#WritersCoffeeClub April 24 - When older novels use outdated or racist language, should they be edited for the modern world or left alone and viewed in context?
There's no universal "should" or "shouldn't" in all circumstances, and can smug white people please shut up omg
Honestly the "old books should never be edited under any circumstances whatsoever" and "that sanitizes history" arguments have some big "don't retire Confederate statues because how else will we remember history??!!!one" energy.
Hmm so how DO we remember history if the dedicated white supremacists who took up arms for slavery aren't looming on every major monument, gazing down at Black people? By sticking that worthless trash in dusty museums as shameful history, by educating people, and through plentiful photographic and historical documentation, that's how. You know, like the fact that these statues were mostly erected during the Jim Crow/Civil Rights era as tools of intimidation and a rallying point for white supremacists, not directly after the U.S. Civil War.
This idea that changing books is always wrong unless one is the actual author, or that history will somehow be forgotten unless everything is preserved in amber, is absolutist and intellectually dishonest. Very few responses go into the issue of prominence, for instance, that racist books deserve to be forgotten and not to be brought back and plastered in our faces over and over again. There are so many permutations and nuances that people forget about in their reflexive rush to censorship, which is disappointingly flat, boring thinking coming from people who purport to write and think about societies and people. The amount of mediocrity I have witnessed on this subject today gave me vicarious embarrassment, ugh.
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