Here’s something to keep in mind the next time the left calls conservatives anti-education or book burning anti-intellectuals. A public school in Virginia has banned “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain and “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee because a parent complained that her child was traumatized by the numerous racial slurs which appear in both books.
Apparently, this parent was unable to explain to her child that both books make an explicit case against racism. The superintendent of the school system was also unable to convey this simple fact to the parent.
KIRO 7 News reported:
Virginia schools ban ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘Huckleberry Finn’ for racial slurs
The decision to remove “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain and “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee came after a parent filed a complaint, WAVY reported. The parent cited excessive racial slurs as the reason for wanting the books banned, Superintendent Warren Holland told the news station.
The parent, whose son is biracial, said that her concerns are “not even just a black and white thing.”
“I keep hearing, ‘This is a classic, This is a classic,’ … I understand this is a literature classic. But at some point, I feel that children will not — or do not — truly get the classic part — the literature part, which I’m not disputing,” she said at a Nov. 15 school board meeting. “This is great literature. But there (are so many) racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.”
The parent said her son, who was reading “Huckleberry Finn” for a high school assignment, couldn’t get past a certain page in that story on which the N-word appeared seven times.
A racial slur appears 219 times in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and 48 times in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by (any) means,” the parent said, also noting psychological effects language has on children. “There is other literature they can use.”
This is where progressivism leads every single time.
In a sane world, the suggestion that these books should be banned would have been met with disbelief and scorn. The banning of books for the sake of political correctness and protecting people’s feelings is antithetical to the educational process. This decision should be denounced by people of all political persuasions.
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