My, aren’t they delicate flowers?
Book banners gonna ban books (NBC News):
Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first National Youth Poet Laureate, spoke out Tuesday against what she described as a book ban after access to the poem she recited at President Joe Biden’s inauguration was limited at a Florida school.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools moved “The Hill We Climb” to the middle school section of the library after a parent filed a formal objection to the work, according to documents obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and shared with media. The Miami Herald first reported the story.
“Unnecessary #bookbans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back,” Gorman said in a post on Facebook that accompanied a one-page statement in which she said her book had been banned from an elementary school.
“I’m gutted,” Gorman reacted in a tweet.
School officials pushed back, saying that “‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle school students and, it was shelved in the middle school section of the media center.”
A review of five titles available at the library at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes was triggered after a parent of two students filled out forms requesting the titles be removed “from the total environment,” according to the documents obtained by the Freedom to Read Project, a group founded by public school parents and dedicated to fighting what it calls book bans in the state.
A review by the Washington Post of complaints in 153 school districts for the 2021-2022 school year found that a “majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people.”
Each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges. Together, these serial filers constituted 6 percent of all book challengers — but were responsible for 60 percent of all filings.
“In some cases,” the Post reports, “these serial filers relied on a network of volunteers gathered together under the aegis of conservative parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty.”
One of the serial filers, not surprisingly, is Daily Salinas. Salinas alleged that The Hills We Climb “included references of critical race theory, ‘indirect hate messages,’ gender ideology and indoctrination, according to records obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and shared with the Miami Herald.”
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what ‘just is’
Isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow, we do it.
Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”
Miami Against Fascism alleges in a tweet thread supported by video that Salinas is associated with Moms for Liberty Miami-Dade as well as the Proud Boys and County Citizens Defending Freedom USA (CCDF), a Christian nationalist group.
When asked if she was aware of professional reviews of the National Youth Poet Laureate’s poem, Salinas wrote, “I don’t need it.” And when asked to list the author, she wrote Oprah Winfrey. (Winfrey wrote the forward for the book version of the poem published in March 2021.)
[…]
“So they ban my book from young readers, confuse me with Oprah, fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives,” [Gorman] wrote. “We must fight back.”
Fight or be beaten.