Five books are being banned by a school board in southern Alaska due to their “controversial” stories and themes, including Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.”
Fox News reported that “the Matanuska-Susitna School Board in Palmer, Alaska, voted 5-2 to ban the books, which include “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison; “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller; “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien; “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou; and “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
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Angelou’s work was banned because of a graphic description she wrote about being molested as a child and for “anti-white” messaging.
“The Things They Carried,” about the Vietnam War, was cited for profanity and sexual references, while “Catch-22” was banned for racist attitudes, misogyny and violence.
As for “The Great Gatsby,” it was reportedly removed for language and sexual references, and “Invisible Man,” a story of race and identity in a pre-civil rights era America, was nixed for language and depictions of rape and incest.
Three of the banned books won prestigious literary awards, including Angelou’s, which won the Literarian in 2013. “‘Invisible Man’ won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953 and ‘The Things They Carried’ was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991,” Fox reported.
One of the board members who voted in favor of the ban, Jim Hart, never read two of the books he voted to ban, instead relying on summarized versions, the Anchorage Daily News reported. The two books he hadn’t read were “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” and “Invisible Man.” Hart said Angelou’s book was banned for its description of molestation.
“If I were to read this in a professional environment at my office, I would be dragged to the equal opportunity office,” he told the outlet.
Kelsey Trimmer, who voted against the ban, told the Daily News that it felt like the plot of “Footloose,” where “the old white man’s club” decided what people can and can’t do. Sarah Welton, who also voted against the ban, told the outlet that the “controversial book subjects as reviewed by parents is…beneficial to our students. I think we might be doing a disservice to not provide that.”
Former educator Pat Chesbro one of many, many people outraged by the bans, and posted a message she said she sent to the board asking what specific parts of the book were objectionable and if anyone had actually complained about them.
“One of the purposes in teaching books that have controversial content is so that teachers can guide students through the book to get to the underlying ideas,” she wrote, according to the Daily news. “From your reading of these books, what are the underlying ideas to which you object?”
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