Although I did begin my career as a teacher in the Miami-Dade School District, I am responding more as an American than as an educator (though my later job as a professor of Gender Studies would certainly no longer be secure) to the removal — or, according to the school, the relocation — of books from an elementary school in that county in response to one parent’s complaint that the works acted as “indoctrination.” The first thing that must be said, and cannot be said enough, is that Critical Race Theory (which so many people enjoy disparaging regardless of their ignorance of what it really is) examines America’s legal institutions and the unequal treatment of people of color throughout the legal system. CRT is a tool that reveals how racism has shaped social and legal policies (e.g., in housing); it does not consider racism as the result of individual prejudice. More importantly, CRT is not a new “woke” theory designed to make children feel bad about their past. Using CRT as a dog whistle is even more dangerous when it is based on misinformation.
One of the books on the list, The ABCs of African American History, is a picture book that teaches African American children about their unique history with each letter of the alphabet, as in “B is for brave, for bright, and for bold. For those who STOOD UP—even when they were told to step back, stand down, remember their place.” Is this not American history also? Another book, Love to Langston, honors Langston Hughes by explaining his poetry. Poetry and other literary forms teach us what it is to be human; literature connects us and deepens our understanding of people who are different from us.
“Little Boy Blues” tells the story of a boy born at the turn of the twentieth century in Joplin, Missouri, a poem whose exclusion speaks to the poet’s own. The verse narrative is explained in terms of Hughes’s own life in a later note, saying that his grandmother would not allow him to play outside for fear he would be harmed by other children who taunted him with “racist names.”
I invite anyone to research (even briefly) the history of Missouri and its numerous “sundown towns” and lynchings (there were over 100 sundown towns in Missouri, having the second-highest number of lynchings outside of the Deep South).
I lived in Missouri for thirty years, and I have a strong attachment to that state, but its strengths (which are many) do not erase its history, which I worked hard (and sometimes uncomfortably) to make visible in my classroom. Should students not know the truth about our country? Or, to put it another way, when is it appropriate to lie to those students? Perhaps the answer about truthful curriculum lies within another literary work that, according to the parent in her complaint to the school, sends indirect messages of hate. In Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” (the poem was read at the inauguration of Joe Biden), she sincerely marvels that she “descended from slaves and raised by a single mother/can dream of becoming president.” Is this not the American dream? Read on: “So let us leave behind a country/better than the one we were left with.” Does not the Preamble to the Constitution encourage us to “form a more perfect union,” to keep evolving, learning, perfecting the idea that somehow, paradoxically, could be “more” perfect as we grow (“A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished”)?
Our children grow up in a world that is made up of all kinds of people, and not everyone is going to look the same, think the same, or act the same. Helping them to understand diversity also helps them to understand a verse they recite, possibly every day of their school lives: the Pledge of Allegiance. “Liberty and justice for all’ could also mean practicing compassion and kindness or doing unto others as you would have others do unto you. I cannot see these works as “hate messages” but rather as lessons in love and inclusion.
Even a brief review of the lyrical words created by these authors reveals that language can be powerful enough to change the arc of the narrative. This power is evident, or people would not fear it and demand it to be suppressed. Yes, it is important to clarify that the literary works I mention here were not technically banned but were all relocated to the middle school media area of the school. This action might still be considered by many people as censorship. What is still not evident is why one person, who may have the right to determine what her child may read, has the power to determine what every child may read. This is the question of the day and quite possibly of our future in a state that has, by this date, banned 175 books.[i] Is the poem not “educational”? If we continue to invalidate education, ignorance becomes the default.
Here is the text from the poem to which the parent objected, pages 12-13:
“We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what ‘just is’
isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow, we do it.
Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”
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Kathleen Butterly Nigro, Ph.D. spent the first decade of her teaching career as a high school English teacher. She taught English and Gender Studies at a public university for the remaining decades of her career.
