Good news from the Brooklyn Public Library for teens whose libraries have been ransacked by censors and other vandals.
The Brooklyn Public Library will give you free access to its collection, which is uncensored.
Like we needed another reason to love libraries: with book bans ramping up in school systems around the country, the Brooklyn Public Library is taking steps to make its massive catalog available to as many young people as possible.
Right now, and for a “limited time,” anyone in the United States between the age of 13 and 21 can apply for a free Brooklyn Public Library eCard, which gives access to 350,000 eBooks, 200,000 audiobooks, and online databases. (Normally, Brooklyn Public Library eCards are only free for people who live and/or work in New York state.)…
Teens who want to apply for the free eCard can send an email to BooksUnbanned@bklynlibrary.org or a message to @bklynfuture on Instagram.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What about the rest of us? I would love to get books from the Brooklyn Library!
Use your child’s library card.
Tennessee is at it again: Have a look for yourselves:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/school-library-bill-advances-sponsor-235431403.html
Tennessee is always at it. The Demi-Gods of demagoguery.
This guy from Bean Station, a beautiful place in the Great Appalachian Valley just north of Knoxville, has to impress five or six people in order to assure his election.
Further down that same valley is McMinn county, where Maus was banned. Another idyllic location. But Gov Lee is a Williamson County plutocrat. He is constantly appealing to the people who only think of the issue of prayer in the schools or abortion so that the Republican stranglehold on Tennessee makes the money flow ever more regularly into his pocket.
I wish more people in Tennessee were more like Dolly Parton.
The White Panic effect of witnessing an African American voted into the Whitehouse twice by unarguable majorities coupled with the dismissal of Trump by another unarguable majority have thrown sections of the USA into something approaching a white-washing hysteria.
Knowing that pride precedes a fall, I will take that chance and say I am proud today to live in Brooklyn.
Keeping perspective on this issue of censorship forces us to remember that very recently people on the Left have also favored banning books and other forms of censorship. To Kill A Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn have been labeled “white saviorist” and “racist”, respectively, and have been taken off library shelves – to name just two examples. Several college newspapers – all controlled by left-wing students – have favored not allowing mainstream conservative views to be heard on campus. Even some liberal professors have been deemed not woke enough for opposing the suppression of free thought that deviates from far Left orthodoxy. And just this past week much of the online Left has been infuriated that the new owner of Twitter won’t censor wrongthink in the way that Twitter has hitherto done.
Irony noted. The left is a big tent, and we on the left don’t agree with each other on everything. We’re not an organized syndicate. I personally oppose censorship laws, period. What books a teacher or professor uses must be up to the English or literature department of the school in which he or she teaches, not up to legislative or executive bodies. If a school department is uncomfortable with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, so be it, but I would be livid if my California Legislature or California Department of Education banned the book. I am LEFT Coast Teacher, and I say what Brooklyn Public Library is doing is heavenly.
leftcoastteacher,
I wish good folks like you and others would realize that your reply to Karen Wood is exactly why the far right gets their views legitimized and amplified.
There is a difference with those on the left asking that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “To Kill A Mockingbird” no longer be REQUIRED READING and replaced by arguably better novels. That doesn’t mean it is “banned”. But your reply reinforced the false narrative that this happens which the far right uses to frighten journalists into reporting this as a “both sides equally bad” story and thus normalizing what the far right and Karen Wood are supporting.
Karen Wood should have to clarify her opinion to see if she is a racist or a hypocrite. Should a school which removes “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” from the REQUIRED reading list be forced by Republicans to require all students to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin because Karen Wood will accuse them of censorship for not requiring all students to read it?
Twitter doesn’t allow LIES that foment hatred and violence. The only reason right wingers like Karen Wood don’t like the twitter policies is because the left does not spew hateful lies about the Republican politicians and their families like the far right does.
If Karen Wood wants to go on record saying she is good with the left starting to post on twitter the same ugly lies about Republican politicians that she supports when those lies are directed at Democrats, then she should make that clear.
But the Republicans have successfully propagandized so many people – including most of the so-called “left wing” mainstream media – into treating this as a “both sides equally bad” issue when it is not and never has been.
