The heated debate over “critical race theory,” “indoctrination” and “socialism” in the schools, and attacks on teachers for teaching books like Beloved has unleashed the native fascism that usually hides under a rock.
We saw it in Virginia, where the Republican winner in the election played on these issues in his campaign and vowed that he would pass a law to allow parents to opt their children out of reading stuff that made them “uncomfortable.”
A Texas legislator aims to be on the front lines of book banning. Rep. Matt Krause assembled a list of 850 books that he thinks should be removed from the schools. The books must go “because they might cause students to feel “discomfort.”The list is heavily weighted towards titles about gender, sexuality, racism, and other topics that he thinks should not be taught or read about in school. He probably would ban them for college too if he could.
My guess is that these books were chosen simply by their title, not because Rep. Krause read them.
Here is the list of 850 books that he wants to eliminate from the schools. Krause has no idea whether any of them are taught in the schools.
In the age of the Internet, when teens can see anything and everything mentioned in these books, this crude censorship is ridiculous.
I can’t tell whether the odor in the air is the burning of books or is the stench of McCarthyism.
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Don’t Mess With Texas !!!
(They Have People For That)
Both sides do it: https://www.politico.com/states/new-jersey/story/2019/03/21/new-jersey-lawmakers-want-schools-to-stop-teaching-huckleberry-finn-924748
There was an article the other day about the bipartisan effort against free speech: https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/579415-the-bipartisan-war-on-intellectual-freedom-and-debate
Matt,
You would enjoy reading my book “The Language Police,” which documents the bipartisan efforts to censor words, ideas, and books.
Classic political grandstanding. I doubt the gentlemen gives a rats ass about education at all, but can smell a political advantage from a mile away.
yep
One of the books on the list is titled “The Year They Burned the Books”.
That’s a good one. Is it a how-to manual?
Ha!
I think Ray Bradbury wrote the how to manual. Fahrenheit 451.
I recognized 2 of 850 books on the list. These 850:books have little or nothing to do with schools. There are not even 850 books because many of the titles are repeated in different sections of the list. The titles are alphabetized in separate sections. And the titles aren’t capitalized. It’s as if the list was generated by a search engine, not a person. Someone just did a bunch of keyword searches and found stuff published by Amazon instead of the big five publishers. They didn’t even bother to edit after doing the searches. I bet many of the books on the list have never been in print or read by anyone but the authors. I can’t even be sure they’re all books. Some could be pamphlets. Some could be instruction manuals. Who knows? Pretty lazy propagandizing, if you ask this English teacher.
Sadly, it sometimes seems that that “pretty lazy propagandizing” is the most effective.
Hey wait! I thought public schools didn’t have libraries anymore? And if they still do have libraries, they are understaffed and lacking in investments of books?
Political grand standing at it’s finest and the new GOP (the Koch Libertarian Party) has learned how to win dirty….by using children to earn votes at the ballot box. They did it with the mentally ill and disabled, then they went after the senior citizens and infirm and now they have come for the children. This is the final stand.
They took away the libraries with the Great Recession. Being in California, I’m able to buy and bring books to my classroom that Herr Krause would definitely want to ban. I didn’t see any of them on the list. And where were all the manga titles? Not one? Really? Sheesh!
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Thank you! My classroom has My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, Haikyu, Fruits Basket, and One-Punch Man. I’ll have to take a look at some of the other titles you mentioned.
Guess Krause doesn’t know that he is advertising the reading of the very books he has banned.
People read banned books.
Exactly! Our youth could reply by staging multiple Read Aloud Celebrations on every available social media platform.
BELOVED will only be the beginning!
Well observed, Yvonne.
especially in the days of tech: find it online, find it on amazon, find it on craig’s list…
People read banned books.”
Yes, it’s a version of the Barbara Streisand effect called the Barbara Bookends effect
If not for Tipper Gore no one outside Florida would have heard of 2 Live Crew.
LOL. They should have given her a piece of the royalties!
