A Virginia school has temporarily banned "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain and "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee,after a parent complained that her high school-age son was negatively impacted by racial slurs contained in the books.
As The Independent reports, both To Kill a Mockingbird and Mark Twain?'s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were temporarily banned pending a committee review, with the parent - Marie Rothstein-Williams, the mother of a mixed race child - suggesting a board made up of other parents and teachers from diverse cultural backgrounds determines a list of books that are inclusive for all students.
“I keep hearing, ‘This is a classic, This is a classic’,” the mother said at a school board meeting on 15 November, according to WPXI. “I understand this is a literature classic. But at some point, I feel that children will not – or do not – truly get the classic part – the literature part, which I’m not disputing.
“This is great literature. But there [are so many] racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.”
She claimed her son couldn’t get past a page of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that includes the N-word seven times.
“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by (any) means,” the parent said, perhaps overlooking the role of the teacher in instructing pupils what words are right and wrong to employ. “There is other literature they can use.”
The suspension of the books is a part of the standard procedure outlined in the district’s policy manual which says that after a formal complaint is filed, the principal, the library media specialist, complainant and teacher should gather to discuss the materials.
But as The LA Times reports, the suspension of the books didn't sit will with some residents of Accomack County, dozens of whom protested outside the county courthouse in the town of Accomac, reports Delmarva Now.
Charles Knitter, who helped organize the protest, read a chapter of "To Kill a Mockingbird" at the rally.
"We're not going to be censored, because banning literature is, well, stupid — I don't have another way to say that," he said.
Sadye Saunders, a 16-year-old high school junior, agreed with Knitter, and noted that a petition she had started to have the books returned to schools was confiscated by her principal.
"This is important, because censorship blinds us," Sadye said. "These books are important, because they are not condoning this word, this racial slur ... They're showing the ignorance of using that word and having this bigotry."
Huckleberry Finn" and "Mockingbird" aren't the only books to face challenges in schools recently. Some parents in the Chicago suburb of Lemont have criticized the local high school's use of Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" and Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," citing the books' sexual content, the Cook County Chronicle reports.
As The National Review's Katherine Timpf concludes, of all of the books tracked by the American Library Association, Huckleberry Finn is the one most often targeted for removal from schools and libraries, and To Kill a Mockingbird is up there, too.
In 2015, the Bible was No. 6 because of its “religious viewpoint.” You know, because the Bible is just a religious book, and it has definitely not had the kind of historical or cultural influence that would make it worth reading for people with other beliefs.
Now, if Rothstein-Williams’s son is traumatized by reading the books, then that’s something that he should certainly be able to work out with the school. In an ideal situation, perhaps there could be classes that do teach these books and classes that don’t, and each individual parent and student could make the decision for themselves.
Unfortunately, however, blanket, district-wide policies such as this book ban are exactly what prevents the kind of case-by-case, student-centered problem-solving that allows each individual student to get the education that’s best for him.