I’m not black. I can’t speak to the experience of being black and reading this book and seeing the painful history of your people transformed into pretty scenery. Still, I tried to imagine an analagous situation for myself. What if there was a classic novel, let’s call it Edelweiss, a sweeping romance set against the backdrop of the Holocaust, that followed the story of Ilse Koch, a headstrong German girl caught in a love triangle between a high-ranking Nazi official and a bottom-rung SS officer. And Edelweiss is a LOT of girls’ favorite romance growing up. “How could Ilse ever love Herman Goebbels when Franz Heydrich is such a hot, banter-y BAD BOY for basically all 800 pages of the novel?” And there was a movie made out of this book in 1949 that won ALL THE ACADEMY AWARDS. And all throughout Edelweiss Jews are being killed (and gay people and Communists and dissidents). This is always in the background. Always. The most romantic scene in the book is when Franz confesses his love for Ilse at a picnic in a flowery field RIGHT NEXT TO AUSCHWITZ. There’s a poetic description of the crematorium smokestacks in the background. There is nothing critical about the Holocaust in the novel. Genocide is treated as backdrop.
Gone With the Wind, anyone? No?
I know people love and CHAMPION the LITTLE HOUSE books. Not me. Not anymore — I can’t. If you go back and read them, Wilder translates her childhood terror of the Other into something that echoes down through the ages for us: Savage. Redskin. Rampaging. Evil. Bloodthirsty. Wild. Wrong. Much like the ongoing argument for keeping the Washington Redskin’s name, this is something inflammatory for a lot of people who have love-love-loved this series all their lives, and I don’t fault them for that love. But, there’s also really nothing redeeming about Wilders’ descriptions. Nothing. And, childhood is where we begin to grow our prejudices and our beliefs, and who we are growing up to be is too important to give away to a clumsy gardener
I feel the same way about a lot of the missionary books I read as a kid – good, clean reading that all the Common Sense Media people would be all over. But, nope, nope, nope. I loved A HOME FOR SU-LAN – but her home was with Caucasian people who, of course, extracted from her her home, her culture and her people – and in return for that theft, gave her Christianity which, I’m sorry to say, is a fairly useless gift outside of the context of her whole life and her whole world. Did they HAVE TO take away everything that made her Chinese, in order for Divinity to find her? Really? Untold numbers of Chinese Christians are now confused. The phrase “Fuzzy Wuzzy Land” was actually used in a book I read as a child, and they meant Africa, people. An entire continent of people reduced to a cutesy little wordplay where the darkies are carefree and their hair is fuzzy, and don’t you want to rub their heads and bring them loincloths and Christianity, promptly? NU-UH.
Childhood: too important to give away to bad books.
Institutions. “It’s always been that way.” It’s “an old book, we have to consider the context of the time.” “It’s been our football franchise for eighty years.”
Unfortunately, wrong + time ≠ okay. We cannot grandfather in racism simply because it was racism from a long time ago… can we?
This is what we’re asking.
I love most about this piece that the author really explores WHAT is wrong with Gone With The Wind, and why. As always, the comments go on and on – and there are always some people who don’t want to think, and tell this writer to get over herself, but I think Kit Steinkellner is right to question herself, to turn over all the rocks in the little stream bed of her consciousness. How else are you going to know what all is hiding under there? The unexamined life is not worth living.