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This past week, a South Florida event sprung from yet the latest racially fueled book-banning farce.
The site was Coral Gables Congregational Church. Those in attendance knew their purpose in speaking out against the repulsive incident at the K-8 Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes, where a committee removed five titles from the school library in response to one parent’s objections.
They included – Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb, “Love to Langston” by Tony Medina, “Countries in the News Cuba” by Kieran Walsh, “Cuban Kids” by George Ancona, and “The ABCs of Black History” by Rio Cortez.
Reasons given included “references to critical race theory,” “indirect hate messages,” and “gender ideology and indoctrination.”
The packed house was given Gorman’s book and others that have been recently restricted. Books & Books founder and event host Mitch Kaplan said, “There needed to be some way to show the absurdity of what happened.”
THE PARADOX OF BOOK BANNING IN 2023
REASON 1
One of the best ways to promote a book is to stir up controversy about its contents. Banning a book usually has the effect of increasing its demand.
Individuals, including students, who might never have heard of “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951) or “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969), were more likely to seek it out when it was officially forbidden. The attempt to suppress “Portnoy’s Complaint” turned its author Philip Roth into a significant American literary celebrity. The impulse to break cultural taboos is nearly universal, especially with younger kids.
REASON 2
Book banning was counterproductive enough during the age of the printed book.
But now that most of the books in question are also available online, sometimes in pirated editions, it is virtually impossible to keep them out of the hands of those who are resourceful enough to seek them out. Building a gate between students and the wide world of discourse is no longer possible.
Any kid with a device and a modicum of privacy can get instant access to materials far more explicit and potentially corrosive than the books in question. We delude ourselves if we think pulling “objectionable” books from the library shelves will ensure that the people we are trying to protect won’t find them in some other way.
In Soviet Russia, banned or incendiary books often circulated underground in a few painstakingly generated typescripts; Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s pivotal “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich circulated widely in battered and clandestine typescripts before it was finally published in November 1962. The hunger for these forbidden “books” was much more significant because they were banned than if they had been permitted by Soviet authorities to be published.
REASON 3
Many banned books wind up being regarded later as American classics.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked “Portnoy’s Complaint” 52nd on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the 20th century. Among the best-known banned books-turned-classics are John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (1925), James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1920), Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (1955), and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969).
Countless towns, schools, and local libraries endured attempts to ban the Harry Potter books (first book 1998) and in the 2000’s because of paganism and witchcraft. From today’s vantage point, this seems silly, even pathetic. Millions of young people attribute their love of reading to J.K. Rowling’s books, yet few have subsequently given their lives to the “satanic arts.” The banning community particularly discredits itself when it goes after “Harry Potter” or “Lord of the Flies” (1954).
REASON 4
In an astonishingly large percentage of cases, the book banners have not even bothered to read the books they seek to suppress.
This was the case with Salman Rushdie’s notorious “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which brought on an Islamic fatwa in which he was condemned to death by Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who admitted he had not read the book. The same was true of Rushdie’s Aug. 12, 2022, 24-year-old assailant Hadi Matar, who admitted in a jailhouse interview that he could not be sure he had read “The Satanic Verses,” and indeed no more than one or two pages.
Daily Salinas, the parent who filed the complaints against the five books says she “hasn’t fully read any of them” and says, “I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education.”
However, despite her disdain for Gorman and Langston Hughes’ poetry and being a non-reader – there is one book for children that Salinas promotes on her social media: “The Kid’s Guide to Ron DeSantis” by Former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee—available for just $1.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached by email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
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