It’s Actually Fine to Not Read Racist Books

So I saw a headline about how we should read books that offend us, and I thought “wow that content is almost certainly going to annoy me, I should not click it.”

Reader, I clicked it.

The author, Brian Morton, and I agree on a lot, including the idea that books may contain offensive stuff (the example he uses is Edith Wharton’s anti-Semitism) at the same time they also contain beautiful writing and paradigm-shifting insight. We agree that the morality Overton window is constantly changing, and what seems okay in one social context can seem horrifyingly immoral in another social context. We agree that approaching a book with some knowledge and expectation of its upsetting / prejudicial content gives readers their best chance to engage with the text in a productive and thoughtful way.

Morton begins his piece with the story of a college student he meets on a train. This student began reading The House of Mirth, but found the anti-Semitism so off-putting that he threw the book away. As far as I can tell, the student wasn’t reading the book for a class. He was reading it for funsies. He stopped reading it because he didn’t feel like reading it anymore. There are more books in this world than any of us can possibly get through in our lifetimes, and I skip books for way pettier reasons than pervasive anti-Semitism, but WHATEVER, let’s go with it.

The passion for social justice that many students feel — a beautiful passion for social justice — leads them to be keenly aware of the distasteful opinions held by many writers of earlier generations. When they discover the anti-Semitism of Wharton or Dostoyevsky, the racism of Walt Whitman or Joseph Conrad, the sexism of Ernest Hemingway or Richard Wright, the class snobbery of E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, not all of them express their repugnance as dramatically as the student I talked to, but many perform an equivalent exercise, dumping the offending books into a trash basket in their imaginations.

Morton proposes that instead of thinking of those authors as time travelers to our time, we readers should think of ourselves as time travelers to theirs.

We’d know that nearly everyone we’d meet, even the best, most generous minds — rich or poor, male or female, white or black — would hold opinions that would be unacceptable today. We’d be informed of this in the contract we’d be required to sign, at the same time as we’d be given our inoculations and fitted for our period clothing — our hoop skirts, our waistcoats, our top hats.

Except that readers do not slough off our identities when we enter into a book, any more than we humans could slough off our identities in order to go a-time-traveling. Time travel is rather famously only fun for white guys. The differential hostility that a female reader vs a male reader encounters in Hemingway would not be resolved by popping both of them into a time machine to the waistcoat era.

Or hey, let’s run with the hoop skirts example. (The two genders: Hoop skirts and waistcoats.) I bet that as a white lady, I would be granted an appointment with Walt Whitman if I wrote him a nice letter. As a lady, maybe I would have to get someone to escort me, but I could probably get myself from the Deep South, where I live, up to New Jersey, where Walt Whitman lived. I probably wouldn’t get harassed or detained on the journey by law enforcement, or thrown into jail on charges that had less to do with my behavior than the color of my skin. So yeah! Totally! Me and Walt Whitman could have some lovely long chats in which I, a curious and knowledgeable woman, could discover how a great-hearted man like Walt Whitman could have believed that the intellectual inferiority of black and native people was so marked that it would lead naturally to their eventual extinctions. I wouldn’t be outraged or shocked! And because I wasn’t outraged or shocked, I would have space to learn a lot about Poetry.

I know that Morton doesn’t intend it that literally. I know he doesn’t mean we actually need to think through the logistics of getting an audience with Edith Wharton or whoever. What he wants is for everyone to perform this imaginative time travel in the mindset of a person for whom such travel would be safe, or even possible. He wants his students to forget about the ways their race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. situate them in relationship to the past and the present, and to proceed as if they belonged to a neutral race, gender, sexuality, class, etc.

But there is no neutral. We cannot make there be a neutral by wishing very badly that it existed. We cannot make unmarked mean neutral no matter how hard we are white men.

I read The Sun Also Rises when it was assigned to me in college. I found the book’s sexism intensely off-putting. If I had been reading it for pleasure, I would have stopped. If Morton had been my teacher, he’d probably have thought I was throwing The Sun Also Rises “into a trash basket in [my] imagination,” and he’d have been right. Maybe if I’d imaginatively time-traveled to the 1920s, instead of expecting Ernest Hemingway to time-travel to me, I could have engaged with the book more and gotten out of it.

I am not sure, though, of the moral justification for continually asking readers to engage thoughtfully with books that not only don’t engage thoughtfully with them, but exclude the very possibility of them as members of their audience. Books that not only exclude the possibility of me as a member of their audience, but that are actively, persistently hostile to me and people like me, and people I like.

(After we read The Sun Also Rises for that college class, we read Light in August and then Native Son. Recently I told a male colleague about this experience, reading Light in August and Native Son back to back. I said I got pretty burned out reading two woman-gets-hacked-apart books in a single fortnight. My colleague, who has read all of Faulkner and considers him to be the greatest writer in the English language, said, “Nobody gets hacked apart in Light in August.” This is a true anecdote from my real life, and not a metaphor for something.)

Morton again:

And maybe, without overlooking or forgetting about Wharton’s blind spots, we’d be able to appreciate the riches she had to offer — her aphoristic wit; her astonishingly well-wrought sentences; her subtle sense of how moral strength and weakness coexist in each of us; her criticisms of the cruelties of her historical moment, which are not unlike the cruelties of ours.

With anti-Semitic hate crimes on the rise, how many Edith Whartons do we find it reasonable to ask Jewish students to read for the sake of aphoristic wit? Did I learn less about the ability of a writer to “make the world more human” because I happened to read The Chosen instead of The House of Mirth in school?¹ How many times per semester do we find it reasonable for women’s hacked-apart bodies to teach us Great Truths about fictional men’s lives? How many times in the course of an education do we find it reasonable to ask black students to engage with white authors who use black trauma to teach lessons to a presumed white audience? (Light in August is a twofer!)

I am not asking for the Canon to be hacked apart, although I wouldn’t be the most mad about it if we had to tear that motherfucker down and start from scratch. I just wish that before Brian Morton busted out his laptop to be like but what if there were a way that students could more fully appreciate and rejoice in the status quo?, he had taken a minute to remember that criticism of a text’s ideological failings is itself an engagement with that text.

I wish he had considered that students’ reluctance to engage with a text might not be an intellectual exercise in their noble-but-sometimes-misguided quest for social justice. Instead, it might be that they are weary (I am so extremely fucking weary) of being asked to give their hearts to books that want to leave their bodies in pieces.