By Annie Julia Wyman
Last week, during the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, I found out that a group of parents had recently pressured the public school I attended, in Texas, into “suspending” not just one but seven different books from assigned reading lists. The plain fact of the suspension wasn’t surprising to me. Highland Park High School, situated in perhaps the best school district in the state, serves a conservative community in two small towns that thrive on football and prayer and whose combined population of thirty-one thousand is ninety-one per cent white. During my time there, we had a chaplain for every sports team, creationists on the teaching staff, and a mandatory daily recitation of the Texas State Pledge. But people who live in places like my home town are not necessarily ignorant. People who ban books do sometimes read them. The towns my high school serves, Highland Park and University Park (collectively known as the Park Cities) are the two most educated municipalities in Texas. The Dallas Morning News reported that more than a hundred concerned residents attended a school board meeting to debate the suspension, many armed with “books flagged with sticky notes” from which they argued.
For a week—before a backlash and an online petition from alumni and other parents led to the reinstatement of every book but one—no teacher in my old high school was allowed to assign these seven volumes in class: “Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison; “Siddhartha,” by Hermann Hesse; “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie; “The Art of Racing in the Rain,” by Garth Stein; “An Abundance of Katherines,” by John Green; “The Glass Castle,” a memoir about poverty by Jeanette Walls; and “The Working Poor: Invisible in America,” a nonfiction study, also about poverty, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David K. Shipler
No comments:
Post a Comment