Every few years the same debate arises: A classic of children’s literature is released in a new edition with small alterations to the text, and people respond as if civilization is coming to an end. I’m not going to comment on particular instances—of which Roald Dahl’s work is simply the latest—as that is a distraction from what I believe to be the really interesting question behind these recycled conversations, namely: What is the real fear motivating the backlash? Is it that children will grow up ignorant of societal biases or opportunities to discuss them? Given how deeply we are all steeped in biases from birth, that seems unlikely. That children will lack exposure to truly great literature? Again, highly unlikely due to the sheer number of fantastic books that have been published worldwide since the invention of movable type. That wonderful novels are being distorted beyond recognition and gutted of their essence? This, of course, would be a tragedy if it were true, but it’s hardly the case when relatively light edits are involved. And if these books’ literary merits were somehow dependent upon the bits and pieces that have been updated to suit contemporary sensibilities, isn’t that something that should make us stop and reflect?

I believe that a critical factor contributing to this existential panic is the unfortunate moral framing of questions of bias. It goes something like this: I believe that bias is bad, but I know I am a good person. If I read and loved a book that contains biased language and is therefore bad, am I as good a person as I think I am? To feel comfortable with myself and avoid considering what I might have absorbed from this book without conscious reflection, the book cannot change.

Cognitive linguists, spin doctors, and others understand how deeply language shapes perception, even among adults. People who make minor changes to books are not reshaping entire cultural landscapes with nefarious intent. Through reading, children absorb vocabulary, syntax, story structures, and cultural values. Developmentally, they don’t have the broad perspectives of adults who can put shifts in social norms or language into historical context.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, as evidenced by the passion of grown-ups for whom particular books are positive reminders of childhood. But what about the many adults who remember these same books differently—particularly the shock, betrayal, and pain of encountering content that suddenly brought home where they stood in the eyes of authors they admired?

Pakistani Muslim author Rukhsana Khan illustrates this vividly with a blog post about her childhood in Canada, during which she felt like she was outside “on the porch, looking in, to a warm scene of people gathered around a fire.…Growing up in such a community, I used books to survive”:

And I remember reading one of the Anne of Green Gables books, one of the later ones…and I got to a point where L. M. Montgomery refers to “those heathen Muhammadans,” and I couldn’t believe it!
She was talking about me!
Couldn’t she ever have imagined that one of those “heathen Muhammadans” would one day be reading one of her Anne books and identifying so much with the characters…?
I got so mad I threw the book across the room.
And once more I felt like I was out on the porch, looking in.

We can’t know what a particular deceased author would have done if they were writing today. I like to give the benefit of the doubt and assume they would not have wished for any child to be hurt or to absorb ways of hurting others through reading their words. But we can also ask: Who did they imagine their child reader to be? Who is implicitly invited inside their world?

This connects to another frequent argument: that classic books can prompt enlightening conversations about changing norms, the fallibility of geniuses, and more. This is absolutely true, but how often is children’s literature actually used in this way, whether at home or in the classroom? Given how fraught these topics are in classrooms today—and how rarely most White parents explicitly talk about race with their children, something explored in NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman—the answer is likely not very often.

When these educational conversations do happen, they often exclude the most vulnerable children from a feeling of community, putting them in the uncomfortable, exploitative position of serving as learning opportunities for their peers. By contrast, consider how many books kids from dominant backgrounds can read that are purely fun, ones in which they don’t for a moment have to think about their identities as “issues” and in which exclusionary harsh words or phrases never jolt them out of immersion in the story.

Ultimately, all the outrage over updated classics can serve as a distraction from larger and more important truths, as translator M. Lynx Qualey so wisely put it on Twitter:

For most of human history, stories have been transmitted orally, shifting with each retelling. Even today, this more fluid method of story transmission flourishes: Of the roughly 7,139 living languages, just over 4,000 have writing systems (and not all of those have universally literate populations). Stories have always evolved to serve the people who share them. Written stories shift through collaboration between author and editor before appearing in print. Given this context, attributing untouchable sanctity to one iteration of a text feels like a very narrow approach to cultural abundance.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.