Book banning

[arewethereyet]

There's a podcast I follow (can't wait for new episodes) that did a whole series on racism in movies such as Gone With the Wind and Disney's Song of the South (which has been pulled from circulation).

I remember seeing SotS when I was a kid and the things I took notice of was that it blended cartoons and live action and it had lots of music.  

I think people should teach kids that when reading a book or watching a movie they need to be mindful of when it was written.  The difference in time is important to grasp.  They need to know not just the time setting of the story but the time that it was written.  Banning such things is not the way to go.

A key thing to note about SOTS is that it was Disney itself who locked that movie away out of shame and there are a lot of very good reasons for doing so, the least of which is that the book it's based on was nothing less than a white man's theft of black cultural stories that made him some money.  I think anyone who produced a work of art should be allowed to sequester it if they so choose.  It would be like Mark Twain being embarrassed by a book of his and pulling it from a publisher.

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Why does it bother you the book is written from the perspective of a white child?

It has to be written from someone's perspective.

Thank you for asking and it's a valid question.  For starters, Scout is a fantastic voice for a book, but probably not this book.  She's years ahead of women's rights but because of the time in which the novel was written, her voice and the tone of the book in regards to the real lives of black people in the south is extremely tame, so as not to offend anyone.  Lee can be excused for this but society has come a long way since then and even many books and films for children address important issues with more vigor.  In a way, I see the book as sort of two stories wedged together awkwardly; Scout's story and Tom's story (or perhaps Atticus's).

It's also impossible for us to see the book as a statement on racism when so little of the book actually addresses the topic because Scout is also dealing with questions of poverty, social niceties and friendship.  She's distracted from the most important issue of the book much of the time.  This works well with her story but does little to challenge views on racism.  And please understand that I view this book as a masterpiece, just not one that truly applies to the issue of racism.

I had one friend who criticized the book as "preachy".  He's an actual Alabamian and older than I am.  I rejected his criticism as misunderstanding the narrative and just focusing on key elements of melodrama in the book.

Another favorite author of mine is George Orwell and I still see the value of his books, 1984 and Animal Farm, as they relate to the nature of freedom and government, so I'm certainly not just opposed to books due to their age, but rather how well they address the issues for which they are selected.  I don't know what Harper Lee thought about her book being used to address racism; maybe she didn't like it herself or maybe she loved it.

Scout may have been what Harper Lee used to tell a story she was well familiar with.  After all, she was a white female child in the American South.