My Book Was Censored in China.
Now It’s Blacklisted — in Texas.
In October, prosecutors in Wyoming announced that they were considering filing criminal charges against librarians in the state who had L.G.B.T.Q.-positive books on their shelves. The Dallas Morning News reported that parents in Texas “have successfully campaigned against several books and questioned curriculum that delves into challenging subjects, including those addressing social justice and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.” An all-white school board in Pennsylvania banned books and articles on a list of “racial justice resources,” almost all of them by people of color. (After protests led by high school students, the ban was temporarily lifted.) Toni Morrison’s work has been under attack in Virginia, and a Florida school board member filed a criminal report against a book about the Black queer experience that she judged obscene.
I don’t wish to overdramatize; I am on a proud list that includes Isabel Wilkerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Crichton, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William Styron. None of us is rotting in jail; nobody has been forcibly silenced. The Texas document constitutes a cynical electoral stratagem by a bigoted politician in a beleaguered state. But that same state has just passed the nation’s most misogynist abortion law — and after they go for the women, they usually attack the Blacks, the gays, the disabled and the Jews.
I believe that writing the truth as I perceive it is a constitutionally protected right, and that whether or not my books are in school libraries, they will reach their audience. But my daughter, should her peers take an interest in reading my work, may have to explain why it is unavailable to them; she will have to negotiate the proposition that our family’s love is a poison from which they need to be protected.
These are the last three paragraphs of the essay. Perhaps I'm being alarmist, but I feel that this is how losing democracy begins.
As seen elsewhere: ban a publication and the result you get is that it raises the interest for it along with its sales.
ReplyDeleteI hope we can count on the willful mind and the natural curiosity of the young people for them to realize how outrageous these bans are and to get, read and share these books.
Bat - I hope that comes to pass.
ReplyDeleteThey are burying their heads in the sand like these books don't exist. This reminds me of some futuristic movies where they burned the books!
ReplyDeleteWe've already lost it.
ReplyDeleteLuv - As in "Fahrenheit 451".
ReplyDelete