The media allows Republicans to spew the same kind of nonsense Karen Wood did without any follow up questions which would reveal the extent of their hypocrisy and dishonesty and the disingenuous manner in which they try to argue for a policy that is indefensible.
The problem with the Democrats is that they don’t blithely lie. They could, and perhaps they would be more successful, but more often even their truthful statements are parsed by journalists and criticized if there is even a smidgeon of hyperbole. (“How dare you say the budget deficit tripled under Republicans when it only increased 2.7 times”)
Democrats don’t have to lie as much, NYCPSP. All Democrats have to do to show the insanity and stupidity of the opposition is to quote them: “I have an Article 2 that says I can do whatever I want as president; good people on both sides; I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
Too bad we don’t have a stable genius like Donald Trump in the Oval Office right now, given the war in Ukraine. Trump is soooooo well informed! Consider this blast from the past, Trump talking to NBC reporter Chuck Todd when the former was a candidate in 2015:
TODD: “Whom do you talk to for military advice right now?”
TRUMP: “Well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great, you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows, and you have the generals.”
So, “see a lot of great, you know, . . . watch your show and all of the other shows,” and you will totally understand this whole military thing.
There you have it. Your secret to becoming an expert on military strategy.
This is the man (I’m using the term quite loosely) who became Commander in Chief of the most powerful country in the world. And he’s also the traitor who attempted by several parallel means to overturn people’s votes in last election and is still, for some reason, walking around free after having committed that treason.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a sly one. Here is her description of a corner of the cabin from which Uncle Tom’s Cabin gets its name: “On this carpeting Aunt Chloe took her stand, as being decidedly in the upper walks of life; and it and the bed by which it lay, and the whole corner, in fact, were treated with distinguished consideration, and made, so far as possible, sacred from the marauding inroads and desecrations of little folks. In fact, that corner was the drawing-room of the establishment [a tiny log cabin]. In the other corner was a bed of much humbler pretensions, and evidently designed for use. The wall over the fireplace was adorned with some very brilliant scriptural prints, and a portrait of General Washington, drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero [LOL], if ever he happened to meet with its like.”
That passage bears some careful reading. Layers and layers of meaning.
Please read my book “The Language Police.”
I am opposed to censorship. Period.
Most censorship comes from the right, not the left.
I don’t think Trump should be censored. I think he should be imprisoned as a traitor.
Amen to both.
The people on the left who want to ban these books can [the rest of my statement would not pass WordPress moderation]. They can go [ditto] themselves.
That said, I support people being able to make these arguments (and others debating them). That’s what classrooms are partly for. For curating these cultural artifacts and encouraging discussion and debate about them–the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.
And thank you, Mr. Clemens, for your beautiful book. Mr. Clemens, who is in heaven with Kurt Vonnegut now.
Please bear in mind, Ms. Wood, what sort of country you live in. You live in a country in which a white man can murder a black child, in cold blood, for walking through his neighborhood with a bag of skittles; get off scott-free; and then sell the gun he did this evil deed with for $250,000 because someone thinks it such a fine thing to possess the instrument of this infamy.
White folks have the luxury of debating the merits of To Kill a Mockingbird. And black ones? Today, a Latina friend was relating to me the time when she first fully understood the depravity so widespread in the United States when it comes to race. She was in 9th grade and congratulating a black classmate on his soccer skills. “You must have some pick-up games on the street in your neighborhood,” she said. He replied, “My Mama would whoop me good if she saw me running in the street. Somebody’s going to think a young black running in the street is a thief and shoot him.” Imagine having to tell your child THAT. Because of his skin color. THIS is the quotidian reality of race in America, and a whole lot of white folks just don’t freaking get it.
“You live in a country in which a white man can murder a black child, in cold blood, for walking through his neighborhood with a bag of skittles”
That’s a highly debatable characterization of what happened, Bob. You make it sound like Martin was just strolling around and Zimmerman pulled out his gun and shot him for no reason. I don’t know exactly what occurred that night, but the evidence from the trial definitely does not support that account.
Bob, your characterization is only “debatable” by folks who believe that 17 year olds returning home from a convenience store carrying skittles are “dangerous”. And of course, believing that a 17 year old running away from an armed, heavier man chasing him down a dark pathway is responsible for his own death has everything to do with implicit racism. No one disputed the fact that the armed man chased an unarmed 17 year old who was RUNNING AWAY from him.
