by Nina Larbi ’22
Op-Ed Editor
During these past six months of social distancing, I have been obsessively revisiting my favorite childhood media, going through my old bookshelves and rediscovering kids’ cartoons. Rereading my trusty favorites with a new pair of eyes made me realize how many stories I once loved were actually terribly bigoted. Had I tried to read the “Narnia” series now, I would have put it down 10 pages into “The Horse and His Boy,” because I don’t want to read about the nice white boy and the bad brown people who are polytheistic.
Poor representation of marginalized groups in media isn’t just a problematic element to stories — it greatly impacts how they are consumed. Individual consumers have the right to refuse to read “1984” because of its sexism, or “To Kill a Mockingbird” because of its white savior complex, but rather than tacking on warnings telling audiences that “it was a product of its time,” we need to reconsider our literary canon and our discussions of how we approach media.
The literary classic genre is highly esteemed by a number of influential people and has been deemed to have had a significant cultural impact over time. For example, “Catcher in the Rye” is an American classic because it was one of the first mainstream novels to discuss the problems of adolescence. The people who decide its cultural influence are those with high socioeconomic status, and thus have the means for their voices to be heard. Publications like The New York Times also have a hand in determining literary tastes, decisions that are then corroborated or rejected by the upper class.
There are other “essential” media that are not of the 50-plus-year-old literary genre that may have been constructed by a wider audience, like the graphic novel series “Watchmen.” However, they did not rise to their status in a bias-free market. Western graphic novels like “Watchmen” have a very white and male audience, and the novel’s success was predicated on their tastes and prejudices. There are popular works now that have held their own for a handful of years, enough for socially distanced people like me to have gone back and revisited, like the children’s book series “Harry Potter” or “Percy Jackson,” but neither have existed for long enough to determine their relevance over time.
The lack of diversity in the bodies of individuals who decide the cultural value of books is why book lists are completely populated by a homogenous group of authors, save for the occasional Maya Angelou. Furthermore, the authors of the popular books among my classmates that were not assigned in classes were also overwhelmingly white and male, except for the occasional white female author like J.K. Rowling who wrote the “Harry Potter” series.
Understanding that classical literature is not neutral is key to deconstructing it. But we also have to reexamine our own feelings towards the specific classical works that we like. Do I like this because it’s nostalgic? Or do I think the message is poignant? If you enjoy reading “1984,” you can still like it, but you have to recognize and accept its sexism and understand that others may not want to read it because of that.
Because of the multiple factors that go into what we consider classical, for both ourselves and for society at large, what I consider to be good but problematic might not be worth it for someone else to read. Additionally, there are other books out there! Librarians across the country have been rewriting their book lists to replace classics containing prejudiced language with books that are written by a more diverse range of authors that are not as “problematic,” like on the School Library Journal’s website. Ultimately, it’s not bad to like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but recognizing a work’s faults and why others may not like it is crucial to understanding its place in society.