I’m writing a book with stories that might evoke a wide range of emotions, along with recipes. The harder part has been deciding which recipes make the cut.
As the author, I get to make these choices.
In eighth grade, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, and we had lots of classroom discussion about it. In it, a girl named Scout tells the story of her father, a small-town lawyer defending a Black man whom the whole town has already convicted.
Harper Lee shows us how a child sees what the grown-ups refuse to see. I still carry the lesson Atticus Finch gives his daughter: you can’t understand a person until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
Killing a mockingbird means hurting someone whose only offense was existing. Destroying something good just because it makes you uncomfortable.
Schools have pulled this book for sixty years. A Virginia school board called it immoral in the 1960s. Harper Lee wrote back that it made her wonder if any of its members could read. A couple of years ago, Palm Beach County, the county next to mine, pulled the book for review under a parental-rights audit, just because it made people uncomfortable.
Here’s the thing: It should make people uncomfortable.
Racism is uncomfortable. Kids can handle that, often better than you and me, especially with a good teacher. And a parent choosing what’s right for their own child is different from having that choice made for every family.
Palm Beach eventually reinstated the book, confirming the novel met all state criteria under Florida’s parental rights laws.
But the fight continues. According to PEN America, nearly 12,000 book bans occurred in public schools last year, the most since they started tracking it.
Please join me in contacting your members of Congress about this. EveryLibrary and We Believe in Education have made it easy: they built Write for Your Right to Read in partnership with CivicMail. Just enter your zip code, personalize your message, and CivicMail prints and mails a real postcard.
Here’s the link to do it: http://stopbookbans.us/
Let’s fill your congressperson’s mailbox and keep our school libraries filled with important books.
Be kind, feed your mind, and send some postcards!
Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America, with recipes along the way.
