This month a high school English teacher quit her job in response to the enforcement of a new Oklahoma state law on teaching controversial subjects. School officials instructed their teachers to cover up or remove books from their classrooms whose “titles might ‘elicit challenges'” to the law. If a teacher could reasonably defend a book, it wouldn’t have to be covered up or removed.
Summer Boismier had 500 books in her classroom and covered up all of them with paper and the note “Books the State Doesn’t Want You to Read.” She printed a QR code for students to get easy access to the Brooklyn Public Library’s “Books Unbanned” program, which decries the challenges that have been made to teens reading books written by Black or LGB-etc. authors.
What books does this program recommend?
“As part of the initiative, the library will also make a selection of frequently challenged books available with no holds or wait times for all BPL cardholders. The books include: Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, Tomboy by Liz Prince, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.”
Is this what Boismier had on her shelves? Were school officials fine with this library before Oklahoma HB1775 was passed?
Looking at the language of the law, these books would not be a problem unless they were required reading. They certainly weren’t banned. Moreover, if the principal and school board allowed such books in the classroom, they were definitely not banned.
What the law forbids is a teacher or course instructing students in such ideas as racial inferiority, discrimination, and inherent oppression. It attempts to prevent students from believing they should discriminate against their peers on the basis of race or sex and that due to their category in society they are inherently oppressed or oppressors.
The intent of this law is completely lost on some librarians and teachers who seem to think their discriminatory judgment cannot be challenged by anyone. A challenge to one book is seen as a challenge to all books.
With my limited knowledge of the books named above, I’m going to suggest Toni Morrison’s novel is the most valuable and least objectionable. Her writing and themes are marvelous, but you can see in this report out of St. Louis reasons The Bluest Eye would be challenged for teenagers. I’m confident some of what’s referred to here is difficult to read and would be better read by those college-aged and older.
It’d be safe to bet The Bluest Eye was in Boismier’s lending library, but was every other book of the “Books Unbanned” type? No Moby Dick or Paradise Lost? No Great Expectations? Was there a collection of poems by Gwendolyn Brooks? (She talks about her most famous poem and objections to it in a recording from the Academy of American Poets.)
All of the books in that classroom couldn’t have been problematic according to the school’s interpretation of the law. The real problem is how they got into the school in the first place.