Here in South Carolina, we’ve grown paranoid about what books students might be reading in school. These books might be exposing our children to horrid ideas that could shake the very foundation of our state, of our country. Ideas like, “Gay people exist.” Notions like, “White people in the past did some very bad things to black people.” Ideas such as, “Horrible things like sexual assault happen,” or “Teens sometimes commit suicide.” We aren’t quite to the point that the notion that “Jews suffered terribly during World War Two” is controversial, but just give us time!
To prevent students from being exposed to books that might in turn expose them to such awful, harmful notions, South Carolina teachers now have to make a list of every single book, article, poem, Power Point presentation, Excel spreadsheet, Google Doc, video clip, painting, sculpture, and any other artifact we haven’t thought yet to add to that list. The list is to be available to anyone (not just any parent of a student in that class; to anyone in the state) so that if anyone has a problem with those materials, they can lodge a formal complaint and work to have that material banned. It’s not just that parents of students in a given classroom can do this; anyone can protest a book, even if they don’t have children in the school in question. Or children at all.
It’s a wonderful time to be an English teacher in South Carolina.
Recently, parents presented three books to be banned. This happened at the State School Board office (none of those positions on the board are elected positions — they’re all appointees from the governor) at 11:00 a.m. on a Thursday. A great time to have an open discussion about the merits of this or that book.
The first book they were considering banning was To Kill a Mockingbird. This is not because of the growing complaint that it presents a skewed view of the African American experience by making it a story of “a white man saves the day!” It’s always been curious to me how we could tell that story without the defense lawyer being a white man: African American lawyers deep in the Jim Crow South were not exactly that numerous. But that was not the potential-book-banner’s complaint. The complaint is the sexual assault that occurs in the book. Except that it doesn’t occur. And that’s the whole point of the book. Still, they made their case before the board.
The second book that some wanted banned was Romeo and Juliet. This was due to the supposed sexual content and the suicide at the end. It is of course silly to suggest that he book in any way promotes suicide, but that was the complaint.
I was anxious about this: These two selections represent the majority of my second-semester work with my honors students. “They are banned, I have no second semester,” I told anyone who’d listen. I decided if they got banned, I’d just do Lord of the Flies instead of Mockingbird. It’s already on our vetted list for our school. (That’s another joy: all novels we read in school must be vetted. Who does the vetting? The school district that recommends it? No — teachers who are told to teach it. “That way,” they cleverly explained, “if it gets challenged in one school, it’s not necessarily challenged everywhere.” I just think they wanted us to do their job for them.) As for Shakespeare, I thought I’d do a greatest hits type unit: I can teach excerpts without the vetting process (though I do still have to list it on my “List of things you might get nervous about” document).
The third book was one that I’ve never taught because our district reserves it for senior year in high school: 1984. That’s right: they wanted to limit access to a book about a totalitarian regime that limited access to information. That’s ironic enough, but one of the reasons someone protested was because — you’re probably not ready for this level of complete and utter ignorance — it’s pro-communist. That’s right: 1984, banned in the Communist Soviet Union, is pro-communist. “Tell me you’ve never read the book without telling me you’ve never read the book,” was the common response among English teachers in our school.
In the end, though, the board was reasonable and declined to ban any of those books. And I can’t believe I just used the word “reasonable” to describe a very basic tenet at the foundation of our constitution.
But it is a temporary victory: those board members can be replaced, and as previously explained, they’re not elected. They’re appointed. And given South Carolinians’ current MAGA-happy political orgasm (a very deliberate word choice: you did see the footage of Trump simulating fellatio with a microphone stand at one of his final rallies, didn’t you?), members of that board are likely to be increasingly conspiratorially minded and less reasonable with each appointment.
It’s a wonderful time to be an English teacher in South Carolina.