The 2023-2024 U.S. public school year registered a tripling from the previous year of the number of books banned, mostly by conservative Republican Christian “citizens panels” and conservative Christian home-schooling moms and with the help of Republican legislatures. Colonization and the Wampanoag Story was one such casualty. Debbie Reese, founder of the American Indians in Children Literature group, said “To claim this book is fiction dismisses our perspective and history” and diminishes “Native kids” and non-Native kids alike. “This country is better off,” she noted, “if we all know history in a more informed way” (pen dot org press release, October 16, 2024). Popular belief has it that children’s and young adult fiction must now feature three mommies and alarming drug use, but banned titles include Roots: The Saga of An American Family; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880; and Go Tell it On the Mountain.
Thankfully, citizen groups with signatures in hand demanded that Colonization and the Wampanoag Story be reclassified as juvenile non-fiction and returned to its rightful place. “This was a mistake from the outset . . . We are glad to hear that the Montgomery County Commission recognized the error” (pen dot org press release, October 17, 2024).
Books are banned and falsely classified as having “gay agendas,” as confusing kindergarteners with “C.R.T.” and as exposing them to authors who “hate America.” This wastes the intellectual and labor resources that are needed to root out real sexism, bigotry, racism and xenophobia.
My question to you, Dear Reader, is whether book-banning hordes a) actually know American history well and are therefore so ashamed of our histories of bigotry and sexual violence, racism and land-theft, as to prevent knowledge thereof by children and young adults; or b) simply do not know such histories in the first place. The former can be charged with craven cynicism, the latter, with living inside a small bubble or loud echo-chamber. E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web has been banned because it features animals who speak, and speaking animals violate God’s natural order. Other book-banners know that whitewashing American history is the only way for them to hold on to their power; dominant white European cultures have long “whitewashed” Indigenous history. Americans seem, en masse, unable to discern fact from fiction anymore.
Speaking of “whitewashing” . . . have you heard the one about the “Black Insurrectionist” who convinced millions of Americans already of fraud about an election that hasn’t even happened yet? He’s the dude, I mean, “the anonymous social media influencer” from upstate New York, the white dude, Jason G. Palmer. Now that man has an agenda . . .
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