Collectively, roughly 47% of all adult Americans have lost their damned minds.
Outrage erupted recently in Texas among schoolkids, parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishing companies and literacy program advocates as a Montgomery County “Citizens Review Panel” acceded to the demands of right-wing advocates that Linda Coombs’ Young Adult book, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, not be banned but reclassified as “fiction.”
Most of you, Dear Readers, like most of me, Dear Writers, “knew” (were told) only one side of the story of “America’s founding.” We were taught that the Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, and later, that colonizing pilgrims, buckle-hatted and –shoed, heavily armed men by the boatload, stepped off the Mayflower and onto virgin soil that was just waiting to submit in the name of Jesus Christ to be inhabited, tamed and developed.
The problem is that most of the founding story of America is a fictitious fable set upon an imagined Terra Nullius. Wherever Caucasian Christians stepped, dug, surveyed, chopped, planted, farmed, sluiced and built, they encountered Native American bands and tribes, hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists—hundreds of them, nay, thousands, tens of thousands of them. Whether or not the existing inhabitants “lived in Harmony,” they had been there for thousands if not tens of thousands of years. From the Mayflower’s landing to the First Thanksgiving, from the founding of the U.S. to 2020’s election, America has been purposely misrepresented in school.
Linda Coombs’ book is “told from the perspective of the New England Indigenous Nations that these outsiders found when they arrived,” is a true telling of the “the story of the Indigenous Nations of the American Northeast, including the Wampanoag nation and others, and their history up to present day" (from the publisher’s blurb). The conservative Christian Republican “Citizens Review Panel,” however, saw to its moving to the juvenile fiction section.
P.E.N. America (at pen dot org) reported that 10,000+ books were banned in public schools in 2023-2024—quintuple the figure from 2020-2021. Most of the banned titles are about sexuality, race, racism, sexual abuse, and LGBTQ+ themes. A conservative Christian Republican mother, Michele Nuckolls, forced the adoption by school libraries of “61 Christian, conservative children’s books” (houstonlanding dot org) . . . though she home-schools her children.
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