THE LANGUAGE POLICE

How can they do this?

The first question to ask those who seek to sanitize America's textbooks and achievement tests is what they hope to achieve thereby. The answer generally given is to raise students' self-esteem, to prevent them from developing bad habits, to avoid distracting them (and thus lowering their performance) on tests. Or, as Diane Ravitch puts it (referring to guidelines from the National Evaluation Service, an independent testing company):

The next question is whether it works. The answer to that has to be a resounding "No!" American students are influenced during their development by many things besides the textbooks they use: interactions with parents and friends, television news, television drama, radio programs, movies, the Internet, and of course all the other books they encounter. Indeed, the case can be made (and Diane Ravitch makes it) that "sanitized" (read: Bowdlerized) textbooks have less influence than they might, simply because they are less interesting than the unexpurgated variety. Also, competition must be considered. America is not the only country in the world. Its quality of life, perhaps even its survival, depends on the quality of its citizens. We diminish their minds at our great peril.

But let's turn to the question of how this claimed protection is being achieved; that is, what are these forbidden words and works? I've touched on them in my review. In general, they are those which purportedly

• show men as superior to women (stronger, smarter, more active, better at leadership)
• put men and women in stereotypical roles (men as breadwinners, women as housewives)
• describe older people as infirm or limited in any way
• portray crime, or any sort of disobedience by children
• exclude either sex or any racial or ethnic group, or present it in unequal numbers
• denigrate any religion, or suggest that homosexuality is not abnormal
• demonstrate a "regional bias" by mentioning place names
• touch on death, violence, war, sexual activity, drugs, or alcohol
• discuss evolution as an accepted fact

This does not convey the full absurdity of the practice. To do that, I must provide a few of the examples of content decisions by a "bias and sensitivity review panel" which the author provides in the book. She was involved in the first six because she sat on the committee that previously had selected those stories for a fourth-grade text.

• A story about a blind man climbing Mount McKinley was rejected for two reasons: by portraying the achievement as noteworthy, it suggests that blind persons are more limited than sighted people; and the mention of mountain-climbing injects a regional bias, which is bad because some have no experience of mountains. (Page 10)
• One of Aesop's fables has Mister Fox tricking Mistress Crow by flattery. This was questioned as gender bias: it shows the male as clever, while the female is vain and foolish. In this case, the fable was kept, but only because Ravitch's committee changed it so Mistress Fox was the flatterer of Master Crow. (Page 11)
• Gutzon Borglum's biographical sketch was deleted because his creation, the presidents' busts on Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, offends the Lakota people. (Page 12)
• A story about growing up in ancient Egypt did not make the grade because it showed class distinctions: some people lived in palaces, some in hovels. (Page 13)
• The "B&S panel"1 objected to a story about how owls hunt rodents at night — not because of the description of predation, as you might expect, but because owls are taboo to the Navajo. One member of the panel was a Native American. Another added that owls are associated with death in some cultures: a second reason to strike the story. (Page 16)
• An inspiring story about how Mary McLeod Bethune started a school for African American girls in Florida early in the Twentieth Century disturbed the panel because Ms. Bethune was divorced, and for several other equally nonsensical reasons. (Page 17)
• In 1982, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned as "racist trash" — by the Mark Twain Intermediate School of Fairfax County, Virginia. (Page 80)
• The Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC) managed to rate John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain Does It Again as "racist, sexist, materialist, individualist, conformist, and escapist."2 (Page 85)
• The Indianapolis school board objected in 1973 to any stories that contained the word "hate". (Page hatey-hate — I mean, 88.)
• A California group, the Standing Committee to Review Textbooks from a Multicultural Perspective, decided in 1974 that phrases like "the deputy's face darkened", "the afternoon turned black", and "it's going to be a black winter" smacked of racism.3 (Page 89)
• The sentence "A scientific panel says fossil fuels are the main culprit in Earth's heating up" was cut in 2002 from a science textbook intended for Texas. The editors' comment: "We'd never be adopted in Texas." (Pages 110-111)

Finally, to complete the picture, here is a selection of words from the list the author provides as part of Appendix 1, along with the reasons for suppressing them, suggested alternatives (if any), and my sometimes irreverent comments.

In addition to the facts that the great majority of these words are quite innocuous, that some have legitimate specific uses (e.g. "Longshoreman"), and that many have no good substitutes (but only circumlocutions), note the guidelines' inherent contradictions. For example, "black" is excluded as a description of a person of African descent; yet, for the ethnocentric term "swarthy", we are told to use "black". True, the former proscription refers to "black" as a noun, but it's commonly used as an adjective for the same purpose (e.g. "black man") so I submit that the contradiction remains.

Note too the failure of the guideline writers' imagination or diligence (or both.) If "swarthy" is bad, what about "dusky complexion"? If "polo", "regatta", and "yacht" are elitist because they suggest wealthy status, what about terms like magnate, plutocrat, tycoon? What, for that matter, of "millionaire" and "billionaire"? What about castle, country estate, mansion, penthouse, palace? What about events in which few but wealthy people take part — events like "fancy dress ball", "gala reception", "soiree"5, "steeplechase"? If "papoose" demeans Native Americans, what about "squaw" or "wampum"? And why should "huts", a word of Germanic origin, be banned as ethnocentric, when terms like "hogans" and "tepees" and "yurts" are not?

Probably the most pernicious of all is the implicit assumption that all of history must be portrayed as just like the idealized vision of today's United States. What possible benefit could there be in suppressing the truth that people of yesteryear lived very differently, e.g. that ancient Egypt had extreme wealth and extreme poverty side by side? The effect must surely be to stifle critical analysis; and the thought that this might be the desired outcome is loathsome in the extreme.

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This page was last modified on 15 July 2024.