Keep book banning candidates off boards
Most parents want what’s best for their children, although there can be differences of opinion as to what that looks like and how it is achieved. My parents worked to make sure they raised my sister and me to become happy, well-adjusted adults who are engaged and informed members of society. And they did a pret- ty good job consid- ering the material they had to work with.
They loved us, of course, but they also assigned chores, set limits and meted out discipline when necessary. The one thing they never did, though, was tell us the books we could and could not read.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I took a combined English and social studies class. The teachers arranged shelves filled with their personal books to create a library nook in the classroom and told us we could take out any book we wanted. It felt very mature and exciting to have hundreds of books written for grown-ups at my disposal.
The first book I chose was “Goodbye, Columbus” by Philip Roth, which won the National Book Award in 1960. Set in New Jersey during the 1950s, it was a book about premarital sex, contraception, Jewish American identity, class differences and more sex. In other words, exactly what a 15-year-old Christian girl living in upstate New York who couldn’t even think about talking to a boy without passing out could relate to. When my parents saw I’d brought the book home, their only comment was “Oh, you’re reading Philip Roth.” The way they said it made me think they wanted to say something more about it, but they didn’t.
Well, they probably should have said it because after I finished the book I promptly moved to New Jersey, procured contraception, and lost my virginity, and not necessarily in that order.
I’m kidding. Actually, I finished the book, said “huh” and returned it for another book.
The next book I borrowed was “Manchild in the Promised Land” by Claude Brown. Published in 1965, the bestseller was hailed as a modern classic of the Black experience. Either I was making a concerted effort to read books that portrayed life outside my limited, cloistered experience or the biography of Sweet Polly Purebred had already been signed out.
The book detailed the struggles to break free from the poverty of Harlem in the 1940s and ’50s, and white readers at the time were shocked to learn that it’s hard to escape gangs and drugs and crime when you are poor and Black. No one told me this wasn’t the right book for me or even that the book, with its gritty portrayal of life outside anything I’d considered possible, had no place on a school bookshelf. Which was something I had a lot of time to think about during my stint in juvvy for drug dealing and prostitution. Again, I’m kidding.
Actually, I never really thought much about either of those books until recently when I began to hear talk about candidates for local school boards who not only would oppose those books being available to students, but who would have turned my 10th-grade teachers into examples of what they think is wrong with education in America. It may come as a surprise that removing books from our schools is a big issue in the upcoming election, seeing as we aren’t in Florida or Texas or one of the many other states where book banning is becoming commonplace. But make no mistake, there is a concerted and organized effort underway in our area to, according to a group called Take Back our School Boards, “flip these seats.”
It can be hard to figure out what candidates really stand for when they all offer some version of wanting what’s best for our children. But after listening to and reading about candidate forums in area school districts, I began to hear common phrases coming from certain candidates. Wanting to ensure “collaboration” and that “all stakeholders have a voice” sounds very reasonable on its face until you realize that the stakeholders and collaborators they’re talking about are people who want to ban books. These same candidates also profess that we should keep politics out of our schools. Again, this sounds reasonable, except here they consider the support of diverse opinions, experiences, and identities as “politics.”
Books, like the ones I read in high school, can deepen understanding and create empathy by exposing us to perspectives and experiences different from our own. And books that allow a young person to identify with a character whose race, or sexual preference, or gender identity mirrors their own can, quite literally, save lives.
These candidates, and those who support them, have every right to make choices about the books their own children read, but they have no business putting those limits on my child. Or on yours.
Please vote on Tuesday to keep these decisions in the hands of trained educators and librarians. Because you can be sure those who oppose equity, inclusivity and diversity in our children’s education have May 17 circled on their calendars.