Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Assassination Classroom, black butler, cbldf, Flamer, fun home, Handmaid’s Tale, manga, Soul Eater, texas
Houston TV station KHOU uncovered a Texas school library banning system that went under the radar, including a number of graphic novels.
Houston TV station KHOU has uncovered a school library banning system that has gone under the radar. As the Klein Independent School District in Harris, Texas, has chosen to use a system usually reserved for old or damaged books to remove graphic novels and other books that mention race, sex and abortion from school libraries. And thereby avoid media scrutiny of public records – until now.
Indeed, there have been parental protests against – and in defence of – graphic novels that had already been surreptitiously removed from the school libraries in question. For more than a year, KHOU tracked books that had already been banned at Houston-area schools, and had requested lists of books removed over content issues and reported only one in two years, despite many bans in neighbouring districts, the graphic novel Flamer by Mike Curato.
But instead, graphic novels such as Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, The Handmaid’s Tale: Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood and Renée Nault, and 43 separate volumes of the manga Assassination Classroom, Black Butler and Soul Eater had been disposed of.
As well as other prose books such as The Nerdy and the Dirty and Forever for a Year by B.T. Gottfred, Regretting You by Colleen Hoover, Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, about a Black girl who is raped, Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, How to Be An Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi, Everything you Love Will Burn: Inside The Rebirth Of White Nationalism In America by Vegas Tenold, Roe v. Wade: The Untold Story of The Landmark Supreme Court Decision by Marian Fox, The Cider House Rules by John Irving, Gay Issues and Politics and Feeling Wrong in Your Own Body: Understanding What It Means to Be Transgender by Jaime SebaB, How Prevalent is Racism in Society? by Peggy J. Parks, Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith, Golden Boy: A Novel by Abigail Tarttelin.
A total of 3,000 books from five high schools were disposed of in this manner, including all copies of the above. An official Klein ISD statement to KHOU read that “books can become part of a deaccession list for many reasons including but not limited to: damage, lost or missing for over a certain period of time, obsolete (out of date), lack of adherence to TSLAC standards, low circulation, duplicate copies.” KHOU identified a number that did fit that description but noted that at least 67 separate titles were removed from all libraries after they were banned or challenged elsewhere. Including all nine titles that were listed in a letter that the Texas American Civil Liberties Union sent to the district last year. Texas ACLU stated”Klein ISD has disappeared books from its libraries—it has secretly removed dozens of books from its shelves” which it considers a “violation of the First Amendment, the Texas Constitution and Klein ISD’s own policy”.
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