A school in Texas has chosen to mark Banned Books Week by suspending seven books from its classrooms, including works by Toni Morrison and John Green, after parents complained about their children having access to “obscene literature”.
As bookshops, libraries and schools across America took part in the annual celebration of the right to read, at Highland Park high school in Dallas, parents were making their concerns heard about content in books including Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Green’s An Abundance of Katherines and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, reported the Dallas News.
Objections were raised to Pulitzer winner David Shipler’s non-fiction title The Working Poor, because it includes a reference to a woman who was sexually abused as a child and had an abortion. Narrated by a dog, Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain was criticised for a sex scene, and Alexie’s award-winning novel for its strong language. Also suspended were Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle and Hermann Hesse’s classic novel Siddhartha.
According to the local paper, more than 100 people attended a school board meeting about the books, where “parents and grandparents … read excerpts of sex scenes, references to homosexuality, a description of a girl’s abduction and a passage that criticised capitalism” and “sent hundreds of emails to district officials”.
One parent told the paper: “This is not about banning books. No one is advocating that. We want the kids to have access to the books in the library. The problem is having obscene literature mandatory in the classroom and for discussion.”
Now school officials have taken the decision to suspend the offending works. “I made the decision — given the volume and the tenor and just the continual escalation of this issue — that we would pause, take the time to go ahead and create the reconsideration committees and do the work,” said the school’s superintendent Dawson Orr. The books will now be reviewed by committees of parents, teachers and students, reported the Dallas News.
“The real reason my True Diary gets banned? Because it’s about the triumph of a liberal Native American rebel,” tweeted Alexie about the incident. Walls told the local paper, “My book has ugly elements to it, but it’s about hope and resilience, and I don’t know why that wouldn’t be an important message. Sometimes you have to walk through the muck to get to the message. There are so many complicated situations out there. And we can begin to give kids the tools they need to deal with it, if only to say, ‘You are not alone.’”