Woke Book Censors Strike Again!

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird will no longer be on the recommend reading list in Surrey schools. But rest assured, says Surrey school district communications director Ritinder Matthew: “We are not banning books”.

To Kill a Mockingbird was not the only book on the chopping block. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and In the Heat of the Night by John Ball will also be removed. Teachers will now need special permission from the principal to teach these titles in class.

You see, an “equity scan” – a concept which I am sure has a very solid foundation in the scientific method – found that these books contained “harmful stereotypes” and are “no longer up-to-date”.

The equity scanners found that Atticus Finch, the Alabama lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird who defends a black man falsely accused of rape, is a “white saviour trope”. Of Mice and Men stands accused of containing “ableist language” – which, well, is perhaps not that surprising given that Steinbeck’s book is about society’s unfair treatment of a mentally disabled man: gentle giant Lennie Small.

These four insightful works – three of which are recognized literary classics – will be replaced by four books which are “explained through the lens of the marginalized person”.

One is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a young adult novel published in 2017, centred on the incessantly discussed theme of white racism and containing no fewer than 89 F-bombs. Another is Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi, a young adult novel published in 2022 about a young black girl’s experience with social justice protests. To be frank, students could easily get this kind of content by opening TikTok.

Ritinder Matthew explained that this list “will resonate with our students and better captures the current social landscape of the world today”. Canadian bureaucrats have a habit of speaking in vague terminology and social justice lingo. Allow me to translate: “Because a majority of Surrey’s residents now have an immigrant background, we will mainly assign contemporary books written by non-white authors (but only if said authors are woke).”

How about the many immigrants to Canada who want to assimilate, and would be glad for their kids to read the Western Canon at school?

As wokeism becomes more and more hated by the masses, far left ideologues are becoming increasingly unhinged. Recently, all 20,000 Toronto schoolteachers received an official guidebook offering them pearls of critical race theory wisdom, including this gem: “Education is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized.”

Canadians are realizing that the woke ideology in control of nearly all Canadian institutions has the validity of Scientology, the self-assuredness of a UFO cult, and the fanaticism of Joseph McCarthy. Let’s laugh it out of the room.

Editor’s note: My bi-monthly Counter Current column is originally published in Salt Spring’s Islands Marketplace paper (islandsmarketplace.com/issue.pdf). This piece was published on March 8th, 2024.