California school district bans classic works of American literature
Right on schedule, amid the new unconstitutional lockdowns, we have book bannings coming out of a liberal enclave. Newsweek is reporting that the Burbank Unified School District has banned many classic works of American fiction from use in course syllbi for their “offensive” presence of the N-word (historical context is soooo passe in education).
Until further notice, teachers in the area will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Four parents, three of whom are Black, challenged the classic novels for alleged potential harm to the district’s roughly 400 Black students.
All but Huckleberry Finn have been required reading for students in the district.
Carmenita Helligar said her daughter, Destiny, was approached by a white student in math class using a racial taunt including the N-word, which he’d learned from reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry while both attended the David Starr Jordan Middle School.
“My family used to own your family and now I want a dollar from each of you for the week,” another boy is said to have told Destiny.
Yes, I’m totally sure this happened. It sounds so legit that it just has to be true! If a kid learns the N-word, it is most assuredly not coming from reading. It’s coming from rap music or just hearing some black youth interacting with anyone. I can’t count how many times I’ve been casually called “nigga” by an urban youth, and I’m not even black.
Helligar, who is one of the parents who filed a complaint in the case, claimed the boy’s excuse was that he had read it in class and the principal had been dismissive of the incident.
“My daughter was literally traumatized,” Helligar said. “These books are problematic … you feel helpless because you can’t even protect your child from the hurt that she’s going through.”
Nadra Ostrom, another Black parent who filed a complaint, argued that the portrayal of Black people is mostly from a white perspective.
“There’s no counter-narrative to this Black person dealing with racism and a white person saving them,” she said.
Atticus Finch is such an asshole for doing the right thing and helping a black guy. Effing white knighting the poor fella.
Ostrom added that the current education given to students assumes “that racism is something in the past.”
We wouldn’t want kids in school to learn the truth about things. That keeps them from being convinced they’re victims of something and entitled to special treatment.
Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Liberals suck
In Malcolm X’s autobiography he called all white people “devils” and actually believed white people were created on an island by a mad scientist.
Does that get banned?
Now let’s talk about the hate manual of the Koran…
If you think that’s whacked, check out Moorish Science sometime. 😱
So let me understand this correctly. The parents state that current education material assumes “that racism is something in the past.” Do they offer other alternatives that might better display how current racism effects them? Probably not…since it is not their job to educate others, to include their child!
I seam to remember reflecting on the blatant racism in the books and understanding that it did effect others. I was raised in Illinois, at a time of integration. In fact my first years we unwittingly the first years they integrated the schools. I did not realize it until later, that my older siblings had not always had black students with them. I found it strange to be opposed to busing (I liked the kids I grew up with and played sports with). It wasn’t until I read those books that I understood what it was like for them.
Sorry to hear that these adults can’t deal with telling their children that reality exists, and how to deal with it!
Fortunately, most race hoaxers know absolutely nothing about how non-progressives think. As a result, they have this cartoonish view of what non-progs are and the scenarios they come up with attest to this. To them, a non-prog (I keep using that because it isn’t just conservatives they believe think like this) actually DOES think in such a way that a boy learning the N-word from classic literature makes them call others this word and claim past slave holding credentials is a believable story.
►The kind of kid that would actually call another student the N-word in 2020 is looking for good racial epithets in classic books?
►They didn’t know of this word prior to reading a school assignment?
►There is a kid in middle/high school that would actually say the dreaded N-word in public? I think that has been demonized to the point of being like screaming “I love Satan” in the town square during the Spanish Inquisition
►THAT’s what they would come up with as an insult (assuming they actually used the word)?
Did they think that including a MAGA hat reference would be just TOO much, or something?
This has as much credibility as going out for Subway late at night in a freezing weather in downtown Chicago and being accosted by two MAGA hat wearing guys (once again skulking around downtown Chi-raq at night) who beat you up and put a noose around your head which they happened to be carrying around and then you walk back to your apartment (with your sandwich cause damn they’re good) and waiting to call the cops for a while and still having the rope around your neck when they finally show up.
Yes, it’s that credible. At least it is when you believe this IS what people who don’t think exactly like you behave.
I had a future dream or flashback(not sure which) that the New History books have a story about Patriots dressing up as ANTIFA/BLM natives and tossing democrats in the bays all over America during the Second American Revolution…..
Got to love a woman named Sydney and an attorney too!
MAGA
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
Ahhhhhhh California again.
Shithole.
