Texas School District Removes Bible and Anne Frank Adaptation in Back-to-School Sweep ↗
From Amanda Holpuch:
One day before students returned to classrooms in North Texas, a school district ordered principals and librarians to remove books including the Bible and a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” from libraries and classrooms.
Forty-one books were challenged by this backward school district last year with a new policy requiring that they be pulled from bookshelves until they can be reviewed. More than thirty-five thousand students may now have free access to important books taken from them.
Additional books challenged by the district include The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe.
These challenges are becoming more frequent, but no less disturbing and sad. Another public banning happened earlier this year, when Maus and others were removed from the shelves of a Tennessee school district. I wrote about it then in a post called The ban of Maus and other essential books. I shudder to think of the momentum that these misguided bans are building.
A notable quote from a speaker during a school board meeting on August 8, included in a CNN article on this story:
“We are very pleased that our new unwoke school board has made these changes. This is just the beginning, I hope.”
For too many people, being “woke” is the worst thing that could ever happen to a person. It’s the boogeyman. A living death. Unwokeness is a quality to strive for and wear like a badge of honor. In other words, compassion, equality, and fact-based learning should be rejected at all costs. Hatred, racism, misogyny, and bigotry are the only admirable qualities (but nobody who bans books would ever put it that truthfully).
How pathetic. Ignorance should be rejected at all costs instead.
Please consider purchasing, reading, and freely sharing these banned books with everyone you know. Especially younger people. They need to read the words that are kept from them. They’re all smarter than they’re given credit for; they can decide for themselves who they want to be and what they want to believe.
As an aside, I feel lucky to have attended school in Southern California when I did. Book bans have long been a blight on this country, but they weren’t so frequent and blatantly hateful when I was younger. I continue to hope that these bans don’t become more prevalent in my area of the state.
I also find it delightful that the Bible was flagged as an inappropriate book. It makes me think of The Satanic Temple and their continued fight against all things religiously hypocritical. Was the inclusion of the Bible their doing?