If LR5 doesn’t put ‘Black is a Rainbow Color’ back on the shelf, it’s letting racism win
One complaint and a book is removed from the shelf, Lexington-Richland 5 school district?
One complaint? The book should be back on the shelf ASAP.
The State’s Alexa Jurado and Bristow Marchant reported on LR5 removing “Black is a Rainbow Color” from school library shelves “after receiving a complaint.”
Children should not have representations of themselves taken off shelves because of one complaint. Children should not be stripped of a chance to read and learn because of one complaint.
Let’s call the complaint what it is — racist.
Any person complaining about “Black is Rainbow Color” is actually complaining about their children learning basic Black history and Black culture.
See what’s in the book for yourself. You can go through the whole book in a YouTube video. It takes about 7 minutes. That’s about how long it should take LR5 to review the book and return it to school libraries.
A synopsis of the book would read like this: Black people exist, have a culture and a history. In the end it goes through a brief history of names for people of the Black race.
The book references Jazz singer Billie Holiday; the first Black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall; civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr and Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. Their legacies have been taught in schools for decades.
Nothing in the book is poisonous to a child’s mind. What is absolutely toxic to children or anyone else are the ideas behind the complaint that removed the book.
Why would any person complain about a book which simply celebrates the existence Black history and culture? While we don’t know the identity of the person who made the complaint or their exact motivation, South Carolina and the United States are littered with people who don’t want Black history or culture to exist, or they want Black history and culture to be so far removed from their own lives that it might as well not exist. While it might be one complaint, it represents a painfully real bigotry.
Parents who want “Black is a Rainbow Color” removed don’t want their kids learning about Black history and culture because then their kids will know the things their parents say about Black people are wrong. These parents live in fear of their own shame and regret when they foresee their children growing up to reject their parents’ bigoted beliefs. These parents are mired in racism, incapable of change, and want their children to remain trapped in that same cynical view of the world.
Racism isn’t just enacted by the belief and expression that another race is inferior. Racism is enacted by indoctrinating and rigidly enforcing it on those close to racist and not allowing any dissent.
The bigoted attempts to have books banned are happening in other parts of South Carolina.
The Beaufort County School District pulled 97 books from its shelves after a complaint, it said. Some of those books deal with the experiences of people of color, trans teenagers and gay teenagers. Others were fantasy novels that deal with gender roles. And if you can believe it, some of the books for teens deal with — get this — sex!
Apparently a set of parents in Beaufort County believe that Stephen King’s novel “Carrie” — in which a mother won’t let her daughter wear lipstick among other overbearing rules — is an excellent parenting manual.
A Greenville County councilman and the county GOP have pushed an absurd narrative that librarians have let sexually explicit books sneak into children sections. A majority of county council saw through the ruse and stopped a resolution to remove books from county libraries.
The book removals in LR5 and Beaufort County and the proposal in Greenville County are all an attempt to ensure that the only kind of children who exist are boys who wear blue, girls who wear pink, and it’s best if they’re white and live in fear of Hell fire if they let any naughty thoughts in their heads. In the minds of book banners, any kids who deviate from those standards should be oppressed out of existence.
Will LR5 enforce that oppression? Will the district be part of erasing Black history and culture? The district will be if it doesn’t put “Black is a Rainbow Color” back on the shelf.