Even the apolitical in the US had to notice what happened in August with the town hall eruptions with their cries of socialism and the many, many racist slogans and pictures on protest signs. The absurdity might have reached its apogee when parents protested the airing of a Presidential address aimed at telling children to stay in school, study, and do their homework.
But while the insanity on that front might be ebbing (and I use might very warily here), there are still some whitecaps to be seen. Juliana Baggott tells a story of an elementary school principal from the Boston suburbs who called to say she wouldn’t be sending home the book orders with Baggott’s books in them. Why?
She stressed that she didn’t want to deal with angry parents complaining about the books, and how she just couldn’t give the impression that the school was endorsing my work.
I explained that the state of Massachusetts as well as many other states had already endorsed “The Anybodies’’ and that it was on several summer reading lists. The principal told me that none of this mattered, explaining that her district was one that had opted out of the president’s recent address to schoolchildren….
Then it dawned on me that there was a possible connection between the recent uproar from parents about the president’s address and my visit. She’d brought it up, after all. Like many other administrators throughout the country, she had taken a lot of heat from parents – on both sides of the aisle. It also hit me that the narrator of my novel, a biracial 12-year-old boy whose face lights up the cover, looks an awful lot like a young Barack Obama. Was this aspect of the book playing into the nervous call?
She told me that she would be happy to send the book orders out after the visit. I wasn’t sure how this made her less culpable for promoting “objectionable’’ books. But she assured me that it did.
I really can’t blame the principal for wanting to duck controversy–one thing that social media has done, for better or worse, is made it easier for groups to organize and harass people or organizations with very little lead time. And as we’ve seen this summer, what were once extremes are now often norms. In a time when principals are often dealing with overcrowded classrooms and budget cuts, why would anyone take on parents who will get angry over the slightest hint of controversy?
Yet–and it’s easy for me to say this when I don’t have to deal with irate parents in my day job–this principal should still do it, for the same reason that English teachers should teach Huckleberry Finn and biology teachers should teach evolution: because it needs to be taught, and because we’re a less intelligent society if we give in to the protests of the ignorant. We’ve ceded too much ground in the last 40 years. We have to push back.
