There seems to me something disingenuous in the claim that it shouldn’t matter because no one is censoring anything.
The ALA is not some tiny fringe organization, and the logic behind this decision is not a bizarre aberration. Neither is it an unjustified extrapolation to think that some of the people who made or support the decision would also be likely to refrain from reading the books to their children, object to it being read to them at school, and, in the case of the librarians, silently strike it from the recommendation lists for young readers.
It isn’t necessary for the government to be jailing people with unpopular opinions for me to believe that the narrowing of the range of accepted views on college campuses is a problem. Similarly, it isn’t necessary for people to be burning Wilder’s books in the square for me to see this as indicative of a worrying cultural trend in which the salutary reassessment of our history has begun to cross the line into a shaming and shunning that is, ironically, thoroughly insensitive to historical realities.
Renaming this award is not a recognition of Wilder’s flaws. It is a statement that someone who holds the views she held is unworthy of being honored. If Wilder’s views had actually been those expressed by Ma in the books, I’d agree. But they weren’t. And it is concerning to me if the bar for deeming someone unworthy of being honored has now been set this low by a national organization filled with people who do have some role as cultural arbiters and who, perhaps more to the point, serve as an indication of a certain mindset that is hardly unique to the members of the ALA.
I’m not a relativist. I am perfectly comfortable saying that cultures and eras that are sensitive to diversity and respectful of human difference are, in that respect, superior to cultures and eras that aren’t. Neither should cultural or historic context always serve as sufficient mitigation. There are people who committed deeds and espoused views that were extreme even by the values of their time and place. There are also certain acts that are so shocking to our most basic sense of decency that the fact that it may have been the norm for a certain culture can’t meaningfully lessen the guilt of their perpetrators (I would consider someone like Christopher Columbus to fall into this category - I don’t think we need to change the name of Columbus, Ohio, but I’d get rid of Columbus Day). There is obviously going to be disagreement about where we draw these boundaries. But as I said in an earlier post, once we’re including a woman whose crimes are 1)relatively mild stereotyping, 2) writing a narrative of the American west that is less mindful of the perspectives of Native Americans than it should have been, 3)not explicitly condemning a truly vile opinion espoused by a character in a novel, I think things have gone too far in a way that does have potentially disturbing and destructive implications.
We can acknowledge the flaws of the past without writing off the people of the past.