Conservatives Are Just Openly Endorsing Book Burning Now

Authored by vanityfair.com and submitted by Dull_Tonight

The calls for book burning in Virginia follow the election of Glenn Youngkin, who said during his gubernatorial campaign that he would ban critical race theory on his first day in office, and ran an ad featuring a local mother who tried to get Beloved, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Toni Morrison, removed from her son’s A.P. English curriculum. The mother claimed the book contained “some of the most explicit material you can imagine,” which is entirely true, given that it’s about the horrors of slavery, which many conservative parents would prefer their children not really learn about.

“What has taken us aback this year is the intensity with which school libraries are under attack,” Nora Pelizzari, a spokesperson at the National Coalition Against Censorship, told The Washington Post. She added: “Particularly when taken in concert with the legislative attempts to control school curricula, this feels like a more overarching attempt to purge schools of materials that people disagree with. It feels different than what we’ve seen in recent years.”

Also this week, the Post reports, a school board outside of Wichita, Kansas, said it was removing 29 books from circulation, including Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye, and writings about racism in America like August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play “Fences.” Last month, Texas state representative Michael Krause launched a “review” of books that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” (Krause specifically flagged numerous award-winning books, from the 1967 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner to Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.) Also in Texas, a school district recently told teachers if they have a book on the Holocaust, they must also provide a book with an “opposing perspective.”

theidkid on November 12nd, 2021 at 01:14 UTC »

Book burnings are the symbolic destruction of ideas. When you have no defense for your beliefs the way you protect them is not through debate, but the suppression of opposition. It’s a small leap from symbolically destroying an idea to destroying those who believe in that idea. This is where they are trying to take us.

Master-Mycologist747 on November 12nd, 2021 at 00:43 UTC »

I remember also when Harry Potter books were being burned

LockheedMartinLuther on November 12nd, 2021 at 00:42 UTC »

The calls for book burning in Virginia follow the election of Glenn Youngkin, who said during his gubernatorial campaign that he would ban critical race theory on his first day in office, and ran an ad featuring a local mother who tried to get Beloved, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Toni Morrison, removed from her son’s A.P. English curriculum. The mother claimed the book contained “some of the most explicit material you can imagine,” which is entirely true, given that it’s about the horrors of slavery, which many conservative parents would prefer their children not really learn about.