A lot of rhetoric that assumes particular acts to be neutral or inherently good is not helpful.

I'm thinking, for some reason, of how reading is characterized. I used to work in a children's bookstore. My mom is a librarian. I'm working on a PhD in English.

A common trope is that whatever a child wants to read is good, because they're reading. As though reading is a value neutral or virtuous act in itself.

And to some extent, I agree with this trope, or at least what I think is behind it. You need to meet a child where they are at.

I've seen firsthand some of the harm of restricting certain types of reading.

But there's also the fact that many books, including books for children, are racist, sexist, ableist, and otherwise actively harmful.

Another trope, repeated generationally, is that each younger generation does not read as much as the previous generation. It's always untrue; younger generations often read more. They're just reading different texts.

But major texts of our moment include text messages, social media, and an increasingly atomized news media, much of which is actively providing disinformation.

Whiteness values neutrality or value-neutral acts because whiteness views itself as neutral. Whiteness often does not name itself.

Anyway, I got very little sleep last night, so this may be a stretch, but it also might not be. I'm connecting the "read whatever as long as you're reading" to the ways news media values the view from nowhere.

Every year we get these statistics about how white kids' books are, and how there are more books with animal characters than children of color, and yet we still treat children's reading as entirely virtuous.

Dr. Debbie Reese does amazing work delving into the values of children's literature at American Indians in Children's Literature. …https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/ 

I am partially thinking about this as someone who was a voracious child reader, someone who sometimes read texts that were actively disruptive to my emotional health, but also, someone who imbibed poisonous forms of whiteness in literature.

Unlearning some of those ideas and tropes is ongoing work. I don't think adults should have limited my reading, but I do think there are ways that it could have been curated differently.

I think we as a society tend toward either "BAN IT" or "everything is equally good and up for grabs," and like, there's other ground? It's not that simplistic.

In the last few weeks, I read a lot of nonfiction about the Osage and tried to place what I was learning in context with the Little House books I read and loved as a child.

I've read Prairie Fires, and the fictional/libertarian/white supremacist aspects of the Little House books are not new to me. But I did read them as a child. I did love them. They're part of my brain.

When I was a broke very young parent, I actively compared my resourcefulness to the imaginary resourcefulness of the parents in those books, because they were part of how I think and thought. Even knowing, at least partially, what was wrong with them.

Much of this past week's riots were planned in ways that assume basic literacy and an interest in connecting and communicating via text.

I'm not sure I'm describing my thought process well, in part because I'm thinking it through, in writing, as is often my wont. And publicly, because I've found that sometimes when I think things through in text, I get responses that help me to think better.

It's good to follow someone's interests and encourage them to gain rhetorical skills, but we well know rhetorical skills, analytical skills, etc., can be used to manipulate and harm.

Treating them as value-neutral means that we get educated Nazis.

Debate is another space where this happens. The point of debate is not to believe in your cause. It is persuasion and winning. I wasn't on a debate team, but I was sometimes assigned to argue for something in school.

I can no longer remember what it was, but I remember once being assigned to argue for something I strongly opposed, and I did my best, and I won.

Argument, and politics, seemed very much like a game. This was often made worse by my textbooks, which were poorly written for reasons I've ranted about before.

Later, as a parent, I frequently saw my kids' behavior and language change based on what they were consuming, whether it was text or other media.

Some of those changes were negative, and sometimes they weren't old enough for a conversation or explanation to suffice. I rarely restricted reading materials, but I did redirect and stopped checking some books out of the library for them, though I did explain why.

This may be exaggerated by the fact that I have autistic children, one of whom communicated frequently in delayed echolalia. It was VERY clear where his speech was coming from, because it was often verbatim.

This was often charming and adorable, but it also made it clear how strongly the media diet they were consuming was affecting how they thought.

We're seeing, rightly, pushback against the idea that humanities education alone will solve our problem.

I'm a big cheerleader of the humanities, but you know how abusers go to therapy and then gain language to help them launder their abuse?

Without ethical intervention, the humanities can just give abusers better language and reasoning for their abuse.

My youngest has an intense hyperfocus on justice and she helped me to see, when she was very young, racism and sexism I had not seen in books that she was reading.

This is going to sound like one of those "my three year old just said we should read more Adorno" tweets, but whatever. In kindergarten, she told me that she wanted to write a series of books for kids called "That's Racist!" "That's Sexist," etc., because kids weren't told.

She said a lot of the kids in her class said or repeated racist and sexist things without knowing that they were racist or sexist, and she thought they'd do better if they were taught to look for it.

I assume her kindergarten version of this wouldn't have been very sophisticated, but once she said this, I realized I'd almost never heard language called out by teachers in school as racist/sexist/ableist?

Disagreement was often reduced to interpersonal disagreement, also value-neutral. You're both at fault, them for provoking, you for reacting.