Tag Archives: CRT

A short list of banned books

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To Kill a Mockingbird*
The Hate U Give*
The Color Purple: A Novel*
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian*
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning*
The Catcher in the Rye*
The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley*
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings*
The Lord Of The Rings Illustrated Edition*
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon Graphic Library)*
Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)*
The Handmaid’s Tale*
Hop on Pop (I Can Read It All By Myself)*
Lord of the Flies*
1984*
The Giver (Giver Quartet, 1)*
Lawn Boy*
The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition*
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone*
The Complete Maus*
Lolita*
The Glass Castle: A Memoir*
Fahrenheit 451*
Out of Darkness*
Critical Race Theory (Third Edition): An Introduction (Critical America, 20)*
And Tango Makes Three: Book and CD*
Assata An Autobiography*
The Kite Runner*
The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy*
The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War*
A Civic Biology: The Original 1914 Edition at the Heart of the “Scope’s Monkey Trial”*
The Bluest Eye*
Jack of Hearts (and other parts)*
All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto*
Impending Crisis of the South “Annotated”*
Animal Farm*

Excellent Critical Race Theory Novel: Tangerine

Books, , , ,

It exposes white privilege. It indicts white supremacy. It problemetizes the cult of football. What’s not to love?

Tangerine* by Edward Bloor is written from the perspective of a sort of disabled (but not really? that’s part of the plot) middle school who is white, frail, very smart, repressed, and an excellent soccer player. He is forced to leave his white suburban school and either attend a nearby Catholic school, or alternatively, go to the “inner-city” tough kid not very white school. He readily picks the latter, for some very good reasons, and there he meets his first real fears, his first real friends, and sets about making and breaking heroes.

There are also tangerines, the fruit, which play a special role in the narrative.

This is a book that should totally be banned and burned if you don’t want kids to examine their own privilege, think about fairness and class, or confront racism. Or be mean to football. It is one of those books often assigned in middle school, and this is the time we are reading all the middle school books. Fits the bill as quick and entertaining, meaningful adult reading.

What ya gonna do when they come for you?

Politics, ,

In Ramsey County, Minnesota (home of Saint Paul) you can be jailed for up to 90 days, and fined up to $1,000, if you are found in a park after hours. “Hours” in Ramsey County parks are from sun up to sun down, so the hours change daily and in pragmatic terms, are subjective.

I can see having a rule about when you can be in the park, and fixing it to sunlight makes sense, and I can even see a modest punishment for offenders. But three months in jail because you thought the sun was still up 15 minutes after sundown? Note to those reading this from the equator: The sun continues to brighten the northern sky long after official sundown, since the penumbra is quite wide in high latitudes.

That was in the Star Tribune, the region’s newspaper of record. In the same issue is an op-ed penned by a local retired cop who has a new job of screaming at clouds. There was a horrific and tragic shootout at a local bar the other day, in which over a dozen innocent bystanders were shot, one killed. It was a shootout among some bad hombres including one with an open warrant. Old Guy Cop made the argument that if only cops were allowed to make “low level stops” (aka pretextual stops) then this shooting could have been avoided. The argument goes like this: Cops were formerly allowed to pull people over for things like busted taillights. In so doing they would also end up finding felons with outstanding warrants, so they were thus kept of the streets. But now with all the “defund the police” talk this isn’t the case anymore, thus the shooting. Continue reading What ya gonna do when they come for you? →