So it’s okay so long as you’re not banning books?
I generally don’t enter into charged debates on my town’s local Facebook parenting page. I’m there to give away stuff (so long forever, Pack ‘n Play!) and find out when the Halloween parade is. I’m not interested in a battle of the wits with someone who posts their “facts†about the dangers of the MMR vaccine.
But I’m having a hard time keeping quiet right now as parents argue over the high school’s selected reading for the 11th graders: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
“It’s upsetting,” one parent wrote of the novel.
“It’s obscene!” said another.
These parents aren’t asking for the book to be banned. Instead, they were requesting that their children be allowed to opt-out of the assigned reading and read something else instead.
It’s okay for their classmates to read “pornographic†writing, I guess?
If this isn’t a damn metaphor for our desperate attempt to shield our own kids from danger without giving a thought to the rest of humanity, I sure as shit don’t know what is.
Instead of helping their teens—many of whom are soon going to be able to join the military and have the right to vote—understand the horrors of racism and poverty and the other issues in Morrison’s novel and other difficult novels they may be asked to read, they just want it to go away.
I question why these parents are so focused on the protection of their own children without a care for other kids.
The conversation shouldn’t be whether or not Morrison’s novel is upsetting. It is.
The conversation should be about the numbers of kids who go to bed hungry at night or are in homes that are food insecure. That’s the definition of obscene.
The data on children living in abusive homes is grotesque.
By 16, many of these students these parents are trying to protect will already have been the victims of dating violence or sexual assault (which their concerned parents may or may not know about).
Bullying. Mental illness. Homophobia.
The list of horrors we inflect upon our young, both here and around the world, is depressingly long and depressingly awful. To not read about it? When has denial ever solved anything?
So I couldn’t bite my tongue during this discussion. Finally, I suggested to the parents that for a thoughtful essay on this topic that they read “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood” by Sherman Alexie. If you haven’t already done so, I suggest you do, too. He argues that in trying to steer their children away from books about racism, and mental illness, and rape, and poverty, these adults are trying to protect their children’s privilege.
I’m sure the high school administration is stuck, and they’re going to have to allow these parents to pick an alternate novel because all hell would break loose if God forbid anyone told these people to shut up.
But I sure wish someone would.