Removals impoverish learners by depriving them of a socially and culturally safe way to examine difficult issues. It is a grave mistake to believe that removing stories that reveal painful aspects of human experience will protect the young. The books are proxies in a political-culture war for supremacy in which the real objective is asserting control. In fact, this is not even about the books. This is the “new illiteracy.” Unlike book banners from the Counter Reformation through McCarthyism, those opposing diverse representations take pride in not reading beyond the inflammatory posts and hand-picked passages that drive the bans in the first place. In most cases, parents have not read the books they demand be removed. Those books are not being vilified.īut in 2021, books like “Out of Darkness ” - which received numerous literary awards and was on school library shelves for more than five years without a complaint - began being attacked across the country.
Those books account for the lion’s share of “mature” content in high school libraries. If the issue were sex or profanity, as the parents and right-wing politicians claim, far more of the targeted books would be about white, straight, middle-class characters. Most of the targeted books tell stories of Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+ or otherwise marginalized people. Whatever “concerned parents” assert, based on handbooks produced by right-wing foundations and PACs, profanity or mature content is not what the attacked books share. Book-banning is driven by social media, conservative websites and well-funded, right-wing political organizations that direct followers to go after specific books.
What is occurring today in a growing number of districts is not spontaneous parental concern.
0 kommentar(er)