But certain folks seriously accept the ridiculous uncorroborated story that a 17 year old carrying skittles running away from a scary looking man would suddenly “change his mind” and decide to violently confront the man so that the man had no choice but to shoot him dead.
I don’t buy the argument that a jury of 8 white and 2 Latino folks would have believed that a white suburban 17 year old holding skittles would have first run away from a scary guy with a gun chasing them and then “changed their mind” and decided to violently attack the man for no reason. Why would the teen do that? Their own violent nature? That is the implicit racism that the entire cockamamie defense rests on. That this 17 year old was just violent and after running away suddenly realized he had a chance to violently attack this man chasing him instead.
If this was a white suburban 17 year old, the jury would not hear zebras in their attempt to justify the white 17 year olds killing. Instead, they would know that the suburban white 17 year old did not suddenly “change his mind” but recognize that the scary man caught up to the 17 year old running away, and the 17 year old fought off this armed man chasing him who was trying to harm him.
Only an implicitly racist jury would see evidence of a running away 17 year old fighting off the armed guy chasing him down a dark path as a justification for killing that 17 year old. Because the entire defense rests on the implicitly racist notion that a 17 year old running away “changes his mind” and acts violently toward the man chasing him who meant him no harm. Those who legitimize this racist defense are despicable.
The good news is that this racist defense that certain folks here seem to find credible was also used in the Georgia trial of the men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery. The jury demonstrated that it is possible to put aside implicit racism and render justice.
But those who deny that there is any racism are a huge part of the problem. They find the Zimmerman verdict perfectly reasonable which reveals their own implicit biases.
From the trial of those who murdered Ahmaud Arbery using the same ridiculous defense as Zimmerman did:
“In her closing argument on 22 November, Ms Dunikoski said that the defendants “assumed” Mr Arbery had committed a crime and tried to unlawfully detain him “without legal authority”.
“You can’t create the situation and then go ‘I was defending myself’,” Ms Dunikoski said, adding that all three defendants had made their decisions because Mr Arbery “was a black man running down the street”.
…..
“It was obvious that he was attacking me, that if he had gotten the shotgun from me, it was a life-or-death situation,” Travis McMichael told the court.”
Like Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery didn’t just calmly allow the armed folks chasing him to do whatever they wanted to him without trying to get away. Trying to get away from scary armed people who chase you down and try to unlawfully detain you involves using force. That doesn’t justify the people unlawfully detaining them to kill them because they were trying to get away from them using force.
Thankfully, the Georgia jury put aside any racial biases they may have had. It would be good if the folks who claim they have no racial biases at all – but they are certain that the jury made the right decision that Zimmerman was justified in killing Trayvon – started acknowledging their own biases instead of leaning into them while denying they have any.
Weird, my comment prompted an unhinged 1,000 word response accusing me of being a racist and ascribing a whole bunch of views to me that I’ve never expressed. Who could have predicted!
Karen, it is understandable one might equate far-left criticism of TKAM & Huckleberry Finn since it’s so commonly said, not just in comment threads to MSM articles but also stated (usually out of context) by media outlets. But there’s no equivalency there. Some [many?] school districts’ ELA depts—and even a state or two– have removed them from required reading/ classroom discussion, finding it too dicey to discuss books larded with the n-word and other racial slurs [not because of ‘savior complex’ in the case of TKAM]. But they didn’t remove them from school libraries. That is not equivalent to pubschdistricts decreeing the removal of dozens of books from their library shelves, effectively making them unavailable for all their students.
I find the campus speaker issue much more problematic. In my antique (but noisy) campus day, speakers visiting to promote unpopular viewpoints [such as pro-VNW/ VNW draft, or against boycotting US co’s with large investment in apartheid SAfrica] could expect to be booed and picketed. But there was no concerted effort to keep them away. The spirit of non-violent civil protest was respected (and honored/ enforced—the non-violent part). Debate of controversial subjects was encouraged.
Cosign.
Love this!❤️
THIS!!!!!
All praise to the Brooklyn Public Library!!!!
So awesome.