So What's the Deal With Book Banning in Alaska?

It makes you wonder just where people's minds are. It really does.

In the Matanuska-Susitna (referred to as Mat-Su) School District of Palmer, Alaska, the school board created an unnecessary firestorm recently by voting to prohibit classic works from being taught in the district's classrooms. The books could stay in the school libraries, they said, but not part of the curriculum.

The books were: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien; Catch-22 by Joseph Heller; and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. You may recognize these. They are classics.

But classics usually have controversial parts. That's why they're classic. They navigate them in ways that are ripe for discussion.

Discussion is the idea. Why include books in which everyone agrees with everything that's written? And come to think of it, what books would those be? And how would you get much discussion out of them if they were?

The district provided a one-page (this from CNN) flier from the Office of Instruction, telling why the books were too controversial: they included sexual references, rape, racial slurs, violence and profanity. Angelou's book includes, says the flier, "sexually explicit material such as the sexual abuse the author suffered as a child," as well as " 'anti-white' messaging."

Oh. So a black author's anti-white attitudes aren't normal? They should be hidden? The kids in the district won't run up against them when they get out of high school? And sexual abuse won't take place anywhere they wind up?

Nobody's saying these books aren't delicate. They are. And you can cherry-pick and find naughty words and naughty bits all around. But if you just let them in the library without
discussion, the danger of those ideas running rampant without perspective become worse, not better. A decent teacher--remember, one that the district has hired--would be well-situated to deal with the actions and attitudes contained within. You might defeat the very purpose you originally had.

But the school board also made a significant strategic mistake: They made the decision during the pandemic, when no one from the community decided to take the risk and make statements to the board during their meetings. Maybe it was sloppy. But it looked sneaky.

In a democracy, sneaky processes are nearly always exposed. And once exposed, nearly always condemned.

It felt like a parent sneaking into the bedrooms of their kids, pulling magazines and books they don't prefer. Once discovered, that will usually prompt a confrontation that leaves no one satisfied.

The public was not solicited, at least not in any formalized way. There was a discussion and vote taken afterwards, but not one in which the public participated. The vote was 5-2. Then it hit the fan.

In the reports on the topic, I didn't see the board suggest substitutes. If you're going to control the curriculum, then control it with positive acts as well as negative. Don't just remove things and leave everyone gasping. Wrecking things is easy to do; it takes no skill. 45 and his band of hoodlums have demonstrated that.

My dad said several times that he never wanted Mad magazine in the house; he thought it was "trash." Which we respected (though we looked at friends' copies in school or snuck a look at the drugstore), until I saw one of my English teachers laughing his head off at it in study hall. Then I didn't care. Mad, which ended not too long ago, had excellent, if cheeky, satire. Yes, it was edgy, but not all humor reflected the corniness of Red Skelton.

I'm a big believer in the power of free speech, but it has to be responsible free speech, or the advantage is lost. Good teaching can guide and even demonstrate the meaning of responsible free speech, and lead with civility instead of insults. We have enough trouble with people saying stupid things without having kids mimic them.

That's the sad part to all this: That it betrays the teachers doing the discussion. This is saying that nobody can teach this well enough to explain and separate the good values from the bad. And that's a shame. If I were a teacher there, I'd be embarrassed and unhappy.

You can be concerned with some books arriving at students' desks; in fact, I praise school board members for caring. But to simply ban them without a vetting, without a review, without asking about it, smacks of a juvenile approach. If a teacher can't give a good explanation, that's one thing, but to deny a chance to defend the decision is quite another.

You know the real test? If nobody laughs at Catch-22. It's filled with irony and trashing of the wartime mentality. And if you can't shake your head at the actual Catch-22, then the book's over your head and it should wait until kids can better understand it. But if it isn't, it's one of the best antiwar books still going.

If you can't react to Invisible Man with sufficient outrage, then you don't have a decent grasp of the meaning of discrimination. Then maybe a good teacher needs to take you aside and enlighten you. If you're a junior or senior, you'd better hurry up, though, since you've got the right to vote coming up and some of the decisions you may have to make are based on the kinds of values that are stated, and sometimes overlooked.

There is much to learn in these works. The Mat-Su school board has apparently backed away from its former position, now that civil rights' groups got hold of the issue and shook it hard. Too bad, because now any discussion about these books are tainted. The right to free speech got waylaid by someone denying it, and that, not the books themselves, became the point of the matter.

One fear was replaced with another. Too bad. A great deal of trust was jettisoned on both sides. Let that be a lesson to someone else contemplating this.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark