Your assumptions about The Good Fairy expose your own bigotry. She’s not in the right here. All I’m trying to do, when I scoop up field mice and bop them on the head, is to preserve my own identity as a Little Rabbit. Not many people know that Little Rabbits are under threat. I’m hoping to change that through social media.

Some history: For nearly a century, field mice have been pulling the wool over your eyes and making you believe that they’re victims, just because I scoop them up and bop them on the head. Using this falsehood, they get special treatment and benefits, and all the while the correct power structure in which Little Rabbits rule over the forest civilization is eroding. But believe me, the natural order of things is to have Little Rabbits in charge. That’s the way it’s been ever since we were Little Rabbits in Europe. Scooping up field mice and bopping on them on the head is part of our birthright.

There’s this frog who totally gets me. He’s the only one.

Everything bad that has ever happened is a result of taking away power from Little Rabbits. Little Rabbits are much smarter than field mice. Let that sink in… If I didn’t scoop up field mice and bop them on the head, they’d mix with Little Rabbits and then what would happen? There would be no Little Rabbits. It would be Little Rabbit genocide.

In 1987, 103 field mice participated in a Florida University study. The study revealed tapping the head of field mice stimulates the neurons which produce serotonin, also known as “the happy hormone.” Given this incontrovertible fact I ask you, where’s your compassion for field mice? What about their happiness? YOU’RE the one who hates field mice.

In a forest where I can freely bop them on the head, field mice would be much better off. If you say you care about field mice — you, the Good Fairy, and the Forest Council which has recently issued a statement condemning my bopping field mice on the head — you’re a hypocrite. You don’t give a damn about field mice, their children, or babies. You’re just virtue signalling to convince yourselves that you’re better than me, Little Rabbit Foo Foo. I won’t let you get away with that, baby-hater.

The frog watches everything. I know he has my back. I call him Pepe.

The Good Fairy is the real racist, because she’s destroying Little Rabbit civilization. The Good Fairy needs to take her “I don’t like your attitude” sanctimony and shove it up her ass. Oh wait… I’m not supposed to say stuff like that anymore because it’s not politically correct. Remind me: Who’s being oppressed again?

Most field mice are undocumented, you realize, so you’re defending something illegal. ILLEGAL. Think hard about that. Meanwhile, the Good Fairy threatens to turn me into a Goonie, and no one cries out. Everyone has become desensitized to hatred directed against Little Rabbits.

On a side note, don’t believe the false doublespeak Gruffalo narrative which implies that field mice are clever. The Gruffalo is a cuck. Everyone knows that, and calling someone a cuck is the best, most damning, most devastating insult and not for a moment will I ever examine why I’m convinced of that. Read this excellent article I found on Reddit called “Are field mice mammals?” Take your red pill!

Sometimes, the other forest animals watch me, perplexed, as I scoop up field mice and bop them on the head. “What on earth are you doing?” they say. “And why do you keep calling people cucks?” “I’m a proud Little Rabbit,” I tell them, “and I’m committed to safeguarding the heritage of the European forest civilization.” To their follow-up question, I reply, “Yes, I am aware that most real-life Europeans think I’m just a strange Little Rabbit. I get asked that a lot.”

And after all my efforts, what happens? The Good Fairy still doesn’t like my attitude. She’s trying to silence me and suppress the truth by threatening to turn me into a Goonie. The Forest Council has approved the measure. But just you wait. The frog is going to rise up. The frog is strong and bold. My feelings for the frog are purely platonic, by the way.

Go ahead. Try to turn me into a Goonie. We will rise up. The frog will…. Wait. Where is the frog going? Hey, come back! Don’t spawn now! I don’t have any chances left! Wait! You’ll see! We will rule the world! We’ll be the master race again! We’ll all get book deals and aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhbhbhghh!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a cartoonish president and a platoon of ignorant lemmings marching in lockstep across red states provide the perfect sunset-hued filter to enhance the already very golden self-image of liberals from San Francisco to New York City.

Not only did they vote for a Black man to be President — twice — but they alsowatched Moonlight, and donned safety pins as self-appointed guardians of the nation.

That’s why there was a gasp of collective, artisanal horror when Nicole Wright, a scholar of Jane Austen — the author who perfected the sharp, snide critique of society’s buffoons (we’re looking at you, Mrs. Bennet) — wrote that Austen’s work has been co-opted by the so called ‘alt-right’ who view her writing as a manifestation of the ideal (read: white) society, sexuality, and culture.

As Wright observed:

“… Austen as an avatar of a superior bygone era is linked not only with fantasies of female retreat from the sexual whirl, but also with calls for white separatism…[where] the world of Austen’s novels is extolled as a prototype for the ‘racial dictatorship’ of tomorrow.”

It’s easy to feel self-righteous when faced with this shallow reading of Austen’s novels. It is the same kind of smugness that caused many white liberals to dismiss Trump’s ascension to the presidency. Indeed, in a related piece published by the New York Times, Elaine Bander, a retired professor and a former officer of the Jane Austen Society of North America, proclaims, “All the Janeites I know are rational, compassionate, liberal-minded people.” As if simply by reading Austen, one is inoculated against illiberalism.

“This notion that ‘great’ literature and art can somehow defeat systemic injustice is a problem because of the notion of ‘great’ art,” adds writer and racial justice advocate Nakia Jackson. “What’s considered ‘high’ culture is rooted in multiple forms of systemic oppression.”

