Censorship or rewriting ?

I agree @Henetha, the world is going mad, there are too many people being 'offended' by history. Surely best to not read this stuff if you don't like it, why should we change our history anyway, regardless of whether it offends, you can't change it, it's gone, passed, leave it alone.

Censorship by another name. Some unnamed person dictating what words/expressions are/are not permissible. It’s just like Winston’s job at the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in ‘1984’ isn’t it? Frightening.

I take it that the offending words will be banned in our language now as being offensive. Are we allowed to speak of the fat on bacon, meat or will be saying "trim the adipose tissue from the food". Will food labelling have to be changed to remove the fat content advice? Has Shakespeare's works been scrutinesed? Absolutely ridiculous.

I find David Walliams books deeply sexist, I have read both him and Dahl extensively to children and with regard to treatment of women Walliams is worse.

This is so sad. What happened to common sense.
It’s a slippery slope.
Those ‘who know best’ will be changing the bible, Shakespeare, etc, etc , the list is endless.
…… And yet we allow the internet to thrive with easy-ish access for children read & view to all sorts of dreadful things.

Who gets to decide that then? What money would you put on the tweets of those working in the publishing house being pure enough for scrutiny.

sorry will try and reproduce the image:

Moderation in all things: slightly adjusting text or images that are overtly racist, sexist, or encourage bullying dont belong in children literature IMO.

this illustration was in the original Charlie and the Chocolate factory. it was changed in the 1970's

[url=https://postimages.org/][img]https://i.postimg.cc/FKtvL5yn/Unknown.jpg[/img][/url]

Leave things be!

Censorship shouldn't be happening....

Censorship of anything should be an individual's choice. Next thing someone 'who knows best' will be dictating everything in our lives!

I’m surprised the new Google pixel add hasn’t been pulled.
In it AJ Adudu complains that with her old phone all you could see was her teeth.

So much depends on the director of a play like M of V though. The Al Pacino film version is very far from being anti-Semitic for instance, but in the hands of other directors it can be very much so - an illustrated book is very different.

Similarly, the reporting of this story is interesting. The emphasis shifts so much depending on who is talking about it. ‘The tractors can’t just be tractors who happen to be black’ is not strictly the case - originally they were ‘murderous, black-looking machines’, which is rather different. Changing that to ‘brutal-looking’ alters none of the sense, but removes any ambiguity surrounding racism. Similarly, Augustus is not described as ‘enormous’ instead of ‘fat’, but instead of ‘enormously fat’ . Admittedly neither is flattering, but it’s not meant to be. There is a difference, but again, none of the impact or sense of the original is lost.

I am not a fan of mollycoddling young adults, and think that (for example) trigger warnings on literary texts in universities is ridiculous, but children are different, and shifting the language slightly so that they don’t see upsetting phrases as normal can’t do any harm.

grumppa

To return to the M of V for a moment, the Christians come across as a pretty unpleasant bunch, and Shylock as more sinned against than sinning. As for Portia and racism, read the casket scene.

Agree. Nasty bunch of Christians.

To return to the M of V for a moment, the Christians come across as a pretty unpleasant bunch, and Shylock as more sinned against than sinning. As for Portia and racism, read the casket scene.

MerylStreep

I loved Trevor Phillips contribution to the debate.
He was talking about the fact that he’s been asked to remove the word black from the re- write of his Windrush book.
He said ^This has nothing to do with children, except the children who work in publishing houses who want everybody to know how lovely and compassionate they are^

He often nails it with a pithy comment.

I dont agree with everything that Trevor Phillips says but I always find his comments make me think and I enjoy his contributions to this kind of conversation.

I loved Trevor Phillips contribution to the debate.
He was talking about the fact that he’s been asked to remove the word black from the re- write of his Windrush book.
He said This has nothing to do with children, except the children who work in publishing houses who want everybody to know how lovely and compassionate they are

Callistemon21

Who decides this on behalf of us all?

To some extent it's public opinion. Some things don't need policing in the sense of being banned. In the unlikely event that I wanted to wear a T shirt (unlikely in itself 😉) with a golliwog on it, I would fully expect to get flak from people in general and children in particular.

Princess Michael wore the Blackamoor brooch and it was considered, rightly IMO, inappropriate, and she got a lot of bad press. Who would wear a fur coat, even if they wanted to? There are lots of things that people do and don't do because they don't want to risk the disapproval of others. I know it's not always enough, and that there are always going to be those who think it's clever not to care about public opinion, but most people want to fit in.

Having said that, probably that's what's happened here, and focus groups will have shown that people are less likely to want to read stories about fat people or 'gendered' Oompa Loompas to their children. To keep the sales figures up, the books need to change to fit in with those changing norms. I wasn't made racist by reading Little Black Mambo, but I wouldn't have read it to my own children - this is just more of the same, I think.

Who decides this on behalf of us all?

Do you think if you trawled through the tweets of those at the publishing house you would find only goodness? Who gets to decide that's what we need to be looking at.

I have to stop swearing.

NanKate

What about Billy Bunter the fat owl of the Remove?

He's enormous!

When I woke this morning I thought "Am I just a bit fat or am I now enormous?" I don't want to be enormous 😥
DH reassured me "You're pleasantly plump, dear".

Because handing that power to people you know nothing about is worse and always impacts minorities the most.

But we don't need to reproduce racist stereotypes. I really don't understand why there is such an issue with this?

I once, totally unwittingly, played a video at the end of term with a very short man in it. It was comedy. Probably not as 'PC' as it should have been, but it was a PG and I'd prescanned it for nudity/swearing. I was totally wrong. I had a little person in the class and when I saw his face at the end of the lesson, I realised how badly he'd been affected by it.

These images we aren't affected by, because they aren't of 'us', can deeply hurt others. So why would we do it? Because it's how it's always been done?

What about Billy Bunter the fat owl of the Remove?