Scholastic, and a Faustian Bargain

I agree with Scholastic. As much as I am glad that Russians such as myself are not treated any differently in US today, racism was not the most direct cause of Japanese internment, Japan attacking US was. German and Italian Americans were also affected by EO 9066. It's fair to say that racism was one factor that contributed to meager public pushback and disproportionate practical impact on Japanese Americans.

Claims that immigration enforcement, police shootings, voter ID laws or food deserts are the same as Japanese internment are unsubstantiated fabrications. Food deserts are part supply and demand due to unhealthy local tastes, part impracticality of running full supermarkets in high crime neighborhoods, part residents lacking time and money for cooking and part agricultural subsidies distorting prices. These issues are worth talking about, but it's not like anyone set out to make people obese based on race.

All in all, I want my children to be taught based on facts and sound analysis, not words of people carrying a hammer and determined to see everything as a nail. If adults want to read other kinds of books or buy it for their own children, sure.

“The word RACISM would be removed from the author’s note altogether” doesn’t seem like an honest way to summarize the proposed edit. They didn’t propose to edit out the frank descriptions of the trauma of Japanese internment, or the conclusion that it was inexcusable. They struck out an unrelated political rant about how Americans are all racist and various modern policies the author doesn’t like result from that. I guess the “everything is politics” meme has reached fixation in the author’s circles, but it’s baffling that the author would see “let’s not have an aside calling the readers racist over food deserts” as a Faustian bargain which fatally compromises her message.

Yet another instance of the right's complaints of censorship being projection. They were censoring and cancelling people before the term "cancel culture" existed.

Welp, time to order a dozen copies and seed the local Little Free Libraries...

....aaaaand it's sold out everywhere but amazon.

I'm still mad about Scholastic censoring His Dark Materials, one of my favorite books as a kid. If you read the censored passage it wasn't in any way offensive or inappropriate.

You used to be able to get an uncensored edition from Book Depository, but Amazon is shuttering it just a few years after buying it.