Banning Books From the Left

This story in the Washington Post today deals with a group of teachers who are asking that no one in their school district be allowed to assign To Kill a Mockingbird to their students.

Their argument is that the book, which in part deals with racism in the South in the 1930s, centers around white characters and the white savior, Atticus Finch, and does not deal realistically with black characters or allow black characters realistic agency. There's also the fact that the novel uses the n-word, though as I recall it's only used by "trashy" and bigoted characters. As I recall, Atticus mildly tells Scout not to use the word, at one point, because it's "common." (The classism of the book is not discussed.)

These are good points, and I can't help noticing that the defenders of the book in the article are all white. I do think Harper Lee's book appeals to white moderates, who were, after all, her intended audience. And having read Lee's sequel, Go Set a Watchman, I can't help reading back the reactionary politics of that book into Mockingbird. So I understand where these teachers are coming from, I guess is what I'm saying. And I certainly am not defending Lee's book, even though I loved it to pieces as a kid.

On the other hand, banning books is banning books. If they had wanted, as was their apparent first motive, to just removed the book from the required curriculum, I would have been with them 100%. Their point about how using a book by a black author which deals with racism would be a better approach -- that's a solid argument. 

Also, I don't think teachers should be forced to assign specific books. We have a thing here at our university where we assign a common text to all the freshmen students in our Comp II class, but we also allow teachers not to assign that text and sub in a different one. One year when the book assigned was an apologetic for Nazis (not the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but one like that one), I honestly could not teach it. Even thinking about teaching it made me queasy.

But they wanted to keep anyone in the school district from assigning the book in their classroom. The book can stay on the library shelf, they said, but no student should be forced to read it. (As a side note, I'd like to see anyone force a student to read anything. I mean, have these people met students?) That, I think, is a step too far. And I think the school district did the right thing -- the decision they made was that the book could be assigned, but no longer *had* to be assigned.

Anyway, it's a thoughtful piece, which I recommend if you have access to the Washington Post.

These two paragraphs encapsulate the issue:

“We profoundly question why we should read a book by a White author, in which Black characters are secondary, voiceless, meek, and two-dimensional,” Kuzmany of Kamiak said, according to a copy of her prepared remarks.

“I am standing against taking books out of the hands of our students for any reason,” Freemon of Mariner said, according to a copy of her prepared remarks. “There is not one novel that we teach at the high school that is not offensive to someone, in some capacity.”

 

Reading Ben Shapiro's Brainwashed

Honestly, I'm not sure I'm going to read all of this one. After three pages, I have already had my bait of Ben's strident screeching. But let's look at as much as we can stand.

For those of you who are blissfully ignorant of his existence, Ben Shapiro is the darling of the MAGA-American crowd. He is a former editor at Brietbart, and appears frequently on Fox News and posts his "discourse" on YouTube, explaining why trans people are mentally ill and Muslims are "radicalized" terrorists. In 2004, he published Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, which I'm wondering if anyone read past the title.

It was published by that stellar press, World Net Daily.

Let's have a look.

Brainwashed has not one, but two forwards, one written by the editor of World Net Daily, and the other by David Limbaugh, Rush's little brother. Both are empty stuffing. Ben is a brilliant young genius, what a clever toddler he is, what an important book this is. We'll skip over these.


Chapter One

Ben lays out the case for "brainwashing" by liberal universities.

First he attempts to prove that universities are liberal. He declares,

The vast majority of the professoriate is leftist. This is an uncontested fact.

What's his evidence for this? Ben at least includes his sources (1/4 of the book is sources) so I turn to the back of the book and discover that his "uncontested fact" is based on a single survey, done by the think tank National Center for Policy Analysis.  This think tank (now defunct) was funded by the Koch brothers and among other things worked to deny global warming.

The survey the NCPA ran had 151 respondents, from (as they put it)

professors and administrators in social science and liberal arts faculties at Ivy League universities 

and found that of this small sample, almost none of them selected George Bush as the best president in the past 40 years. (I know, I can't believe it either!)

Also, 57 percent admitted to being Democrats, while only 3 percent said they were Republicans. 20 percent said they were independents.

This is Ben's sole evidence for his "uncontested fact." Frankly, anyone with sense would stop reading right now.

Let's take it apart, shall we? The sample size is too small, and furthermore it's a biased sample. They surveyed only professors and administrators in the social sciences and the liberal arts -- social sciences are in the liberals arts, by the way, so I assume they're selected out for their ability to scare Conservatives.

No survey was done of business schools, and probably none of economics professors (some people think of economics as a liberal art, but since NCPA doesn't define what they mean by "liberal arts," it's hard to know if economics counts). No survey of science professors or math professors.

Also, we have no sample questions, and no link to the actual survey. As those who design surveys know, how a question is worded often influences its answer.

Also, the "survey" ends with this:

Critics point out that academics are all for diversity in the student population, but are against diversity of opinion on campuses.

Who are these critics? On what are they basing this conclusion? Where's their actual statement?

This is very shoddy work, especially since Ben is going to build an entire book on this dubious claim.

I'm sorry: This "uncontested fact."

