God...pun intentional...The Handmaid's Tale, which I taught to Grade 11 Boys in the late 80's to 90's...if you want to talk about a reluctant audience ask me, was part of a dystopian unit.
Like 1984 and Brave New World, The HandMaid's Tale IS A CAUTIONARY TALE. Period.
One of its aims was to remind people of how reactionary movements can rise. In Atwood's case, she was trying to caution feminists about the many gains the movement had made and to not be complacent.
And given the current rise of the religious right, and their continual unrelenting attacks on Roe vs Wade, she was prescient.
The TV series is a whole other thing but please...can you not see that by constantly pointing out racism and misogyny and genderphobia, and patronizingly lecturing 'the ignorant', you are in effect advocating censorship, in an alarming echo chamber, and censorship always insults the intelligence of readers and viewers alike.
It's infantilizing to be told that I don't know what I'm watching or reading because I have a label on my brain, marked privilege because of my lack of melanin, and that I therefore lack empathy, social awareness or higher levels of cognition.
BTW, those 16-17 year old boys, back in the 90's? They got The Handmaid's Tale.
Do you think that they would have if I had lectured them on their skin colour or privilege or gender?
The Christians in the class didn't like it much but one of my assignments was to go through Leviticus and Deuteronomy and find restrictive and sexist laws: all in order to thwart the argument that Atwood was engaging in hyperbole.
I even encouraged essays which focussed in on slavery in the Bible.
It wasn't hard for them to find examples.
Religious fundamentalism, like any fundamental ideology, has banned books in the past, indeed the Puritans thought the only book worth reading was the Good Book, the Bible.
So what's next on the list after The Handmaid's Tale? To Kill a Mockingbird? Sounder? Black like Me?
Oops. Perhaps too late.
How about Roots and Kunta Kinte?
An incredible series, which I also showed to my classes, should we deconstruct that book and series and then ban them too?
You can neither decontextualize nor censor your thorny path of condemnation to egalitarian enlightenment.
People will eventually tune out.
To conclude: how about juxtaposing the struggles, like summary public police executions, which still need to be overcome, by celebrating the incredible gains Black people have made since the 1960's, I mean the 1970's, I mean the 80's, no the 90's...ok maybe since 2005?
There are BIPOC Mayors, Generals, Lawyers, Professors and Scientists and Members of Congress...and Black Police officers and Sheriffs to say nothing of Newscasters and actors and performers. More and more people are marrying each other outside of their race...isn't that something to celebrate?
You know, show some balance.