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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

The reason you’ve never heard of this accusation is because it was Babb who was wrongly “cancelled” soon after she wrote her novel. She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal.

Regardless, I think it’s odd you find something utterly unbelievable simply because you haven’t heard it until today. Surely the entire internet is full of true things that you, and I, and most people have never heard of? Not having heard a piece of information before doesn’t make it any less credible.

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Good points.

> She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal.

That's awful. :(

the original comment is itself perhaps over-confident in its accusation. as far as i can tell, the known facts about what materials steinbeck received of babb's are hazy. certainly seems suspicious though.

It's still illegal for a white woman to marry an Asian man if she's already married to a white man. Still awful. I'm just making a point that these social norms are pretty relative and if you don't have any underlying system of morals to judge them by, you'll probably just end up reinforcing whatever morals your own society already has, with no regard to their awfulness.

Also her leftist tie was derived from her marriage to a Chinese man:

""" Howe met his wife, a white woman named Sanora Babb, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry, but their marriage was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, after the law banning interracial marriage was abolished.[5][13] Due to the ban, the "morals clause" in Howe's studio contracts prohibited him from publicly acknowledging his marriage to Babb. They would not cohabit due to his traditional Chinese views, so they had separate apartments in the same building.[14]

During the early years of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Babb was blacklisted due to supposedly having Communist ties from her marriage to Howe; she moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from racial harassment.[5][15]

Howe raised his godson, producer and director Martin Fong after Fong arrived in the United States. """

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wong_Howe

That's so awful. It hurts to think about the pain she and her husband, let alone families like hers had to endure.

I'm sorry for my tone. I had no idea.

Don't be, we all are learning. Nothing was set in stone. Even words carved on stone can erode and change.

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