This was a comment on Vancouver librarians caught in the middle of the culture war by @zephyreks but I ended up writing so much I thought I’d make it a new post. Hope that is OK.
The term “culture war” is excessively very dismissive. The subjects that people take issue to here are matters of material well being.
People in the article and comments are using the word “ban” alot. I don’t think there is any request to “ban” anything. It is just the one library. When something is “banned” it is prohibited from all sources. After actually taking a look at the list of books I don’t think any of them should be removed from the collection on the basis of the complaints. I do think some of them could be re-shelved. But getting all worked up about a few random complaints that literally anyone can make because they are in a bad mood, and obliquely referring to nazis/holocaust is going way overboard.
I also don’t see that anyone is “caught in the middle” of anything. Some people made complaints. People are always complaining about any large organization. They dismissed the complaints and as far as I can tell, that was the end of it? I got very bored reading off topic commentary so maybe I missed something.
about the books
I was curious so I did some looking at the actual titles since the person who wrote this article didn’t have time I guess because they did so much interviewing ideologues instead. There are 3 themes in the target books.
theme 1: lgbt and sex positive books for young people
Looks like about 1/3 of the target works are pro-LGBT/sexpositive and seeking to explain this to some young audiences. I wasn’t familiar with Cory Silverberg so I looked up the amazon page for You Know, Sex:
In a bright graphic format featuring four dynamic middle schoolers, You Know, Sex grounds sex education in social justice, covering not only the big three of puberty—hormones, reproduction, and development—but also power, pleasure, and how to be a decent human being.
I added emphasis because… what a thing to complain about.
To me this book sounds perfectly nice. But whoever requests for it to be removed likely thinks it’ll cause kids to come to harm. Who knows what kinds of delusional thinking motivated the specific complaint. But it isn’t “culture war” because they are under the impression that this book will be dangerous physically and socially and spiritually.
theme 2: racist caricatures and other hate imagery in children’s books
Another 1/3 of the complaints are about children’s books depicting racist or hateful imagery. I think these complaints are legitimate. Books like this should be available for adults but not circulated to little kids! They are of historical interest, not entertainment.
I borrowed Asterix the Gladiator from the Internet Archive Library and flipped through it. Here is one of panels which is probably at issue. (I am not sure about the etiquette/politics of sharing this. I would consider feedback in the direction of not sharing racist material.) I have blurred out the actual caricature but described what is depicted in text. I put it in the spoiler. Summary: it’s exactly what you think it’ll be.
spoiler
This panel depicts a person with dark brown skin, a very small skull, eyes so close together that they touch and are crossed, a huge open mouth with giant red lips (larger than skull) and one tooth sticking out, wide nose, big ears, goofy body language.
I don’t care to actually read this so I don’t know what the plot is about. But I can say that flipping through it, the people with brown skin only come into view a few times in dozens of pages. They are not characters in the story, just devices the author occasionally employs. They are present 1-3 panels at a time.
They look to be in positions of servitude. They do not perform their jobs properly and are therefor deserving subjects of violence by the characters with pink skin. Many pages earlier, a masseurs with brown skin gives too deep a massage to a solider with pink skin. So the soldier beats him. The masseur’s boss complains: “You have no right to beat up my masseurs! They’re horribly expensive this season!” The most superficial joke being that the only reason not to beat the person with brown skin is the economic impact on some other person with pink skin. The person with brown skin has no lines and is depicted in a racist, caricatured way similar to the spoiler above. Except instead of being goofy he is big and strong. So strong he casually (and presumably accidentally) hurts the person with pink skin. Once he is punched so hard he flies across the room, he disappears from the story.
I remember when I was a kid, seeing this kind of thing. This series looks vaguely framiliar but there is a whole cannon of this shit. My parents did their best to raise me explicitly anti racist and I recognized the messaging as vile. I understood that it was communicating a generalized degradation and inhumanity related to perceived race. In both the presence (as objects) and their absence (as full characters). I remember being confused why people I thought of as “good” would have stuff like this lying around. But I am sure that it got into my head anyway. Sometimes really horrid stereotype illustrations I saw as a kid pop into my mind’s eye. I wish I didn’t have those in my brain because they are despicable. If an adult intentionally wishes to study hate lit it is different.
This is the kind of thing that teaches from a young age “black lives don’t matter”. Black people only involved as props, punchlines, animalistic, deserving subjects of violence etc.
There are a bazillion kids books that aren’t trash like this. I vote to move these to whatever the dewey decimal is for historical hate literature, in the adult section. Possibly in the Reference library to convey the seriousness. I didn’t investigate the other children’s books but it seems that they are all on a similar theme and not appropriate for kids.
theme 3: right wing nutjobs
The remaining 1/3 of the books are more recent publications which appear to be regressive shitty books full of lies. I know the Shrier book has been thoroughly widely debunked criticized rebuked. It is full of medical falsehoods and her own weird fantasies misrepresented as scientific. It primarily advocates for denial of health care to trans people. This is not “culture war”. She literally wants to seize control and manipulate the balance of chemicals in the bodies of other people. It is as material as you can get.
