A reading awareness project: Banned books list printed on free bookmarks

A banned books list printed on bookmarks should include a square to mark off the titles we have already read. I will start by checking To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nigh-time, by Mark Haddon :

Dateline Texas: 130 books were targeted by reactionary parents. 11 were banned. Frustrated students started their own club: Leander’s Banned Book’s Club.

And this:  An echo opinion letter published in The Washington Post:  Pretty soon, we’ll just not let children read at all. 

What? What is this?  "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nigh-time"??- Oh paaleeeze! The novel is narrated in the first-person perspective by Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy who is described as "a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties" living in Swindon, Wiltshire.

To the editor of The Washington Post:  I’m grateful to be a high school senior. Youth education has become highly politicized and is used as a pawn for politicians to win votes. And behind the deliberately vague wording lies a clear motive to restrict dialogue about sexuality and gender identity among students, some of whom might be looking for representation of their own.

What frustrates me most is the law’s illogical examples of banned materials, “descriptions, images or videos of sexual bestiality, lewd nudity, sexual excitement, sexual conduct, sadomasochistic abuse, coprophilia, urophilia - IOW, a paraphilic disorder classified under Other Specified Paraphilic Disorder in the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5),,, i.e., obsession with penises...or fetishism.” I might have missed a couple of days here and there, but I’m certain my classes weren’t covering books with urophilia any time in my 12 years of public education. 

In fact, the grouping of sexual excitement and sexual conduct with concepts such as sadomasochistic abuse is chilling.

Banned books!  How many have you read? 

It’s saddening that young children won’t have many trusted adults around them able to speak about such common phenomena. Additionally, this law will more than likely be subverted to target material with LGBTQ+ characters and themes. In the (sadly) polarized world we live in, it’s more important than ever to set an example of open-mindedness for children.

From Jessica Feng, in McLean Virginia

P.S.  In my Maine Writer opinion, we should consider organizing a movement of people who want to protect free speech to begin memorizing Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.

Memorize To Kill a Mockingbird - Fahrenheit 451

It “makes some people uncomfortable.”~ To Kill A Mockingbird

(It's time people start memorizing books like the clairvoyant plot described in the Ray Bradbury novel "Fahrenheit 451".) 

"Uncomfortable"- That was the explanation Kenny Holloway, a school board official in Biloxi, Miss., gave the Sun Herald newspaper last week, for the board’s decision to remove from its eighth-grade curriculum a Pulitzer Prize-winning American classic, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“There is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable,” said Holloway. He said this like it was a bad thing.

In a nation where some educational institutions now deem it their duty to offer “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” to protect their students from vexatious language or behavior like cartons protect eggs and bubble wrap protects china, maybe it is. So I beg your pardon for the heresy that follows.

Because, with pure hearts and noble intentions, these educators are doing nothing less than presiding over what I will call the stupidification and wimpification of this country. Having liberated the American mind from the tyranny of facts, we now seek to liberate it from the bother of contending with difficult words or ideas.

It “makes some people uncomfortable,” he says.

By which he means the word “n----r.” And yes, it is offensive. Indeed, if you are not African American, you may have trouble appreciating just how obnoxious the word is.

But it is also wholly appropriate to Lee’s moralistic tale, set during the Great Depression, of a 6-year-old white girl in the deep South, watching her attorney father defend a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. When one of the locals tries without success to goad her father into a brawl, should the dialogue read: “Too proud to fight, you African-American-lovin’ b----d?”

Let’s be serious.

I am reminded of recent email exchanges with readers angry over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial oppression. These readers argued that protest should not make anyone -- here’s that word again -- uncomfortable. One man said protest should “unify” and “educate.”

Maybe that makes sense in a color-coordinated Pepsi commercial with Kendall Jenner, but it has nothing to do with reality. Did the civil-rights marchers seek to “unify” with Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham? Did the colonists seek to “educate” when they committed the anti-government vandalism called the Boston Tea Party?

No, they were raising their voices, poking a stick in the eye of their oppressors. They were making them … uncomfortable. We should be grateful they did.

And we should ask those uncomfortable people in Biloxi and elsewhere: Where did you get the idea you should be sheltered from history? What made you think you had an expectation of being shielded from truth? 

Who told you you had a right never to be made ill at ease?

Yes, I recognize the possibility -- in fact, the probability -- that some of those discomfited by Lee’s book are African American. It makes no difference.

In literature, as in protest, the audience’s discomfort is often a sign the message is being received. 

As a matter of fact, it can offer an invaluable opportunity to consider, reconsider, debate, teach, learn, reflect and grow.

Or it can be an excuse to run and hide. In a nation where ignorance masquerades as authenticity, and the ability to think deeply and critically on difficult subjects has been mollycoddled into near oblivion, it is too often the latter. So I have no sympathy for those delicate folks in Biloxi.

“Mockingbird” is a seminal text of the American experience. 

Yes, it “makes some people uncomfortable.”

That’s the whole point.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian (i.e. imaginary) novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, published in 1953. It is regarded as one of his best works. The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. But, a group of people memorize the books and pass the narratives along to future generations.