The truth is, the white power structure that created the conditions that brought Trump into power includes Hollywood, the Literary Establishment, the media, and academia, as well as the liberals and conservatives who were shaped by these institutions. With their erasure, indifference, or unconscious disregard of the lives or loves of people of color, they are complicit in the propagation of Jane Austen as a tool of white supremacists, and, indeed, of propagating white supremacy itself.

The Essential Resistance Reading List
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This July marks 200 years since Jane Austen’s death, and her work remains more popular than ever — her books continue to be taught in high school and university campuses across the world and her seminal work, Pride and Prejudice, has sold over 20 million copies. Austen’s books have spawned a number of film adaptations from actresses Alicia Silverstone and Kiera Knightley in Clueless and Pride and Prejudice respectively, as well as modern literature reinterpretations by authors Curtis Sittenfeld, Joanna Trollope, and Alexander McCall Smith. Although centuries removed from the gowns and balls of rural England, none of these movies or books conceive of a world where the themes of Austen’s books center the lives and loves of people of color.

Aside from some diverse casting in the films Bride and Prejudice and Clueless, English-language cinema regularly dredges up an Austen or other hidebound period piece with all-white casts, focused on all-white problems. Yet, Austenesque social morés still apply to huge, thriving communities of color in multiethnic and multiracial America and Europe, and around the globe. Although modern readers reduce her work to light romances, “[Austen] reveal[ed] her beliefs, not just about domestic life and relationships, but about the wider political and social issues of the day,” writes Oxford Professor of Classics and English Literature, Helena Kelly.

Jane Austen amplified the voices and issues of the women of her time and social milieu — she wrote candidly and bitingly about reputation and social standing; women’s issues related to sex, power, and wealth; and familial and marital relationships. Austen cared about substantive issues and also wielded a sharp, amused sense of social absurdities.

Why ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Isn’t Really A Win For Diverse Representation
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At the heart of these adaptations — and their inability to capture the ways that Austen’s writings could easily reflect the lived reality of a diverse spectrum of modern Austen fans — lies a failure of the white imagination. When institutions from primary school onward amplify white-centered stories and histories as the only “great” art, it becomes easier to imagine zombies in an Austen landscape before people of color can be inserted therein. When non-white voices and stories are erased — or, worse, in their rare depictions, consistently presented as less than, negative, or one-dimensional — white people are rendered incapable of imagining people of color as fully human, complex, and equal to themselves, living lives just as rich as (if not richer than) the white experience.

This racial myopia from liberal institutions — which fundamentally limits Austen’s universal themes — serves as a direct line to the so-called alt-right claiming Austen from themselves.

“We constantly forget that racism is not the product of ignorance,” says G. Willow Wilson, author of the Hugo Award-winning comic book series Ms Marvel for Marvel comics. “It is the product of education. If the system is racist, being educated within it will produce racists, whether they have GEDs or PhDs.”

It’s at this point that someone usually brings up “historical accuracy.” Yet, somehow, historical accuracy never limits roles for white actors. If so, we’d never have been subjected to films where white people don black- or yellow-face; to white women performing roles originally written as Asian characters (Tilda Swinton and Scarlett Johansson in Doctor Strange and Ghost in the Shell, respectively); or to white people populating ancient Egypt or China (Christian Bale and an all white cast in Exodus: Gods and Kings, Gerard Butler and a nearly all white cast in Gods of Egypt, or Matt Damon starring in The Great Wall).

You get the point.

Somehow, historical accuracy never limits roles for white actors.
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Instead of another all white cast (or zombies), wouldn’t it be far more interesting to see Austen’s work from fresh perspectives? What if matchmaking Emma was re-imagined as a meddling Nigerian-American aunty in the Atlanta suburbs, or if the impoverishment of a patriarch’s widow and daughters in Sense and Sensibility were seen from the perspective of a Lebanese-American family whose ancestors arrived in Dearborn, Michigan almost 140 years ago?

What if Elizabeth Bennet was a Black Latina from Brooklyn being courted by a smooth young Pakistani American Muslima from Queens with the dynamics of love, family, race, sexuality, and religion unfolding from there? Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, is a delicious look at what Austenesque themes can look like in a vivid, modern, non-white setting. One need only to look to the popularity of Hamilton to put to rest concerns over “profitability” or “relatability” when featuring a cast of people of color. (Although we do acknowledge the critique of Lin Miranda’s neoliberal re-imagining of the American Rebellion.)

We read and adapt great literature less for historical accuracy and more for cultural accuracy and emotional resonance — to learn more about ourselves, each other, and our current cultural and political moment. By sharing stories about people whose religion, culture, race, or ethnicity are unlike our own, we have the opportunity to recognize our shared universal human experiences. There are still so many stories to be told and connections to be made that reflect the increasingly diverse nature of our society.

Denying the living, breathing nature of Jane Austen’s work is to harken back to an imaginary “pure” era, an observation not lost on the alt-right. As Professor Wright noted, “[b]y comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cozy England of Austen…the alt-right normalizes itself in the eyes of ordinary people…[and] nudge[s] readers who happen upon alt-right sites to think that perhaps white supremacists aren’t so different from mainstream folks.”

Perpetuating the white status quo through Austen’s work — and refusing to use it as a vehicle to further our society’s discourse — simply echoes the great rallying cry of white nationalists and white supremacists from President 45 to Hollywood.

Pride and prejudice, indeed.

Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi are Jane Austen fans and editors of two groundbreaking anthologies, Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women and Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy. Their podcast for Muslim girl nerds, Get Lit, InshAllah debuts this summer.