The Association for Library Services for Children (ALSC) recently announced that the Laura Ingalls Wilder award would be renamed to Children’s Literature Legacy Award on the basis that Wilder, who lived and wrote in the 19th century, used language which today is considered insensitive to minorities. That’s code for racism.
According to Mary Voors, the unanimous board meeting vote “was greeted by a standing ovation by the audience in attendance.” The news has been applauded by progressives all over the country.
Little House on the Prairie
In case you don’t know who Wilder is, she is one of America’s most beloved and read authors due to her classic series of children’s novels Little House on the Prairie, which has also been rendered into an equally famous TV-series starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert.
And until five minutes ago she was a feminist hero proving that women could be successful authors too. But with a pen stroke, progressives have now wiped her from history as “haram” – forbidden.
Unequal standards
By insisting on always judging historical figures to the standards of the current year one is doomed to wipe the history books clean, which in one sense is what the progressive project is all about.
There has been quite the uproar over Wilder’s depictions of Native Americans and Blacks, like this line from the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie, which the publisher later changed: “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” Nevertheless, they do not apply this standard equally. Albert Einstein, for instance, was recently scorned for having written racist remarks about Chinese people in his diary on his travels in Asia. Curiously, however, no-one insisted on boycotting the usage of GPS, which relies heavily on Einstein’s theory of relativity.
National Geographic recently did the woke thing of having a historian sift through their archives for racist material, and sure enough: back in 1916 they had an article which stated that Australian aboriginals were “savages” who “rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.” Did National Geographic do the progressive thing by erasing itself from history and shutting its doors? Nope, still here.
Hold them to their own standards
At best you will hear conservatives complain about progressives being hypocritical, but that is a mistake. It makes the grievous error of presuming that progressives have principles. They don’t. They act on emotion, which means that they allow their sense of life to make decisions for them – and history has shown that the creatures that inhabit the unconscious are often up to no good.
The correct way to deal with their emotionalism is to not only call out their hypocrisy but to demand consistency. If they think that people living in another era should be erased from history simply for not living up to their luxury standards, then demand that they give up all the positives produced by these historic figures.
History is brimming with geniuses and contributors to the world who have made statements or held views that are not acceptable today. Demand that they stop using their computers, turn of their lights, hand in all their iPhones and cars and all the product of this evil white racist civilization that they hate so much.
It is not acceptable to appropriate the fruits of historical figures while spitting on them and demanding that they be erased from history as moral degenerates. Either you accept them – warts and all – or you must throw out everything, including the parts that you like and take for granted such things as industrial farming and antibiotics.
