Scholastic Books to Maggie Tokuda-Hall — Delete Racism References…

Another Wow…!! Silencing authors… Another company attempting to. Again… (this started in 2022, I’m late to the party)

Is this really how we want to continue presenting America to the world…? A country of racists who want to continue down the path of belittling other races? Putting the ‘less desirables’ behind the curtain and to keep quiet…???

Publisher Scholastic Books asked Maggie Tokuda-Hall to remove all of the Racism references throughout the book. The book is called “Love in the Library”. It is a book about a couple at a Japanese internment camp (Maggie’s grandparents). After being relocated to Minidoka, a prison camp in Idaho, Tama (Maggies’ grandmother) takes a job in the camp’s library……

It is about the sad period when Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put away like cattle in WWII. This round up was more than fear of Japanese war sympathizers or war spies. This boiled down to racial discrimination due to them being, Japanese… Sounds, mmm, a bit like how our Indigenous Americans were put out to pasture on Federal reservations — with their land and history taken away…

At any rate, Maggie was writing about this time period with her Japanese American parents and others. Scholastic, for one example, cut out one whole paragraph and removed the word “racism” from the author’s note. (This is from the story: Bay Area author refuses Scholastic’s suggested revision to cut ‘racism’ references in book/.)

Maggie said ‘No’ to Scholastic because of the company wanting to cut out historical content — wanting to only have one story and not a multi-aspect story about life at that time.

And that affects today as well, on how others write books and papers when it comes to racial disparity.

How does many of these boards and so many people think life should be? Completely whitewashed as if nothing bad ever happened…?

That there is only one race to write or think about…?

Life is history. And history is about everything. You cannot cut out pieces here and there just to make it sound better for one group of people.

Life is everyone, everywhere.

This book is no longer going to be for students after Maggie turned down Scholastic.

This is honor and integrity on Maggies’ part. I stand with her.

What are companies afraid of…? I am with Maggie here — companies attempting to squelch:

· Black Feminism; queer studies; Black Lives Matter activism; etc., etc., etc.

What are so many American parents afraid of…?

· The SAME BLASTED THINGS. It is this crazy fear of a woke culture…. And this noise likely stems from a MINORITY of loud voices, while the majority of parents who applaud writers like Maggie are somewhat silent. This only hurts their children from learning what is going on in the world, from news of today and news, more importantly — from yesterday or years ago…

Very sad. Very sad.

The book is a bit below my grade level, but, I still bought it. 40 pages.

Wait, here is another tidbit, a piece from the New York Times May 6, 2023 talking about another publisher, Studies Weekly, doing the same crazy bit but in regards to wiping out Rosa Parks and what she was standing up for (or sitting down):

“Similar controversies have arisen recently around efforts to remove discussions of racism from school textbooks. One textbook publisher, Studies Weekly, faced criticism after it revised an elementary school textbook so that Rosa Parks’s story no longer included references to segregation or race.”

Tags: Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Scholastic Books, Love in the Library, Japanese-American, internment camps, incarceration camp, wwii, publisher, Rosa Parks, Studies Weekly