of parents don't want their kids reading about someone being 'enormously fat', or tractors being menacingly black-looking', that's fine with me.

We have been discussing Dahl here not Little Black Sambo which I have never read.
I dispute having words changed eg 'black' cloak. I wear black trousers sometimes. What do you suggest changing that to.
Your inference GagaJo that some of us are accepting racism/ antisemitism is not acceptable. You couldn't be more wrong in my case for reasons I don't wish to reveal.

AGAA4

Children don't learn sexism/racism from books. They learn it from people around them.
All my ACs and GCs have read what are now considered contentious books but it has been explained to them what is not acceptable.
All of them accept others
for who they are regardless of race, colour or creed as that is how they have been brought up. Not because someone has censored their reading.


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Yes. And I would posit, that people that think discrimination in a book is acceptable, have an attitude that those attitudes are OK.

Racism is a system. It is multi layered and entrenched. Which is why it is so hard to weed out.

If you're reading 'Little Black S**bo' to your children, you think it's acceptable. And even though you tell them that James in his class is lovely and invite him round for tea, you're participating in the entrenching of racist attitudes by reading the book with its discriminatory message.

Just don't buy the book if you think it's going to be offensive to you. There's probably millions of people who won't find it offensive. It's not rocket science!

Children don't learn sexism/racism from books. They learn it from people around them.
All my ACs and GCs have read what are now considered contentious books but it has been explained to them what is not acceptable.
All of them accept others
for who they are regardless of race, colour or creed as that is how they have been brought up. Not because someone has censored their reading.


.

Really? It would never cross my mind to read it for anything other than what it is.
Too much analysis and preparedness to interpret things in the worst possible way.
Or are you saying that only Jews fit that description? Wouldn’t mind betting there are many other religions or none to which the description could apply

Facing racist bullying in school, because it isn't addressed in society, isn't gentle in any way, shape or form.

I know of children who have self harmed because of it. Who have been pulled totally out of school, because the school weren't able to stop it.

Dealing with the inequalities of the world may be 'gentle' if you are a WASP family. It isn't if you're black or an ethnic minority.

Good that Rishi Sunak disapproved.What the ‘Woke’ people don’t understand is that reading things we no longer approve is the ideal opportunity to open a discussion with a child to say

‘I don’t think that was kind, do you?’
People just can’t go through sanitized lives - the world isn’t like that. Far better to prepare a child gently for difficult circumstances, that have them totally shocked and impotent to deal with adverse happenings

Rosina, it is the Dahl Foundation saying the books need to be changed.

Hardly nameless wreckers and spineless people.

From my point of view, spineless isn't allowing something that is unkind to an ethinic or religious group to stand, spineless is allowing discrimination and bigotry to continue.

I don't agree with any censorship. If you don't like it then don't read it. So sick of the snowflake marred culture.

It seems to me that some on this thread are skirting somewhat close to wishing for a return to the 'good old days' where rampant racism, anti semitism, sexism and downright bigotry were allowed and part of everyday life under the guise of freedom of speech.

A person telling a racist/rape/anti semitic joke is showing who they really are.

Dahl wrote racist and anti semitic caricatures because he was an anti semite and a racist. I don't want my grandchildren growing up thinking those attitudes are acceptable.

If we don't teach anti racism and we allow children to read racist/sexist books and watch it on TV/in movies, it becomes their reality. The reality of a 60/70/80 year old grandparent is very different to that of a 10 year old child. The books we read with them should reflect modern attitudes. Not a racist past.

I am so, so tired, almost to the point of despair, at the way that our society is being manipulated. People are cancelled, villified, trolled, careers are wrecked, and for what? An opinion that doesn't appear to be suffiiciently woke, for something that has happened years ago for which none of us living now can possibly be responsible, or for art and literature that was written in a different age and can only be viewed through the lens of history, but hopefully appreciated for it's beauty and significance. Who are these people who are picking over our civilisation and criticising everything ? I've yet to see a name or face that might enable those with a different opinion to question - and that is another really appalling situation, that the nameless wreckers seemingly cannot be questioned otherwise the questioner is cancelled . Some spineless people in the media and government are failing to stand up to this dangerous and increasing nightmare. I truly believe now, and I never thought to see this happen in our country, that we no longer have freedom of speech.

I also remember binning a book that was about a gang of Gypsy rats

NotSpaghetti

Ha ha Fanny yes!
I was really trying to say that I don't think we should change text but I am guilty of adding in an opinion about it which may be similar.
Then - as an afterthought I thought, maybe explaining is actually OK. 😇

Totally agree.

Explanation when needed is preferable to altering any authors words.

Ha ha Fanny yes!
I was really trying to say that I don't think we should change text but I am guilty of adding in an opinion about it which may be similar.
Then - as an afterthought I thought, maybe explaining is actually OK. 😇