"What we are witnessing in the form of book banning by conservative politicians and parent groups is a pedagogy of fear, which is fueled by a form of right-wing populism/nationalism that resists change, that rejects the unfinished and the yet to be. The banning of books is consistent with a world that is seen as fixed, where Socratic questioning is marked as a form of danger to those who fetishize ignorance and praise anti-intellectualism. It is not just the soul of the U.S. that is at stake, as , but also its mind."
Joe Feagin: "Historically, banning books has always been about suppressing accurate public memories and the critical probing of oppressive U.S. pasts and presents — always in the pursuit of creating greater ignorance and subservience in elite-ruled populations. A central aspect of advanced human rights civilizations is the ability to remember correctly those oppressive societal realities and to react energetically to their deep and continuing legacies in the present and future."
George Yancy: In his informative Truthout on book banning, Chris Walker shares that, “PEN America, a nonprofit organization that promotes free expression and human rights, found that 1,648 titles have been banned by schools across the entire country. A lot of these books had LGBTQ themes, featured Black or Brown characters, or explored themes of feminism.” I am reminded of the warning issued by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana back in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I like Santayana’s use of “condemned,” as it implies the sense of being doomed, which implies destruction.
https://truthout.org/articles/how-can-we-resist-book-bans-this-banned-author-has-ideas/?utm
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