LeVar Burton: American Hero

My comments from the Freedom to Read Fest, in a rare Sunday post!

Hi friends,

I was in Chicago for a conference this week, and then flew back Saturday morning to cold, rainy NYC just in time to speak at the Freedom to Read fest. I thought I’d share my remarks from the festival here.

I’ve been extraordinarily lucky that the second half of my career has gotten to focus on books: writing them, editing them, advocating for them. I’m also acutely aware that books I assigned when I was teaching, and books I love reading to my kids, are disappearing from public life. These books are disappearing because of legislation in red cities and states, but also because people who “don’t want to make trouble” are doing the censors’ work for them, and complying in advance. And this is what I want to talk about today. We don’t live in a state that bans books, but we do live in a state that restricts literacy in meaningful ways.

The latest episode of Stacey Abram’s new podcast—Assembly Required—is all about banned books, and features a conversation with the legendary LeVar Burton. He makes the point that literacy is a human right, just like water or housing—it’s a civil right. To me, this means two things: every person has the fundamental right to learn the skill of reading, and, through reading, to acquire literacy: knowledge and ways of knowing that are needed to be a citizen. Literacy is the cornerstone of citizenship.

The battle against literacy is insidious. Restricting access to books doesn’t have to come through banning. Those of you who don’t have kids may not know that the NYC DOE has forced the adoption of a new reading curriculum that takes books out of the classroom in exchange for short, skills-based passages. In the name of a very narrow, antiseptic definition of reading skills, the curriculum takes away the rights of every student in New York City to read whole books. Instead, they learn a skill, take a test, learn a skill, take a test. This is not preparing them to be citizens, or to love reading.

In the meantime, our (beleaguered) mayor has repeatedly doubled down on defunding our libraries. While Brooklyn Public Libraries have done a great public service giving kids across the country access to library cards to circumvent book bans, the libraries in my neighborhood are chronically understaffed, underfunded, incapable of meeting the needs of our community of new immigrants. We need to do more to push back on the impulse of politicians to rob from our schools and libraries to enrich our police and prisons.

And this also means that we need to be brave—we need to, in the fashioning of historian Timothy Snyder, not comply in advance. Vibes and norms and not wanting to rock boats and politeness and civility do a lot more damage than a few fascist Moms for Liberty legislators could ever hope to do.

You might remember last year that Scholastic decided to comply in advance—removing books featuring Black characters or LGBTQ characters from their book fairs, segregating who kids saw reflected in the literature they had access to. Even a biography of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was taken from their main catalog. What a flat, antiseptic myopic view of reality to offer our kids. But people were brave. Authors, teachers, librarians, students spoke out. And it worked—people changed their minds.

As a parent of three kids under the age of 10, I think about risk a lot. Which is the greater risk to our kids: that they might encounter something in a book that makes them uncomfortable (or makes me uncomfortable) or that they never struggle with new ideas, brave ideas? Or—worse even still—that we create such a chilly environment for ideas and art that today’s kids never write tomorrow’s great novel, either because their voices are silenced or because they never feel the spark?

I wrote Democracy: A Love Letter because I wanted people to have a blueprint for action to protect their books, to know how to push back against subversive fascism in their communities that hides daring books away instead of putting them center stage. We can fight like hell to expand library funding. We can insist that our kids have access to good books. We can support local bookstores and buy banned books and stash them in little free libraries. We can come up with scripts for why books belong in schools and libraries. We can unveil the fact that “pornography” is generally used as a codeword for banning books about LGBTQ relationships. We can be brave.

We’re five weeks out from the election in the US, but to my mind the actual work of protecting democracy is happening this month, during banned books week: as authors, independent bookstores, librarians, and families come together to celebrate literacy: the cornerstone of all citizenship.

Go read some banned books!

A final note: On Friday evening, I got to read my little three-year-old nephew a bedtime story, and he chose the Julián is a Mermaid. This is the very same book chosen by Bella to read to at Freedom to Read during NYC Drag Story Hour—because it’s one of the most banned books in the country right now.

Thanks for reading friends—write bravely, and I’ll be back next week!

Kelly

What’s going on around here

Hi friends, old and new!

I’m Kelly, a political-scientist-professor-turned-academic-editor. I live in Brooklyn, have three kids and a new book. I post here once a week or so about all manner of things related to writing and making space for writing.

I own Epilogue Editing, and here are some of the things we do:

Editing and publicity work: We have fall availability! But the calendar is filling up fast. If you have a piece of writing you’d like to get out into the world, now is a great time to reach out.

Coaching: I’ve accepted my final coaching clients for the fall! If we haven’t talked yet and you need some writing support, I’d love to have you join a writers’ circle—or reach out and we can talk about working together in the winter/spring.

New! We do have a few coaching slots available for international scholars, so feel free to reach out about those.

AcWriMo: It’s here! Click this link to sign up for AcWriMo, where we write every day in November (and then take a break). Get excited!

Coming soon: More information about signing up for spring writers’ circles and the spring sessions of our book writing workshop—stay tuned!