Ben moves on from here to spout several more unsupported or badly supported claims: that Leftist professors don't give a balanced point of view in the classroom, but simply spout propaganda; that the "brainwashing" of students is extremely effective.

His evidence for this last? Students who came into a single universities in 2001 were 29.9% liberal and 20.7% conservative. This is based on a national survey of all university students in the USA. When they graduated, Ben says, they were 71% liberal and only 20 percent conservative. This, on the other hand, is based on the voting patterns of students at one university (UCLA) for one election (Bush v. Gore), evidence collected in 2000 -- an entire year before the results collected in the survey he is comparing the voting records to.

I can't believe Ben honestly believes this is an appropriate way to use evidence. I guess he's hoping his audience is too gullible to care?

But Ben doesn't need this evidence, he says! All the surveys support him! (He doesn't cite any.) Talk radio supports him!

Also, he has personal experience. When he went to UCLA, everyone was mean to him and the newspaper fired him -- for exposing Muslims, he claims, but again he cites no evidence. I suspect they fire him because of his crap research skills and his fundamental dishonesty.

His final evidence in this first chapter? An anonymous email from a professor who supports his brave truth-telling.

That's right. His readers support him in emails.


Chapter Two

Ben starts this chapter with a scandalous claim from a geography professor -- his geography professor, I assume -- who pointed out that truth is subjective, since we are all subjective beings. This is bunk, Ben declares. Of course universal truth exists! Of course evil exists!

Only a tiny bit from the professor seems to be a direct quotation. And, of course, this is being reported by Ben years after the lecture took place. Given that this is a geography class, I suspect what was actually said had more to do with how maps were drawn than with whether babies are murdered (Ben's go-to example, always -- he's a fetus-fetishizer).

Ben goes on to claim that this moral relativism permeates universities. Again, he bases this claim on dubious evidence -- comments by a few professors, and a single poll which found that 73% of students think their professors are moral relativists. This poll is no longer available, so I can't check how many students it surveyed or what they were actually asked.

He goes on to cite another shocking example -- his source an editorial that cites the same survey Ben cited above (in the very same language; I wonder if plagiarism is a moral wrong?) -- that "10 to 20% of his students refused to say that the Holocaust was wrong."

I went to the source. Here's what the editorial actually says, in its 4th paragraph, one in which he is arguing that students are moral relativists, just like their teachers:

Several years ago, a college professor in upstate New York reported that 10 percent to 20 percent of his students could not bring themselves to criticize the Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews. Some students expressed personal distaste for what the Nazis did.

"A college professor" "several years ago" "reported."

Again, this is appallingly scholarship.

More nonsense follows. Ben cites Peter Singer, another favorite boogeyman for the Right, a philosopher famous for saying newborns have no more moral right to exist than piglets do. Evil! Ben shrieks. This is evil!

He cites Paul Erlich, for the horrible crime of comparing the bombing of Hiroshima with the Holocaust. Evil! Ben shrieks. The Jews were innocent, those civilians in Japan...had to be killed, to save American lives.

What?

This is pretty much how Ben always argues, from what I know of his later work. He says something shocking, and usually ridiculous, and then supports it with "evidence" that has little or nothing to do with his claim.

I mean, let's look at that argument. The victims of the Holocaust were innocent. Okay, so far so good.

His claim that the civilians who died at Hiroshima are not equal to the victims of the Holocaust should, reason shows us, rest on the fact that those civilians were complicit some great crime: not innocent.

Instead, he says that they had to die, to protect the lives of American soldiers. Now this may or may not be true, but it doesn't work to refute his outrage over the comparison. In fact, the idea that the civilians "had to die" is exactly the argument that (pardon my Godwinning) Hitler used to murder six million Jews and another six million Poles, socialists, disabled people, Romani, and LGBT people (including trans people). Those 12 million had to be killed, to protect the Aryan nation.

Ben supplies several more, equally badly supported examples as "evidence" that professors are Leftist. For instance, in one of his classes, a professor played a rap song, and then tried to discuss whether censoring that song was a violation of the First Amendment.

(See, there's right and there's wrong, and if you disagree with MAGA Americans, obviously you're wrong. It's right to violate free speech, unless it's Ben's free speech you're violating, then it's wrong)


The Left, Ben concludes this chapter by stating, clearly exists in order to "debase morality."

That's all I can take for now. (This is another way Ben "wins" arguments. After you spend several hours refuting his first three sentences, you're really too exhausted to go on.)

Dead Tropes

So we are lying in bed, the kid and I, as we do on Sunday morning, not getting up, and the kid is ranting to me about her Sims adventures, as she is wont to do, and she is explaining how she can't get two of the characters married, due to some "glitch" I am not precisely following.

(I do not play Sims.)

Me: Can't they just live in sin?

The Kid:  Live in Sims?  They do live in Sims.  What--

Me:  No.  Live in sin.

The Kid: ---

Me:  Live in sin.  

The Kid:  What does that mean?

Wal-Mart, Target, Oh My

Here in Arkansas big signs festoon our world, explaining how Wal-Mart saves money for American families.