This is definitely the stench of McCarthyism plus Trumpism, Kochism, libertarianism and necrophilia. Will they be banning the bible for its lurid and violent content?
Example: In NJ – “Less than 24 hours after his shocking win over State Senate President Steve Sweeney, Edward Durr is facing backlash for an anti-Islamic tweet posted two years ago.”
Sweeney is a big power broker in south Jersey and has been in the NJ legislature for a couple decades, he is not a progressive and even made nice nice with Christie when he was governor. Durr is a truck driver who never ran for any political office, a total newbie and far right wing nut.
My question is, why didn’t Durr’s crude anti-Muslim comments come out during the campaign time? Sweeney was probably over confident and didn’t feel the need to have his team do deep dives into Durr’s Facebook account or Tweets.
These pompous fools will probably ban the teaching of evolution from public schools because it makes some Christians uncomfortable.
Of course some these legislators have never evolved out of being caveman and cavewomen with the mentality of an ameba.
Book burning is the historic symbolic act for those seeking authoritarian power. Tyrants too often succeed with this tactic. It doesn’t matter that these books will be available elsewhere. It is the image of standing up against the elite who want to poison the minds of children. Social and right wing media now have a pulpit that can bring us all down perpetuating ignorance through misinformation. Democrats have got to figure out how to change the narrative. Their track record in regard to public education does not give me hope.
How do we change the narrative?
Claim that public education is meant to underpin democracy.
Claim that government exists to allow all to participate in the fulfillment of self governance through the vote and through equal participation in society
Claim that a house divided cannot stand
Stacy Abrams should be the role model here. Establish a ground game that connects with people. Find people in communities who have the credibility and give them the resources to get to work. The fact that Abrams was not made chair of the Democratic Party is evidence that party leadership is far too timid. Democrats come across as “wishy washy” because they spend far too much time reading inaccurate polling data while Republicans ignore the polls and act to rig the game. Ted Kennedy’s support of NCLB may have been the most significant sign that all of the party elites who send their children to independent schools have no clue what is going on in the public schools. I realize some of this is generalization, but Obama’s position on charters and “accountability was the result of an education that went through private schools into the Ivey League which is similar to the path he and Michelle chose for their children. So now we are witnessing similar behavior with the Biden administration. He seems to believe that working behind the scenes is the best way to get things done without upsetting the apple cart. I thought that Jill might influence a new day with public schools, but the President seems too unwilling to make bold reversals on failed education policy. If there is success, no one sees it. His popularity is tanking because there is little sign of engagement with the American people. This adds fuel to the fear mongering dumpster fire called Republican propaganda.
Exactly, Paul. This is precisely what they all do.
A George Takei tweet about the need to teach the truth: “Is it wrong to teach about the Japanese American internment now? Because I’ve spent my whole life telling our story, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let some fool at a school board meeting refuse to let their kids hear about what happened to us.
The truth, people. Teach the truth.” end quote
Thank you, Mr. Sulu
and Mr. Takei’s words —along with the words and stories from so many other lived experiences—are now all “out there” in the technology universe. How do Supremacists suggest these stories and truths get put back in the bottle?
This guy sounds like a wingnut and I assume it’s very unlikely that this proposal will come to pass, even in Texas. But purging libraries and curricula of books for political reasons or because they may cause offense is generally a terrible idea, whether it’s being done by those on the right or the left.
The Governor of Texas has thrown his weight behind the wingnut.
Excuse the mixed metaphor.
Rub-A-Dub TX Guv has thrown his weight and someone’s bank account behind this sleaze bag. Follow the $$$ because it is a well-financed undertaking.
Nailed it, Kathy!
Does flerp think it’s wrong if a classroom teacher chose to remove the Dr. Seuss’ books with the most offensive anti-Asian language and stereotypes?
Should teachers who don’t keep old books with offensive anti-Asian stereotypes be forced to have those books as long as white parents decide that they are not offensive?
Does flerp believe that purging a library of Little Black Sambo books because “they might cause offense” is a terrible idea?
Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle was edited to remove racist material from it. Today, would parents yell “censorship” and insist that all the racist material remain in the book because it is a terrible idea to remove any material that “might cause offense”?
What do I think?
Well, governors and presidents can not pass new legislation on their own, no matter what Youngkin promised during the campaign.
Just like President Biden is having trouble getting his infrastructure bill through the U.S. Congress, Youngkin may face the same roadblocks because of one factor, the state’s senate.
With that said, after the 2021 election, the Republicans have gained a slim majority in the state House 52 to 48, but the Democrats still hold the majority in the State Senate. The current Virginia Senate with a total of 40 members was elected in 2020 and the state Senators will not be up for election until 2024.
The Democrats still hold 21 seats in the state Senate, the GOP 19.
Of course, Youngkin can do what Trump, DeSantis, and Abbot have done, and sign executive orders that the Democrats will probably challenge in the courts just like they did for many of Trump’s executive orders and are doing to Abbot’s executive orders in Texas.
Censorship and book burning in Virginia may be decided in the courts then.
So you think checks and balances are still checking and balancing? Hope so.
The next time hordes of ignoramuses gather to burn piles of socially conscientious books that they don’t understand, I really hope they pick some of mine. I feel like that would actually be a huge compliment.
Indeed!
LOL, Thanks, Bob!
I think it imperative that teachers make lists of these banned books (for reference, to ensure that their teaching is in line with that promulgated by the Thought Police) and leave them out on their desks for students to peruse so that they will never, ever look at any of them. And they might want to sprinkle their lessons with, “There is this book, __________, but you won’t want to ORDER THAT ONLINE because it’s on the index of things too terrible for you to be exposed to.”
A few years ago, I was teaching high school in Flor-uh-duh. One of my preps was a Debate class for juniors and seniors, and at one point, I had the kids make lists of topics for debate that they were interested in, and I shared the students’ suggestions with the entire class. One of the students had listed bathrooms for transgender students, a topic that was very much in the news at the time. This was one of about fifty topics that students had generated and that I read out to them. We didn’t go on to debate bathrooms for transgender students. What I’ve just described is the entire treatment of the topic in my class. I read this aloud from a list of possible topics prepared by students and didn’t even comment about it. Well, one of my COLLEAGUES, another teacher in the school, a fundamentalist Christian whose daughter was a senior in the class, went to my principal and asked that I BE FIRED for this.
I’ve shared before this story: I had a parent call my AP for curriculum and tell her that “Mr. Shepherd is teaching Demonology in his classes” because I had had the kids, in a Theatre class, enact the opening scene with the witches from Macbeth.
Another: Years ago, a Health text created by the company I was working for was rejected for adoption by the state of Texas because it contained the line “Humans and other mammals lactate.” They were upset about the reference to human lactation, but what really incensed them–the idea that was beyond the pale in fundamentalist Texas–was that the text had dared to suggest that humans were mammals and animals. You know, humans, members of the biological kingdom of Animalia and the class Mammalia.
Another: I was the Executive Editor (in charge of the project) for a new literature textbook series that, shortly after its publication was bought by a school district in Missouri. A big sale. The superintendent had all the books packed up and returned to the publisher because the 11th-grade American literature survey text contained James Thurber’s classic “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which had the line “These gas station attendants are so damned cocky.”
I could go on and on. The adoption committees that objected to references a reference to DNA, the official ed book publisher lists of forbidden topics like “the idea that the Earth is billions of years old,” and so on.
Bob Shepherd, instructor in the Dark Arts of Demonology and Using MLA Style on a Works Cited Page.
How about the stench of Nazism, or an echo of Hitler?.
Bingo!
I was just looking again at Lolita, a book that’s been banned in many places at many times, and it reminded me of this controversy. It’s not as if there’s nothing “objectionable” about the book, which is deeply obscene even on its own terms, let alone in today’s political climate. But of course it should be read and taught.
Nice to see this one.