Sanitizing ‘Problematic’ Old Books Doesn’t Protect Anyone

“Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred.” As Penguin-Random House endeavors to remove unacceptable prose from his and other works, this comment by P. G. Wodehouse seems an apt description of the likely outcome of attempts to sanitize and censor works moderns deem distasteful or unacceptable.

The current push among some publishers toward sensitivity reading and the removal of anything they deem offensive represents a pernicious attack not only upon free speech, but upon history itself.

There are three basic problems with this effort. First, it represents a form of intellectual laziness. Rather than working through prose we deem unpleasant due to racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. content, sanitizing old works allows us to simply avoid the issue.

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