What Kind of Town Bans Books?
During my time there, we had a chaplain for every sports team, creationists on the teaching staff, and a mandatory daily recitation of the Texas State Pledge. But people who live in places like my home town are not necessarily ignorant. People who ban books do sometimes read them. The towns my high school serves, Highland Park and University Park (collectively known as the Park Cities) are the two most educated municipalities in Texas. The Dallas Morning News reported that more than a hundred concerned residents attended a school board meeting to debate the suspension, many armed with “books flagged with sticky notes” from which they argued.
.. Anyone who knows the Park Cities will understand that the suspension of these books wasn’t driven so much by provincialism as by conservatism. It makes sense that a concerted faction of people in my mostly white home town would want to foreclose conversations about race and empire (goodbye “Solomon,” goodbye “Diary,” goodbye “Siddhartha”). The community does not want to talk about sex, abortion, or prostitutes, since it is largely pro-life and pro-abstinence (goodbye “Glass Castle,” goodbye to all the Katherines, goodbye “Siddhartha,” again). You should probably skip exposing your children to an investigation of the structural conditions that drive poverty and homelessness if you’re living in a ten-million-dollar home, and there are many of those where I come from, and many families who head enormous oil and real-estate companies. The Dallas Morning News reported that parents were concerned about books containing “anti-capitalist sentiment,” which is, again, unsurprising: in the state-mandated curriculum for Texas public schools, exposure to what is called the free enterprise system begins in kindergarten.