Some signs explain just how much money Wal-Mart saves American families -- this many dollars a year, or this many dollars per family since 1965, or this many total million dollars for the American family, blah blah blah.

These signs make me want to throw rocks, given that I have students who work at Wal-Mart, like the student in my office yesterday, or the one last year.  Wal-Mart signs them on, works them, usually, 30-35 hours a week -- refusing to work around their school hours (the one last night was telling me how she could not make it to our night class, despite the fact that she was not supposed to have to work nights, because her supervisor wanted her to stay late to do inventory.   "I'm getting paid for the extra hours, but..."  "Did you tell her you had class?"  "Yes, but she says I either stay or I quit.") or students who are worked at physically destructive jobs until their bodies are wrecked and then fired when they can't do the job anymore, told they "can't" file workman's comp -- of course they don't have health insurance, they can't afford it on Wal-Mart wages -- and set adrift. 

Not to mention this, which is even worse in my mind.  Wal-Mart might be selling us cheaper - slightly cheaper -- milk and blue jeans, though frankly their blue jeans are crap; but they are doing it by destroying the country.  They're wrecking the infrastructure.  What good are cheap jeans when no one has a job, when all the chickens are raised by farms like Tyson farms, when everyone's wages are so low that the government (that would be, in fact, you and me, folks) has to step in to provide supplemental health insurance and food stamps and housing?

You realize, in fact, that you and I, in the form of taxes, are making it possible for Wal-Mart to pay those low wages?  That, in fact, our taxes are a kind of grant to the Wal-Mart heirs?  Talk about socialism!

I used to shop at Target, so that I could avoid giving any money to the Wall...but now!  Now Target has started giving its money to Anti-Gay candidates.  So how can I keep giving my money to them?

So now where can I shop?

It's not like Pork Smith has any independent stores left, thanks to the Wal.  

I guess I shop online.

George Orwell

It always cracks me up when the Right Wing quotes George Orwell (pontifically), assuming he would have been at their tea-bagging parties or voting Republican along with them. None of them seem to have actually read Road to Wigan Pier, or to have noticed he was a socialist.

I guess I should not be surprised. If they could read, they'd be Leftists.

Anyway, I was reading this, prepping the deep background for one of my 1213 classes, and came across this passage. Orwell is writing about his days at boarding school.

There was a boy named Johnny Hale who for some months oppressed me horribly. He was a big, powerful, coarsely handsome boy with a very red face and curly black hair, who was forever twisting somebody's arm, wringing somebody's ear, flogging somebody with a riding-crop (he was a member of the Sixth Form), or performing prodigies of activity on the football field. Flip loved him (hence the fact he was habitually called by his Christian name) and Sambo commended him as a boy who ‘had character’ and ‘could keep order’. He was followed about by a group of toadies who nicknamed him Strong Man.
One day, when we were taking off our overcoats in the changing-room, Hale picked on me for some reason. I ‘answered him back’. Whereupon he gripped my wrist, twisted it round and bent my forearm back upon itself in a hideously painful way. I remember his handsome, jeering red face bearing down upon mine. He was, I think, older than I, besides being enormously stronger.

As he let go of me a terrible, wicked resolve formed itself in my heart. I would get back on him by hitting him when he did not expect it. It was a strategic moment, for the master who had been ‘taking’ the walk would be coming back almost immediately, and then there could be no fight. I let perhaps a minute go by, walked up to Hale with the most harmless air I could assume, and then, getting the weight of my body behind it, smashed my fist into his face. He was flung backwards by the blow, and some blood ran out of his mouth. His always sanguine face turned almost black with rage. Then he turned away to rinse his mouth at the wash-basins.

‘All right!’ he said to me between his teeth as the master led us away.

For days after this he followed me about, challenging me to fight. Although terrified out of my wits, I steadily refused to fight. I said that the blow in the face had served him right, and there was an end of it. Curiously enough he did not simply fall upon me there and then, which public opinion would probably have supported him in doing. So gradually the matter tailed off, and there was no fight.

Now, I had behaved wrongly, by my own code no less than his. To hit him unawares was wrong. But to refuse afterwards to fight knowing that if we fought we would beat me — that was far worse: it was cowardly. If I had refused because I disapproved of fighting, or because I genuinely felt the matter to be closed, it would have been all right; but I had refused merely because I was afraid. Even my revenge was made empty by that fact. I had struck the blow in a moment of mindless violence, deliberately not looking far ahead and merely determined to get my own back for once and damn the consequences. I had had time to realize that what I did was wrong, but it was the kind of crime from which you could get some satisfaction. Now all was nullified. There had been a sort of courage in the first act, but my subsequent cowardice had wiped it out.

The fact I hardly noticed was that though Hale formally challenged me to fight, he did not actually attack me. Indeed, after receiving that one blow he never oppressed me again. It was perhaps twenty years before I saw the significance of this. At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish. I did not see that in that case the weak have the right to make a different set of rules for themselves; because, even if such an idea had occurred to me, there was no one in my environment who could have confirmed me in it.

(Emphasis added.)