There are some lively debates going on at Heavy Medal and Fuse #8 about Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, a presumed favorite for 2016 Newbery consideration. The Horn Book starred it; I like it too (and here’s a brief interview I did with Schlitz in the September Magazine). What’s interesting about this debate is that it has largely focused on one brief passage in the book where the heroine makes a glancing and ignorant comment about Indians. (Debbie Reese noted this before the current kerfuffle.) What’s also interesting about the debate is how thoughtful and polite it’s been, so far anyway.

Perhaps it is polite because no one is accusing the book of racism. Everyone agrees that the passage in question is meant to express the character’s ignorance of the world beyond her rural confines; the debate is over whether the girl’s unthinking prejudice toward Indians is necessary to the book, or if it will only serve to hurt those young readers who will miss the unreliability of the narrator as well as those who are Indian themselves, who will be hurt by the inclusion of the slur.

My problem with this argument is in its assumption of harm. Who will be hurt? How will they be hurt? Should all books be assessed for potential harm? (If the hurt is enough to keep The Hired Girl from winning the Newbery–as Nina Lindsay in a comment on Heavy Medal says it should–doesn’t it follow that the hurt is enough to keep it from library shelves altogether?)

These aren’t really possible questions to answer, which is why I hesitate to give them much weight. I am not suggesting that a book cannot hurt a reader, only that we don’t know what in which book will hurt which reader how. Those objecting to The Hired Girl are assuming some readers will be harmed by reading it, but there is no evidence of this, either in hand or beyond the simple assertion. And since we are all apparently in agreement that Schlitz’s depiction of a racist mindset is ultimately in service to its being undermined–meaning we can’t ding the book for racism or stereotyping–the only argument we have against the book’s value (in this particular aspect) is that Kids Won’t Get It.

Some will, some won’t, some will blaze or snooze right past the passage in question. How the heck is this different from any case of any book we entrust into any reader’s hands?

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