New article out just today: "Books on race, gender pulled from schools amid conservative push against 'radical' literature". I thought we were assured by certain posters that these CRT laws wouldn't have this affect on public schools.
"Attempts by conservative activists to regulate how schools discuss race, sexuality and gender have contributed to an ongoing effort to remove books seen as controversial from school curricula and libraries.
The most recent high-profile example was Art Spiegelman’s award-winning “Maus,” a graphic novel that depicts the horrors of the Holocaust, being removed from a Tennessee eighth-grade language arts curriculum. The McMinn County School Board voted 10-0 to remove Spiegelman’s book on Jan. 10, but the story began to circulate Wednesday after a report from the Tennessee Holler. According to the minutes from the meeting, the use of curse words and “nakedness” were the impetus for the change. The school board issued a statement Wednesday saying that the decision was not about ignoring the Holocaust but about finding options that were more “age-appropriate” in their content, concluding, "We simply do not believe this work is an appropriate text for our students to study."
Spiegelman said he felt the board’s action was “daftly myopic” but, having read the transcript, didn’t believe the decision was rooted in anti-Semitism. “I’ve met so many young people who ... have learned things from my book,” Spiegelman told CNBC, adding that he understood that something "very, very haywire" was going on in Tennessee.
The Tennessee decision followed news of a Missouri school board voting 4-3 to ban “The Bluest Eye,” a novel by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, which depicts the struggles of a young Black girl dealing with racism. Due to its passages referencing incest and child rape, the book is a regular on the American Library Association’s annual lists of most challenged books. It was almost removed from circulation in Kansas in November, along with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “Fences,” the Pulitzer-winning play by August Wilson. Both Morrison and Wilson were Black. “By all means, go buy the book for your child,” said school board member Sandy Garber of Wentzville, Missouri.
“I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see.”
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told Yahoo News that in her two decades with the organization she has not seen this many “challenges,” the ALA’s term for requests to remove books...
“You have these — they call themselves parents’ rights organizations — pursuing this censorship agenda and arguing that censorship is the proper solution, but once you start using book banning as a tool, where does it end?” Caldwell-Stone said. “So you end up with work like ‘Maus’ being on the chopping block, so what comes next?”
With Republican-controlled states passing laws aimed at preventing the teaching of Critical Race Theory, it is sometimes now easier for groups of parents to target specific texts. According to tracking by PEN America, 71 “gag order” bills have been introduced this month that would limit topics that can be taught in schools.
The movement to remove books from libraries and schools is organized by groups like Moms for Liberty, which has pushed to remove works about Martin Luther King, Jr., from curricula and has ties to prominent Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Another organization involved is No Left Turn in Education, which has dozens of books listed on its website that it claims “spread radical and racist ideologies to students. They demean our nation and its heroes, revise our history, and divide us as a people for the purpose of indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology.” The books listed are predominantly written by nonwhite authors, and on the same page, the group includes books that discuss LGBTQ themes and feature LGBTQ characters. Titles on the list include Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” Angie Thomas’s “The Hate U Give” and Sarah Hoffman’s “Jacob’s New Dress.”
“Some of this has been organized around, frankly, a very cynical campaign to vilify materials dealing with racism in the United States and the experiences of Black Americans, particularly their experiences with police violence and systemic racism, under this rubric of critical race theory,” Caldwell-Stone said. “We’re also seeing organizations who believe that young people should not have access to information about gender or sexual identity.”
Link:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/books-on-race-gender-pulled-from-schools-amid-conservative-push-against-radical-literature-100038361.html
