WORDS WITH MR. KAUMANS- KEVIN KAUMANS
How are you doing today, fellow readers? Me, I just read an interesting article last week that I’ve been dying to talk to you all about. You see, it’s no secret that in the past we as a society haven’t been as politically correct as we are today. While I enjoy dressing like a man from the nineteen-fifties, even I can acknowledge that media back then, especially books and movies, weren’t as welcoming and inclusive to everyone as they are today.
Obviously, the entertainment industry has progressed and now allows people from all paths of life to tell their stories. This is a good thing. I believe everyone should have a chance to try and become the next Stephen King Or Tolkien regardless of class or background. But could there be such a thing as being too progressive? What happens when we go so far as to rewrite someone’s work to make it socially acceptable by modern-day standards? Which brings us to today’s topic: Sensitivity Readers.
Recently, I read an article about Ronald Dahl, a famous British author known for his literature being directed towards children. The article talks about how sensitivity writers have been hired to edit the dead man’s works in order to make them “less offensive.” Now, I’m sure most of you reading this article can tell right away the flaws within this decision made by the publishers, which is the fact they’re reimagining the work of an author who can’t give his consent to do so.
On top of that I would like to add this question to the debate: Who gets to decide what to edit out of a dead author’s book because it might not be politically correct? No two people on this planet think the same; what one black person, for example, might find offensive, another black person might not. Same thing applies to gays, transgenders, disabled people, and any other minority group. So I’m curious as to just how these publishing companies are hiring people for these positions as sensitivity writers without being biased.
Besides that, if we keep censoring every book that was published in the past because of their wordings, how is that any different to a dictatorship? Would editing the words of people who are unable to say “no” not be infringing on freedom of speech? What about the phrase “learning from history”, is that not why we read old textbooks and novels? If we try to cover up the sordid nature of the past, how will our children know not to repeat what has already happened?
I get wanting the literary world to be as open and inclusive as possible, believe me, I do. I’m an autistic man who spent a lot of his early life isolated and finding comfort in the escapism of fiction. But changing the past to make it seem like there weren’t morally questionable things represented in literature isn’t going to make the world more accepting. Instead, it will make it more likely that those ideals will come back into literature and we won’t know what to look out for because all those books in the past that have those bigoted themes have been censored.
I was having a conversation about the topic of sensitivity readers to Dr. Armstrong, who pointed out that this method could theoretically be used to fight against books being banned, as sensitivity readers can edit a book to make it less likely to be targeted by concerned parents and the like. To this I want to say: If I was one of these authors, I would rather have the material I create questioned in terms of its morals than have someone unable to come up with original works themselves tell the world what my words do or don’t mean because they think they know my books more than I do.
