Haziqonfire
Toronto Wasteman
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I’m not American but this is quite shameful, hopefully this doesn’t start spreading world wide or creeping into Canada. I can’t believe we’re talking about book burning in 2021 but okay.
Also, I swear this reads like an Onion article.
Full article from The Guardian.
“It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA – the last 20 years. We’ve never had a time when we’ve gotten four or five reports a day for days on end, sometimes as many as eight in a day,” says ALA director Deborah Caldwell-Stone. “Social media is amplifying local challenges and they’re going viral, but we’ve also been observing a number of organisations activating local members to go to school board meetings and challenge books. We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books dealing with LGBTQIA themes and books dealing with racism.”
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye has been removed from school libraries in Utah over its “explicit” content; in Virginia, the Nobel laureate’s Beloved has been challenged for similar reasons. Bechdel’s Fun Home, the acclaimed graphic memoir about her father’s sexuality and her own, was pulled from shelves in North Kansas over its LGBTQ themes, while a southern Pennsylvania district banned a lengthy list of titles almost entirely by or about people of colour, by acclaimed authors including Jacqueline Woodson, Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X Kendi. (The all-white school board said it was coincidence that almost all the material banned was by or about people of colour.)
Also, I swear this reads like an Onion article.
In Spotsylvania in Fredericksburg, Virginia, meanwhile, parents have protested about the availability of LGBTQIA fiction to children. One school board member called for the offending books to be burned. “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” he said. “I guess we live in a world now that our public schools would rather have kids read about gay pornography than Christ.” The school board subsequently ordered that “sexually explicit” books be removed from district libraries.
Full article from The Guardian.