A book ban in Placer County? High school parents protest Oscar Wilde, Flannery O’Connor

In the 1998 film “Pleasantville,” two teens living in the ’90s find themselves transported into a black-and-white sitcom set in the ’50s. The eponymous town where they land is wholesome and uncomplicated but restrictive. All roads lead back to town, and none of the denizens are aware of anything beyond Pleasantville.

When the protagonists arrive, they inform the residents of previously foreign concepts such as fire, books and rain. Slowly, as Pleasantville’s worldview expands, the town is infused with color. A small but vocal minority protests colorization, fearing the intrusion of new information.

Ironically, parents in Granite Bay — the town where I grew up, and one that reminds me of Pleasantville in more ways than one — are protesting the study of this movie, along with dozens of other works, in high school English classes.

Opinion

The local protest is a microcosm of a national push to ban books and censor classroom materials. PEN America, a nonprofit that defends free expression, found efforts to ban 1,145 books and other works from public schools across the country during a recent nine-month period.

Last year, the Roseville Joint Union High School District implemented a new process of district-level approval of classroom materials that cleared 900 works for use in high school English. This year, English teachers were asked to submit any additional materials needing approval. Teachers at Granite Bay High came up with 70 proposed supplemental materials.

The list was posted on the school’s website and is being reviewed by its site council, composed of an equal number of teachers, students and parents as well as the principal. The council postponed a vote on the materials last month but could make the decision Wednesday.

A small but vocal group of Granite Bay parents are protesting the majority of them. They have compiled a publicly accessible Google document citing concerns ranging from the alleged promotion of “critical race theory” to “education as activism” to simply dealing with unpleasant subjects.

One Granite Bay parent, Chemene Phillips, voiced her concerns with the works at a school board meeting last month, complaining that they are “dark and negative” and address topics such as “rape, murder, abortion, LGBTQ, gender ideology (and) drinking.” Phillips said she and 22 other parents spent five days reviewing the materials now subject to district approval.

The resulting Google document lists roughly 150 works, and it objects to most of them. But at least half have already been approved by the district as part of last year’s process.

Granite Bay High English teacher Bernadette Cranmer said she thinks the parents are simply “afraid for their students.”

“They want to protect them, and they don’t know or understand what’s happening in the classroom,” Cranmer said. “We welcome the opportunity to talk about what’s happening in the classroom.”

Another Granite Bay English teacher, David Tastor, said students should study a wide range of works regardless of anyone’s personal politics.

“I want my students of diverse backgrounds to see themselves in the literature we teach,” he added.

Parents object

The parents who compiled the document object to Clint Smith’s 2017 book “Counting Descent,” for instance, because it allegedly glorifies police brutality, justifies the Black Lives Matter movement and ignores the context of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. They write that the book omits that Brown “was a drug dealer with a record” as if that might justify his killing.

Three episodes of the contemporary television show “Black-ish” were also deemed objectionable. The reviewer notes that one episode portrays Black people as having to face challenging hurdles adding, “White people, disabled people and other races have to deal with bad stuff every day.”

But it’s not just mentions of race and racism that are deemed objectionable; the parents take issue with virtually any difficult subject. In Flannery O’Connor’s renowned short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953), the treatment of topics such as murder, sin, selfishness and guilt are, according to these parents, of grave concern.

Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968) is deemed controversial because it “is a bash on (Catholicism) and how empty religion is.” Joyce Carol Oates’ 1991 short story “Life After High School” is considered unacceptable because it discusses homosexuality and suicide. Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 story “Girl” depicts a mother-daughter relationship that lacks “warmth.”

Certain works, including Oscar Wilde’s classic 19th-century novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” earn the special honor of being deemed “REPUGNANT” — Wilde, who was gay, writes about homosexuality — while Yukio Mishima’s 1955 short story “Swaddling Clothes” is labeled “MARXIST” for seemingly no reason.

I was required to study most of these texts in high school and college. Whether or not today’s students do so, they will certainly deal with challenging issues like suicide, race and sin — either on the page or in real life. Isn’t it better that they be prepared to think critically about these problems rather than pretend they don’t exist?

How students see it

Teachers Tastor and Cranmer said students are concerned about the effort to ban course materials. One student posted disputed poems around campus so people could make up their own minds, Tastor said.

One poem that raised concerns is John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 10,” a reflection on mortality written in 1609. Donne, a devout Christian, wrote that death is “one short sleep” after which “we wake eternally.” One parent wrote that the poem “could be a problem for a suicidal teen to be reading that death is not to be (feared) and something greater is coming after death.”

“Here is a person that is completely misunderstanding the poem,” Cranmer said.

She added that English classes study works for reasons that go beyond their subject matter. Especially in advanced classes, teachers may use texts to illustrate literary forms and devices irrespective of content.

Take “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which Cranmer has used often in the 14 years she has worked for the district. Written by Martin Luther King Jr., the letter uses the word “Negro” and a racist slur.

“I had to talk to students about how language changes over time, and we had to talk about the n-word and why Dr. King would be using that particular word in that particular context,” Cranmer said. “But I didn’t choose the text because it had that word in it. I used that text because it’s a superior example of how to use a semicolon.”

What’s next

Even if Granite Bay’s site council approves the additional texts on Wednesday, they will need further approval by the school’s Curriculum Instruction Leadership Team, an advisory board composed of parents, students, teachers, administrators and counselors, as well as the school board.

The process seems unnecessarily elaborate, but Cranmer and Tastor said they believe the works will ultimately be approved without much hesitation by the three bodies.

Tastor hopes that the site council meeting Wednesday will be productive and civil. I hope so, too.

In “Pleasantville,” a small but vocal minority of residents retaliates against the town’s changing culture by destroying colorful art and burning books. They are motivated by the same emotion that drives closed-minded individuals seeking to ban books that challenge their views: Fear.

Civility is finally restored to Pleasantville when one of the young protagonists, a teen the same age as many Granite Bay High School students, makes an impassioned plea for tolerance. Only then do the adults realize how shamefully they have behaved.