The Never Ending Story. A kids movie from the mid ’80s that many of us had to play over and over again for our girl children. Who’d a thunk that the term would be applied to snowflakes 35 years later.
No way. no how that this is the FIRST time that these kids have heard the n-word. If they are banning books, then let’s ban the rap music/videos that are flooding the airwaves. ‘Specially the ones thumping out from the hoop-de-mobile sitting at the traffic light…in the center of both lanes…blocking traffic…and then copping an attitude when somebody toots their horn to move them along after the light has cycled thru 3 times.
But ol’ Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is progressive and the black people in it are the heroes– WTF, over?
Lars ❤️ BLM!
Not really.
I just think black lives matter and we desperately need law enforcement reform in the country.
I know you.., are pro-leading the industrial world in extrajudicial killing of citizens by police.
Let’s just agree to disagree on whether we should let our government continue to do that with little or no effective accountability, oversight, or even public record keeping of incidents.
And the fact that we require as little as 4 weeks of training to be a cop, and in some jurisdictions you can be a cop for up to six months without any training whatsoever…, that is perfectly normal.
The certification requirements to be a hairdresser is longer than the requirements to be a cop in nearly every state in the country. Usually twice as long.
Plumber is several times longer.
Lars, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that law enforcement officers are randomly gunning down African Americans every day with no justification whatsoever. Look at the numbers. Homicides caused by LEO are a fraction of 1% every year. The biggest threats to African Americans are Planned Parenthood, African Americans and Democrat Fundraiser Ed Buck. Between those three, they terminate more African Americans in one week than all of Law Enforcement and the KKK.
Nope, not under any “mistaken” impression.
The statistics are what they are.
Police in the US kill more citizens than any other industrial society. Several times more.
And if you are black you are even more at risk.
We use armed police for too many things they are ill equipped, poorly trained, and psychologically not well suited to do.
I was a cop. What I saw shocked me. We desperately need law enforcement reform in this country.
Dunno what “empirical evidence” you’re using for the claim in boldface, Commissar – but a Harvard professor has studied the issue in detail (3,000+ staff hours of work) and says you’re full of it. His data and analysis of same shows that minority detainees appear to be slightly less likely to be shot or tazed in a police encounter than someone who is white. It also shows that the proportion of whites and minorities who are armed when stopped by police are roughly the same.
FWIW: the study’s author is a tenured professor (economics) at Harvard. So he knows a thing or two about how to conduct numerical analysis of data.
He’s also black.
The study was published in 2016. I wrote an article about it not long after it was published:
https://valorguardians.com/blog/?p=66801
Is your “empirical evidence” for this latest bogus claim perchance Maui Wowie? Acapulco Gold? Toledo Window Box? Party Dogma? Or simply Rectus Extractus?
He’s not interested in facts. Just wants to spew poison.
The mantra of “We desperately need police reform” is front and center of how big his (and his ilk’s) blinders are.
It’s law enforcement’s fault 3 strikes laws were passed.
It’s law enforcement’s fault they society has washed it’s hands of addicts and mental health cases.
It’s law enforcement’s fault marijuana is illegal.
It’s law enforcement’s fault having crack leads to more prison time than having cocaine.
It’s law enforcement’s fault putting Americans in prison has been incentivized by privatization of prisons.
It’s law enforcement’s fault that the “snitches get stitches” mentality is glorified in popular culture and music.
It’s law enforcement’s fault that single parent households are more likely to have kids who engage in antisocial activities. And that 25% of parents in the use are single parents.
It’s law enforcement’s fault that over half of all arrests for murder in the US are African American.
It’s law enforcement’s fault people will call the cops instead of asking their neighbor to turn down their music.
It’s law enforcement’s fault that the federal, state and local governments have passed these laws and taken these actions.
It’s law enforcement’s fault the society refuses to accept responsibility and accountability for their own localities and each other.
Of course cops are at fault for everything. It’s not like we live in a representative republic where the citizens elect their leaders and those leaders create laws.
And it’s not like individual citizens should have an obligation to behave in humane manner toward their neighbors.
Black lives only matter when it paints cops in a bad light.
“And the fact that we require as little as 4 weeks of training to be a cop, and in some jurisdictions you can be a cop for up to six months without any training whatsoever…, that is perfectly normal”.
Well… you passed it. And it seems to make you some sort of expert in the matter. Or are you questioning your own credentials?
There’s an idiotic talking point I didn’t think even you would trot out. And you call me a propagandist.
