To the editor: In her opinion piece on e book banning, editorial author Minerva Canto talked about a trainer in South Carolina being compelled to desert her lesson about systemic racism utilizing “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nahisi Coates as a result of some college students “complained about feeling uncomfortable.”
What a strong teachable second that will have been, to ask the scholars what it was that made them uncomfortable, and why they have been feeling that approach. In fact, the solutions to these questions are the true purpose that classes about racism, and books by folks of colour, are being banned.
The conclusion that our nation’s historical past is full of cruelty and injustice directed at these thought-about “others” ought to by all means make us uncomfortable. However then it ought to inspire us to take motion to vary the unjust programs.
Marian Sunabe, South Pasadena
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To the editor: The books talked about by Canto weren’t “banned.” One should purchase them at bookstores, organize them on-line or borrow them from public libraries.
They have been, because the article talked about in passing, restricted. Among the books have been faraway from faculty libraries for not being age acceptable.
Phrases, as a few of my self-described liberal pals remind me on occasion, matter.
I don’t bear in mind a lot of an outcry when Dr. Seuss Enterprises yielded to strain and ceased permitting the publication of a number of Dr. Seuss books. These books have been “banned” from some libraries. Different books which were taken off studying lists and faraway from libraries embrace “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Males.”
Outcry appears to rely so much on whose foot the shoe is on.
Barry DuRon, Oxnard
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To the editor: Canto is true that book-banning dad and mom and faculty board members need “their conservative viewpoint [to] be the one one represented within the colleges.”
I not too long ago witnessed paranoid dad and mom and the Murrieta Valley Unified College District’s Board of Schooling ban an American historical past textbook as a result of its inclusion of viewpoints aside from these of straight white folks made them really feel depressed and ashamed. Not one of the board members, nevertheless, disputed the info offered within the e book, which is utilized in a whole bunch of excessive colleges in each crimson and blue states.
I assume info don’t matter anymore.
Stuart Sheldon, Murrieta
