Another Illegal, Dangerous Book You Should Read

 

How to be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, ****

Florida has become a neo-Fascist nightmare, run by a governor, Rod DeSantis, who wants to be President of the United States.  In order to do this, he needs to defeat fellow Republican Donald Trump.  His strategy for doing this is to try be more fascist and authoritarian than Trump. In doing so, he has mounted a vicious attack on anything in Florida that he calls "woke," especially in the public schools.

As a consequence, if you are a public school teacher in Florida and you teach any book that is unapproved, or any book that is on the "black list", you could face a jail sentence of up to five years. One of the books that could get a teacher thrown in prison is How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.  This book has also been banned in many other Trump-loving parts of America.  

This book chronicles the author's personal journey through racist America and provides the reader with suggestions on how to conquer this racism by fostering antiracist behaviors.  It's a book that's very scholarly and informative, but unsparing in its critique of the racist aspects of American society--so it causes Trumpist snowflakes to cry and then they ban it (even though most of them have never read it).  

Why do Republican racists and white supremacists hate this book so much?  There's nothing in the book itself that advocates violence or illegal activities.  It is a very rational, logical, personal, and historical examination of a serious problem.  They want to ban this book, because Trumpists and Republicans are trying to erase history.  They want to eliminate all mention in our history of racial inequality.  Why?  To restore white supremacy?  To roll back all the reforms gained by black people?  Yes, and more.  And it's working.  It's no accident that the Republican Trumpist Supreme Court has rolled back voting rights for blacks and other minorities over the years and just last month, the court ruled that colleges could not use racial criteria in admissions (yet colleges may still provided admissions advantages to white applicants whose parents graduated from the college which the student is applying to).  

And to top off this trend, yesterday the Florida Education Board voted on a new curriculum in which one of the teachings is that slavery was beneficial to black slaves because they learned new vocational skills while being slaves.  So, blacks really haven't been particularly harmed by their oppression, they actually got a leg up on the job market (if only they had had the freedom to find jobs with these "skills")  This erasure of history is designed to destroy any notion that oppressed minorities should get any help in our society and rivals any history erasure project created in Nazi Germany or the old Soviet Union.  Yes, the U.S. has indeed fallen apart when schools ban historically-accurate and informative books like How to be an Antiracist that promote social justice and potentially imprisons teachers for teaching them.  

If you have a chance to read How to be an Antiracist, I encourage you to do so.  It will inform you on how to promote solutions to racism and how to advance justice and equality.  It's a shame that doing that could get you thrown in jail in the new America. 

Other books I've read recently:

1. Dancing Girls, by Margaret Atwood.  ***  A very good, but somewhat dated, collection of short stories from the 1960s and 1970s. Still worth a read.

2. The Classic Tradition of Haiku (Dover Thrift Edition)  ***   I love haikus and I picked up this collection and literary analysis in the Tokyo Narita Airport.  I thought it was great, but most of you probably don't enjoy haiku as much as I do.

3. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda **  We've learned a lot about how evil Neruda was after his death (for example, he raped a hotel housekeeper in Sri Lanka during his youth).  If a writer is evil should we disregard his works?  I don't know the answer, but when you add to this fact that these poems seem a bit juvenile in their romanticism (they are among his earliest works), perhaps avoidance of this collection would be a good strategy.