An Open Letter To The Book Banning Crowd

Seriously, We’re Still Doing This?

Hi Guys,

It’s been a while. In fact, it’s been decades since I talked to you. In an ever-changing world, I see that you’ve remained exactly the same. EXACTLY. THE. SAME.

I remember the first time we met. I was a teenager. You were all over the place, screaming and hollering about Huckleberry Finn. It had to be taken out of schools, you said. Had to be! It was to protect my precious young eyes from seeing course language like the word, you know the one.

Do you know what my parents did? They bought me the damn book. Do you know why? Because while you were over there clutching your pearls like Maude Flanders, feigning moral outrage, we were living in reality.

Every time I saw you on television, I noticed most of you were white. Aha! My mother schooled me real quick on the game you were playing. As white folks, you had the luxury of banning books with that word in hopes that it would just go away and with it, an unpleasant history.

Must be nice because I can tell you, my family, my father’s family are descendants of slaves (My 6th great grandfather was enslaved in Charlestown, SC before escaping and finding his way to Canada). We don’t get the luxury of waving our hands and banning books in the hope it’ll make history go away. We live with it and its effects every single day through generational trauma, through continued racism. We just don’t. And in my house, you don’t either.

My parents used that book, and others, to teach me facts. You remember those? No? Okay, well they’re those irrefutable things that exist no matter how badly you wish they didn’t. Things like the Earth is Round and Coivd is a real thing that killed real people. They used them to teach me history. From those books, I learned many of the mistakes of history. I was able to ask questions. You know the old saying, “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Just sayin’.

I ignored you in the 2000s when you came for the Harry Potter books. So worried, still clutching those pearls, that your precious youngsters might learn witchcraft or something. It was so stupid, I just didn’t bother. it also didn’t affect me at the time. I was wrong, I shouldn’t have ignored you. For that, I apologize. if I’d have called you out then, maybe I could have put an end to your misery, but I didn’t.

And now, here you are again. First, you popped up in a school district in Tennessee and recently banned Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust citing rough language and nudity. It, according to the McMinn County School Board, was more than 8th graders could possibly be exposed to.

Ummmm, have you ever met an 8th grader? They’re 13 and 14 years old. Trust me when I tell you as a mother who has raised 3 children, at that age, they’ve been exposed to more nudity than the cartoon drawing in Maus. They’ve, well, most of them, have seen actual titties, either on TV or the internet or in real life (yeah, I said it, do you know where you kids are all the time?). They’ve also heard, and most likely said some pretty coarse things.

And now, Texas. Here we go again. School librarians are reviewing their institutions’ holdings for possible removal after an October 2021 letter from Representative Matt Krause listing 850 so-called divisive books.

Two of the books mentioned were Judy Blume’s Blubber and Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret? I read both of these as a pre-teen. And of course, there are the books dealing with LGBTQ+ characters, we couldn’t have the children reading THAT, now could we? We couldn’t have the precious ones catching “the gay” now could we? It doesn’t work that way, by the way. I read Durango Street in grade 7, I didn’t catch gang life.

You have heard about young people committing suicide because of bullying, right? You have heard of young LGTBQ+ people doing the same thing, right? These books are sometimes the only bright spot they have in a confusing and scary life — the only inkling that they aren’t alone. That’s how I felt about Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret? I was a late bloomer, desperately wanting to develop and look like my more mature presenting peers. The book made me feel a little better about that because as fictional as the character may have been, she got my struggle.

I have to ask, do you want your children to be stupid? I ask that facetiously because I know the answer. You don’t, not exactly, but you sure don’t want them thinking for themselves. You want to eliminate anything and everything that might spark an uncomfortable conversation or challenge your narrow little view of the world.

Why? because you’re terrified. You may not realize it, but I won’t disrespect you that much by assuming so. In fact, I think you absolutely know what you’re doing and why. You don’t want your worldview being held to question. You want your kids to blindly accept it and to carry it on. And you don’t want to have the uncomfortable discussions about history where, in many instances, it was your ancestors (and hey, mine too, I’m half-white) who perpetrated the wrongdoing.

As far as history goes, you’re right, it was brutal. It was bloody. It was horrific. Slavery and the Holocaust were disgusting, terrible events. But they happened. Racism and antisemitism happened — facts. And no amount of book banning will change that. These aren’t just unfortunate past events, they are current events. Jews and people of colour are dealing with antisemitism and racism on a daily basis. No amount of book banning will change that.

But never mind all that, right? I mean why discuss things when we can sweep it all under the rug in the name of protecting young innocent minds.

Funny thing though, if your way of thinking was so correct, you wouldn’t need to be so scared of challenge. You’d allow all questions, all opposing views to step forward and make their case, confident in the knowledge that you could meet them head-on and make your case. You refuse the debate because, frankly, you got nothin’. You know it. I know it. Now everybody knows it. Well, at least my roughly 900 followers and a handful of others will know it.

It’s terrifying to me that you’re actually okay with crippling the critical thinking skills of an entire generation. it scares me even more that you’re content to force-feed them this sanitized version of the world that doesn’t exist. What do you think’s going to happen to them when they finally leave the nest and encounter a world they were never prepared for? How do you think they’ll function in a world where they can’t tolerate any other opinions but their own?

I don’t expect you to give my position much consideration, not really. I would hope for it, but well, you know, opposing views and all that. What I’d really love to do is get some sort of huge shipping container and drop a load of your so-called banned books on these school districts. I’d also toss in a few copies of George Orwell’s 1984. Why? Why don’t you try reading it and you tell me.

Sincerely,

A Really (not fake) Outraged Person

PS: You’re losing this battle. Sales of these “banned books” are through the roof, or so I’ve recently read. Something about forbidden fruit tasting the sweetest. I think there’s a story about that… hmmm.