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53% More Book Banning Incidents In US Schools This Year
vikingpower writes "Isabel Allende's The House of The Spirits. Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man. What do these titles have in common? They are banned at a school in the U.S. Yes, in 2013. A project named The Kids' Right to Read Project (by the National Coalition Against Censorship ) investigated three times the average number of incidents, adding to an overall rise in cases for the entire year, according to KRRP coordinator Acacia O'Connor. To date, KRRP has confronted 49 incidents in 29 states this year, a 53% increase in activity from 2012. During the second half of 2013, the project battled 31 new incidents, compared to only 14 in the same period last year. 'It has been a sprint since the beginning of the school year,' O'Connor said. 'We would settle one issue and wake up the next morning to find out another book was on the chopping block. The NCAC also offers a Book Censorship Toolkit on its website."
More people have been persecuted, hounded, ruined, tortured, burned, murdered, and just exterminated en-masse because of a book called the Bible than any other document in human history including Mein Kampf and Das Capital put together.
Just sayin' .
"53% More Banning Incidents"
No, they're investigated 53% more requests. The linked article says nothing about how many were actually banned.
And the majority of requests were from parents or library patrons, not school districts or state/local govts.
49 cases. Is that idiocy? Are these idiots? Sure. But good grief....49 cases out of how many million kids and parents?
Alternate non-OTT headline - "0.002% of parents in the US have requested a book be banned in their local school library."
You could find a greater percentage of people complaining about just about anything.
Politics, probably. There's a lot of backlash against political correctness - some people would see reading such a book in schools as 'liberal indoctrination' intended to make white people feel guilty about being white.
I'd give you odds it's the reverse - that someone searched through an eBook library and banned every one with racial epithets regardless of context.
Usually, anymore, it is an organization that specializes in book or curriculum challenges. It will have a list of "objectionable" materials; downloadable complaints; challenges with page numbers and everything included; and all the press releases needed. The parent/teacher/administrator/pastor/insert authority figure does not even have to read the book.
Check out the Parents Action League's Book Alert Page (sorry, can't remember how to insert a link) for an example.