You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
“Parthenon” made of banned books built at site of Nazi book burning:
YCRT! News
In 2012 YCRT! featured a story about the banning of books by the Tucson Unified School District, an infamous incident that exposed Arizona to national and international ridicule. Would you believe those books are still banned? The Arizona Supreme Court is hearing the case now. Meanwhile, here’s a look at ten outlawed books Tucson high school students aren’t allowed to read or study in school.
Some of those banned books, racist Arizona officials claimed, might incite students to overthrow the government. Those same fears seem to be behind protests over Shakespeare in the Park’s production of Julius Caesar, which, according to Fox News, “appears to depict President Trump being brutally stabbed to death by women and minorities.”
In related circle-the-wagons-around-the-unelected-president news, a New Jersey high school teacher has been suspended for photoshopping out Trump T-shirt logos in yearbook photos. Warning: obnoxiously loud auto-play video at the link.
University of Wisconsin student sues her professor for a higher grade, claiming the poetry course she failed focused on “lesbians, illicit sexual relationships, incest and frequent swearing” while ignoring “the importance and the validity of the mainstream student population.”
When I hear people accusing writers of cultural appropriation, I hear an insidious argument for racial and cultural segregation. As this New York Times op/ed author says, “Campaigns against cultural appropriation reveal the changing meaning of what it is to challenge racism. Once, it was a demand for equal treatment for all. Now it calls for cultures to be walled off and boundaries to be policed.”
Always fun: ‘Yippee-ki-yay, Mister Falcon!’: when movie censorship goes wrong.
Misinformed Americans think it’s illegal to sit out the Pledge of Allegiance or refuse to stand during the singing of the national anthem. After NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police shootings of African-Americans, incidents of forced patriotism are on the rise. The latest case involves a first-grader in Terre Haute, Indiana.
I’m going to guess the Alabama high school teacher who sent out this summer reading list would take a dim view of students refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance:
The National Coalition Against Censorship weighs in against a California school district’s plan to remove Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” from its ninth-grade curriculum.
Thanks to censorship imposed by the Comics Code Authority in 1954, comic books today are one of the last holdouts of white patriarchy. It wasn’t always that way.
The TSA is testing new requirements that passengers remove books and other paper goods from their carry-on baggage when going through airline security. No, this isn’t alarming at all. Move on, people, nothing to see here.
When I watched the Oscar-nominated movie “Hidden Figures,” I was moved by the scene in which a black mother and her children were escorted out of a public library. Largely forgotten now, a sit-in protest at the segregated Jackson, Mississippi public library was an important part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Teen Vogue is woke! Their latest: New Florida Law Lets ANYONE Challenge What Schools Teach (even if they don’t know anyone attending).