By Steve BermanWhat the hell is wrong with these people?
There’s no nook or cranny in society that can hide from the woke scolds. My kids love to read Dav Pilkey, author of “Captain Underpants” and about ten bajillion “Dog Man” comic-style books. We’re talking high comedy for fourth and fifth-graders: Toilet humor, farts, lunch ladies, cafeteria food, and tighty-whitey wearing school principals. But the scolds (my friend Erick Erickson calls them Woke-O-Haram) cannot leave any aspect of life alone.
Pilkey was forced to issue an apology for his 2010 book “The Adventures of Ook and Gluk,” over “harmful racial stereotypes” about Asians, who are the latest rock-stars of the race identity political movement targeting white people.
I swear, these people would make God apologize for the sunrise because its red colors contain a passive racist message.
Here’s the summary courtesy of the AJC:
The book follows a pair of friends who travel from 500,001 B.C. to 2222, where they meet a martial arts instructor who teaches them kung fu and they learn principles found in Chinese philosophy.
Scholastic said it had removed the book from its websites, stopped processing orders for it and sought a return of all inventory. “We will take steps to inform schools and libraries who may still have this title in circulation of our decision to withdraw it from publication,” the publisher said in a statement.
This is absurd and ridiculous. It’s leading me to re-evaluate my reaction to the entire Dr. Seuss idiocy. The two words I see linking Seuss and Pilkey here are “casual racism.” Erick Erickson wrote a few weeks ago about the National Education Association’s indoctrination plan, straight out of Woke-O-Haram, quoting The Washington Post’s Philip Bump:
The answer, of course, is people who perceive criticism of the casual racism of the past as criticism of their own behavior or as a reminder of how the world around them is changing. It’s not that some Dr. Seuss books are being taken out of rotation. It’s that Seuss is a benchmark for a particular sort of American upbringing. Calling out Seuss’s — infrequent! — racist imagery is therefore an attack on that view of American identity. [bold mine]
So if your (my) kids liked Dr. Seuss, Dav Pilkey or even read “Curious George,” they are unwittingly being indoctrinated into white supremacist, “casual racist” culture. This isn’t just an innocent publisher making a decision to limit publication of a few books that contained old, actual stereotypical racist imagery (as Seuss did). It’s now going back into history, up to the recent past, with living authors and getting publishers to cleanse every corner of work to conform to the new “woke” critical race theory.
White people are being fenced in by an ever-shrinking reservation they are allowed to claim as “culture,” and according to the Smithsonian, it’s the essence of “whiteness.”
Whiteness (and its accepted normality) also exist as everyday microaggressions toward people of color. Acts of microaggressions include verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults toward nonwhites. Whether intentional or not, these attitudes communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages.
The act of writing kids graphic novels while white is casually microaggressive toward nonwhites. Therefore no kid should ever read anything written by a white author.
This is the goal of the woke scolds. The line between satire and reality no longer exists. These people are nuts.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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