My Latest Award! Thank you, Iowa!
I was obviously thrilled when I learned that I had won the 2023 Carter G. Woodson Book Award for Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment. The book, meant for high school students, details the shameful treatment of Chinese and Japanese Americans that led to the imprisonment of more than 100,000 totally innocent Japanese Americans during World War II.
I never expected the book to receive a second honor. But it has.
Using a recently enacted “parents’ rights” law, proudly signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, Days of Infamy has now been banned in school libraries in some parts of Iowa. Gratified though I was to be sufficiently irritating to reactionary school board members to receive such an accolade—other books among the five hundred that have so far been proscribed are Animal Farm, An American Tragedy, Brave New World, The Giver, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Invisible Man, and, curiously, Forrest Gump—I was also a bit puzzled. The law, SF 496, passed with only Republican votes, had been aimed not at political or legal history, as my book was, but rather at sex and gender.
SF 496 required school districts to remove from the shelves any book with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” although what constituted a sex act remained vague. There was an exception for science or health class material, but only if specifically approved, a bar one suspects is high. The Bible was exempted altogether. The law also forbade “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion or instruction” that mentioned sexual identity or gender orientation through grade six.
As Governor Reynolds succinctly observed while denying SF 496 was a book ban, “We got porn out of the classroom and the libraries.”
There were complaints from some school administrators that the law was vague and may cast a wider net than was intended, but it remained difficult for me to understand how a narrative that examined a series of laws and Supreme Court cases, without a single reference to anything even vaguely sexual, could have fit under the SF 496’s umbrella.
To find out, I decided to call the high school in one of the school districts that had banned Days of Infamy. It was deep in rural Iowa, and so I prepared myself for a chilly reception. A woman answered the telephone, quite friendly, and I asked for the school library. She said she didn’t think anyone was there but I could leave a message.
I said I would but then I introduced myself, told her why I was calling, and mentioned the book. I anticipated a change in tone, and I got one. But not what I was expecting.
She snorted.
When I asked what was funny, she replied, “I think the whole thing is a bunch of crap.”
She gave me the direct number of the school library, where another woman picked up. She said she was uncertain about Days of Infamy because she was on the public library side. It seems the public library and the school library share the same space and, until the law was passed, both were open to anyone to wander freely. Since then, however, the school district was forced to build a partition dividing the two collections and students were not permitted to enter the building at all until it was completed. Now they are not allowed on the public library side during school hours.
When I commented that it must have been inconvenient, this woman also had some unflattering things to say about both the law and Governor Reynolds. “If parents don’t want their children to read certain books, don’t check them out,” she added, a note of anger creeping into her voice. “But there’s always one who will sue the school.”
Finally, she sighed. “But we can’t do anything about it now. It’s the law.”
I said there was an election in 2024, and the woman said, “Oh yes!” although Reynolds’ term runs through 2026.
I needed to call back a third time to speak to a school librarian. This woman was also uncertain about Days of Infamy, but she did say that, because of the law, the entire Young Adult section had been removed from the library and placed in a classroom at the high school. I did not inquire as to whether the room was kept locked.
This third woman was also no fan of the law and agreed that it was more of a political stunt than a genuine attempt to protect children from the likes of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, George Orwell…and me.
Although this is an inane example, the trend to replace education with indoctrination has been gathering substantial momentum in recent years and has become an incendiary political issue on both ends of the political spectrum. In addition to gender issues, the history of the United States, my field, has become the chief battleground, with demands from each side to teach middle and high school students about the development of the nation to comport with their own political ideology.
While a discussion of how the actual history of the nation should be taught demands more space than I have here, another casualty in this ideological trench war is critical thought, the teaching of which is one of middle and high school’s most important responsibilities.
There are three aspects to effective critical thinking: properly setting the assumptive boundaries within which examination of an issue will take place; evaluating the possibilities inside those boundaries; and choosing one based on reason and the weight of evidence.
The largest pitfall is when assumptive boundaries are not set sufficiently wide as to take in possibilities that later become reality, as Israel has sadly learned from its disastrous threat assessment of Hamas. It is the job of educators to teach children how to expand those boundaries, as most try to do, not narrow them as Kim Reynolds and her ilk are aiming to achieve with SF 496.
What they do not seem to grasp is that attempts to hide the truth, no matter how cynical, do not make it go away.