When Political Correctness Falls into the Lap of Dummies

Good god, is nothing sacred anymore?

I was browsing on Goodreads when I came across the following comments (most probably from a teenager) about Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937), the mother of all memoirs:

I have no idea why my mom recommended this book to me. A white British colonist tells the story of her privileged life on her coffee plantation in Kenya. She writes some great imagery about the Kenyan landscape and tells funny stories about animals, except that her idea of the landscape and animals includes all the Black servants and workers and "squatters" on her plantation. She is really stupid and proudly naive. It's awful. For example, when she jokingly threatens to fire all of her servants if they don't find this cute baby antelope she saw while on an outing, she thinks it's out of love for her that they spend all night searching for it. How darling of them!

I think you're supposed to find her some sort of feminist heroine because she owns this plantation all by herself. If you believe this, please go read Bell Hooks.

I kept on reading hoping to find some great literary merit like one supposedly finds in Heart of Darkness, but all I found was a tired narrative of some lady and her normalized owning class life. Booooorrrrrrinnnnngggg.

What’s wrong with this picture? (Allow me to don my Hat of Pedantry before I proceed.)

For those unfamiliar with the book, Blixen’s autobiography records her life in Kenya in the 1920s. Let me repeat: NINETEEN TWENTIES. Lifetimes away from our so-PC-you-can’t-even-say-Merry-Christmas-without-someone-setting-up-a-protest-group day and age. Some of you may know the Meryl Streep/Robert Redford film adaptation. The film, though exquisite in its own right, differs greatly from the book. Unsurprising for a Hollywood project, you’d say.

But I digress.

It’s a sign of the times when young readers approach books written before their parents were born with politically correct 21^st-century morals. Back in the late 80s, I was naïve to think I’d find romance, as a result of the film adaptation, in a bona-fide autobiography; in the 2010s, it’s naïve of the young to think they’d interpret the world armed with their brand of institutionalised, Benetton-inspired morals. Whose fault is this? School systems around the world that blindly and unquestioningly preach political correctness. 

Young folks don’t realise there’s a time when one could own servants, and the bond between master and servant was a sacred one. They don’t realise for a lone Danish woman to survive in 1920’s Kenya she had to adhere to the accepted mores concerning black and white segregation. They don’t realise that the wish to remain segregated could come from the natives, too. 21^st-century education has taught them an embarrassingly one-sided truth about race relations. In their eyes there’s often a guilty party of oppressors and a designated group of victims. Rarely does it cross their minds that real life involving real people doesn’t function that neatly. When they’re confronted with it, as they are while reading Blixen, they react with (misguided) self-righteousness. To me, this is infinitely more disturbing than my youthful penchant of romanticising reality.

So to this particular young reader I say: Go back to school and demand a more nuanced education. Your educators have failed you. But you may find comfort in this: you're the rule rather than the exception...

(Hat of Pedantry off.)