A plumber, who get’s his hair did by a certified hairdresser, probably lives a lawful life, and therefore doesn’t have a self initiated violent run in with a cop trained in only 4 weeks, who then has to shoot his ass!
Increased law enforcement training would be ideal. I agree with you.
But at the end of that same day, some criminals, who are also sometimes black, will attempt deadly force or great harm on said police officer… and get shot in the face.
See what I said yesterday, Manchu? You invoke his name and he appears to throw dung around the place…
They didn’t ban them.
They removed them, temporarily, from the required reading list.
And schools have been banning books since…well schools existed.
There was a banned book room at my high school it was behind the library computer lab. Most of the students thought it was just a supply closet. The key sat right on top of the door frame.
I used to sneak in there whenever I had a chance and read all the “hidden knowledge”. There was four book shelves. And the books were essentially put on the shelves in the order they were banned from 1918 onward.
The irony is regular books were usually removed from the shelves after 10-20 or so years. But the banned books just sat there since the year the school was built.
It was interesting to see what parents were outraged about over the decades.
Most were banned in the 1950s and 1960s. When America was “great” they were banning books like crazy.
The most laughable, being a southern California school, was a book on surfing. It had a chapter dedicated to how to go into the forest and select the right tree to make a surfboard out of. That’s how old it was.
Parents were afraid their kid would read the book and become a degenerate surfer.
Parents can be ridiculous. Remember when D&D caused kids to become satanic devil worshippers? There was a couple of D&D novels sitting on those shelves. Brand new. Never even made it to the school card catalog.
The stuff hysterical reactionary parents freak out about should not be used as political propaganda to label an entire community, state, or political party as irrational.
Are you saying that banning books is a good thing, because it’s always been done? This is not a case of removing books because they’re age-inappropriate, or removing books from a reading list. This is bunch of ill-informed social justice warriors thinking their precious little children are getting bad ideas from these books, and therefore they should not exist. Fahrenheit 451 was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to manual. Violating the first amendment by banning books is not political propaganda, it’s an abuse of governmental authority by the state of California. But that’s ok with you. You’re a fraud.
No.
Made my point in my last paragraph.
Not a fraud.
And the books were not banned.
They were removed from required reading lists.
Not the same thing.
This entire outrage is fraudulent.
It is propaganda.
The propaganda is calling book banning “removal from required reading lists”. Again I say, you do not get to change the definition of things to suit your purposes. If your children are “traumatized” by these books, the school district has not failed, you as a parent have failed your child.
Indeed.
If a book has been “removed from the required reading list” by order of the school board, then by definition the teachers cannot use it in their classroom instruction. Sounds to me like the teachers in that district were indeed prohibited from so using the work(s) in question.
Or, in plain language: teachers were “banned” from using these books in instruction. Thus, these books legitimately may be referred to as having been “banned” by the school board.
Whether the book was also ordered removed from the school’s library is another matter entirely. It’s also irrelevant to the point of whether its use in the classroom was banned.
This has more to do with California being a liberal nanny state than it does with race.
Most non-liberal places in the US if a white kid were to call a black kid the “n” word the parental expectation would be punching the mouthy little turd in the face.
And if anyone’s take away from To Kill a Mockingbird is it’s ok to be racist, then they need to work on reading comprehension.
Same with Huckleberry Finn. In that work, Huck outright states that he’s willing to go to hell for helping Jim escape slavery.
One would literally have to be a moron to miss Twain’s intentional sarcasm in that particular section of the book.
And you just described pretty much every one of the “american” left…
Quotes and lower case because they aren’t really Americans, they just happen to live here
Twain’s intentional sarcasm in nearly everything he wrote might have something to do with his being referred to as a satirist. But, with the progressive liberal inability to read for comprehension, the context of his work gets lost.
Da, Comrade. In Socialist Republic of Kalifornia, school not for education. School for “proper” indoctrination in Party Dogma!
The proper response to some asshole kid saying some asshole racist thing is for the kid receiving the taunt to throw a good-n-fast lunge punch to the asshole’s mouth, with a rapid follow up sufficient to put the asshole down on their ass.
Making a one-punch-down is optimal, but not required
Usually works wonders to end racist taunting. Note, others may intervene to deliver the lesson, as needed.
(Looks at knuckle scars…) heh
It’s amazing how fast a bully will rethink their life choices after they taste their own blood. I have three good friends from high school that bullied me relentlessly in middle school. Puberty leveled the playing field. heh.