The History of Hating on Books Like The Hate U Give
This piece jumps off from Diamond’s column on book banning to glimpse at a story that feels familiar once you read her piece. Sometimes it takes much longer than a moment, or two decades, for a lesson to take root.
In 1998, a high school English teacher in Maryland was forced to defend teaching her students that the past is sometimes uncomfortable—and that the best voice to share that with ninth-graders might be one that sounds like their own. “It’s one thing to read about segregation from a history textbook, another to read it in a teenager’s young voice. It’s much more vivid.” Her school district had banned I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, first from being taught at all, and then only in the ninth grade. One of the parents who complained told The Washington Post, “I kept waiting for her to realize all white people weren’t bad. The book ends, and I’m thinking, ‘Didn’t this woman ever realize that white people aren’t Neanderthals?’” The reaction does little but prove that the book, after all these years, still felt uncomfortable enough to provoke, perhaps the best argument teachers could ever hope to encounter for why it would be valuable to sit down with young readers and help them see the many shades of nuance in Angelou’s words before they, too, found their critical reading skills calcified by the world.
The book topped most lists of banned novels of the ’90s. It kept getting banned. In 2006, an English teacher, in Wisconsin, again had to defend the book: “I felt as a teacher of the book that the students were mature enough to handle the concepts of the book and look beyond the images portrayed to a deeper meaning and the effects of what Angelou went through. What better place to discuss adversity than in a classroom setting?” Three years later, Angelou was asked about another attempt to ban her memoir: “I’m always sorry that people ban my books,” she said. “Many times I’ve been called the most banned. And many times my books are banned by people who never read two sentences. I feel sorry for the young person who never gets to read.” As Diamond says in her piece, “Banning these books from schools doesn’t make these issues disappear; it just gives students less room to understand them.”