The other books by the likes of Beck, Ngo are certainly full of bullshit. Judging by the title and my understanding of the authors, they will probably be encouraging violence. I had never heard of Forbes before. The book is highly rated on amazon and the top rated review begins:
Fantastic book. As a supporter of those bands I found that the information in it is invaluable.
Emphasis added. Reviewer is a fan of white supremacist music and ideas. All the positive reviews are from people who are straight up white power jackasses.
I found this review on goodreads that I think is probably accurate:
This thing is f***ng nightmare. Read it for research on a project. It ended up being really valuable as a primary source, but if you’re not literally writing a book about white nationalist skinheads, I can’t imagine wanting to read the biased blathering of a bunch of racist boneheads reminiscing about their glory days.
This person also describes who there is value in the book even though the topic really sucks.
It seems like this book gives really shitty people good feelings about themselves. That sucks. When this kind of people feel good about themselves, they like to go around kicking the shit out of people who are just minding their own business. They form militias and murder. The reason someone was bothered by this book is likely because they know it can help stir the pot and encourage street violence. I know people who’ve been targeted by these douche bags. It’s serious.
This book costs about $200-300 to purchase. It should be in the reference library with all the other expensive books, not in circulation.
I think OP’s response to skimming a single Asterix comic is almost illustrative of how people ‘on the other side’ can so easily get their shit knotted up and wind up wanting to ban any and all books with rainbows in them or that acknowledge LBGT people exist - so I think that both those takes showing up in one place is a spot of fantastic irony.
Yeh. Right there. That’s the hallmark quote.
So early and up front, there are definitely huge problems with how Underzo illustrated black people. I think there’s very good arguments to be made for removing the comics including some of the more offensive racial caricatures from common circulation. However, OP is working a little too hard to be a little too outraged here.
A lot of this isn’t defense so much as context and the importance of it when engaging in critique from a position of good faith.
Every single group portrayed in the comics is caricatured. In the modern era, we have sensibilities that mean caricatures of minorities, and black people especially, are significantly more frowned upon than similar caricatures of ‘pale’ folks. I won’t dive into the ‘why’ around minstrel shows and shit, but it’s absolutely necessary to understand that is a very recent sensibility. That sort of portrayal could only come from deliberate prejudice today - but that is not the case in even the recent era these were made.
OP may have skimmed past, or even not have a cultural context to recognize that, the comics are also making fun of ‘gaulish’ and ‘roman’ features in similar fashion, or that the series did so towards all the other groups that the comics encountered. Nobody appeared on page without getting a few potshots sent their way.
Yes, in that specific comic the black characters played a very small part and were in a servile role - they were slaves. As actual romans had slaves and were callous and cruel towards them, so too the Romans in the comics. They are the villains, in case that was missed while skimming. The vast majority of the series takes place in Northern France during the roman occupation, so non-white folks are a pretty decided minority in that part of the world and in that era - and the cited scene takes place in some Roman vacation town IIRC, where again, nonwhite folks are very minority and very likely to be property.
While it doesn’t make the exact depictions OK, I think OP has definitely missed the fact that the practice of slavery and the power dynamics are being criticized there and that the Romans’ treatment of their subjects is not glorified - while OP is responding as if the Romans had been the good guys and we’re all supposed to be supportive and indoctrinated by how they treated the black folks in the comics. The gag about beating up masseuses is, for example, setting up the villains as villainous, and is not supposed to be a straightforward statement that the reader agrees with.
It doesn’t take that much work to pick that up.
So that OP is both refusing to read the books and is effectively skimming looking for outrage-bait, and then also going off on the existence of a series and a bunch of narrative they had to invent, while recognizing this from their childhood and pretending that they saw it in people’s houses and hated them for it, while it’s some sort of alt-right racist indoctrination leaflet…
If you’re going to pretend you’re better than the people calling for kids books to be banned “because they ‘ask people to be decent’” then actually be better. Don’t write essays supporting and decrying various books if you’re unwilling to put the bare modicum of effort into understanding the criticisms and the context behind them. If you don’t know - you don’t know. You don’t need to gild the lily with fiction and personal invective. You certainly should be above jumping to that sort of wild personal judgement, and even prejudice, based on something you have near-zero understanding of.
Even the very well-educated and and ‘expert’ people who are calling for some Asterix comics to be removed from circulation / libraries are doing so because the caricatures are no longer appropriate to modern sensibilities. No one with any familiarity with them, even who wants those books removed from circulation, is subscribing to any small fraction of what OP has, effectively, made up about them based on looking at maybe 20 panels from a ~50 page book.
The caricatures are super racist.
The actual content is not some wild racist indoctrination material, OP somehow wound up rooting for the bad guys while skimming, and seems to think that everyone else would get brought along similar.