Thursday, February 3, 2022

Q Toon: I Feel For You


All over the country, legislatures and school boards run by right-wing Republicans have been eagerly banning Critical Race Theory in public schools (which is like banning the teaching of how to pilot an airplane in drivers ed) because it makes white students "feel bad."

That is literally how they get around having to admit it's about race.

Of course, there is no limit to things that make students feel bad these days, and we can include having to wear masks, active shooter drills, and dodgeball in that list.

(I could be wrong about those active shooter drills. As I dimly recall, most kids in my day found fire drills and tornado drills to be a welcome diversion — especially fire drills, because we got to go outside. But then, in our lifetime to that point, schools being destroyed by fires or tornadoes with children trapped inside were singular events, if we had heard of such tragedies at all.)

For all the right-wing whining about "cancel culture," Republicans are no slouches when it comes to canceling culture they don't like, and never have been. For every liberal push to censor Huckleberry Finn, there have been conservatives agitating to lock up everything from Madame Bovary to Catcher in the Rye to The Color Purple to Harry Potter to All Boys Aren't Blue — anything that admits to the existence of non-white, non-heterosexual, non-Christian experiences.

By the way, you can look through the American Library Association's Top Ten Lists of challenged books year by year from 2001 to 2020 and decide for yourself who's busier canceling whose culture.

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