You Can’t Read That! Banned Book Review: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Caste has been banned from public school curricula and libraries, along with other books addressing racial and LGBTQ topics.
"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
Caste has been banned from public school curricula and libraries, along with other books addressing racial and LGBTQ topics.
“We Are the Ants” came to my attention via a news item from Texas, where a parent is demanding it be removed from a high school library.
“This Book Is Gay” is one of a number of young adult books targeted by right-wing culture warriors. They view it, along with other LGBTQ-themed books, as insidious pro-gay propaganda designed to lure girls and boys into deviant sex and transgenderism. This book, in particular, billed as an “instruction manual” for LGBTQ youth (see the quote from the publisher’s blurb, above), is firmly in their crosshairs.
As to the challenges and bans taking place around the country as organized groups of reactionaries pretending to be parents disrupt school board meetings over “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” claiming it’s pornographic: no, it is anything but.
Ashley Hope Perez’s novel “Out of Darkness,” published in 2015, is a Romeo and Juliet story set against the backdrop of an actual historical event: the New London, Texas, school explosion of 1937, which killed more than 300 students and teachers.
“Gender Queer” is much in the news, with parents, right-wing and religious organizations — even the white supremacist Proud Boys — storming school board meetings to demand its removal from libraries.