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Your jaw will drop at these books deemed 'porn' by DeSantis and minions [1]
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Date: 2023-05-10
One of the books banned? The 1995 photo book “Houses and Homes” by Ann Morris. The book is a photo essay featuring pictures of families around the world and their dwellings. You can watch a walk-through of the book down below. But it has a single racy photo in it, according to Florida’s handmaid braintrust. Here it is. Can you see the problem?
Can you see it?
If you guessed “It’s because the people on the left are Black,” I suspect you are right. However, the official reason seems to be that the child’s naked buttocks make this an “offensive” image. Another butt-shot that earned a Florida ban appears in Trina Schart Hyman’s 1977 title and four-time winner of the Caldecott Medal, “The Sleeping Beauty,” where a single illustration of the queen bathing in the distance seems to have gotten this decades-old classic pulled from the shelves.
Duval Country, Florida, has made the news for participating in some of the state’s most egregious book-banning, and Legum’s found that to be very true. Mem Fox’s “Guess What?,” published in 1988 in Australia and in 1990 in the U.S., is a picture book that guides the reader in guessing main character Daisy O’Grady’s occupation. This photo seems to have been beyond the pale according to Florida’s book-banners. Content warning: Illustrated witch wearing a snorkel while bathing in an industrial sink and holding a fish.
It is important to note that while a few books are deemed “pornographic,” most of the book bans are filed under the catch-all term “inappropriate.” While we can speculate whether or not what someone found “inappropriate” about the above image was the bathing or the fact that the book’s protagonist is (spoiler alert) a witch, the justification is pretty cryptic.
However, the fact that “Jalani and the Lock” by Dr. Lorenzo Pace was banned really gives away the racism in this game. DeSantis and others are playing with history and reality. It is an absolutely beautiful and deceptively simple rendering of the story of American chattel slavery. It is such a true children’s book–I cannot speak highly enough of it. It tells the story of a young African boy who is captured and shipped to America, enslaved, and then freed. In the end, he finally passes down to his great-great-grandchildren the lock that kept him shackled on that voyage to serve as a talisman of his family’s history.
Duval County banned this book under the designation “pornography.” At the same time, the Florida Department of Education announced on Tuesday that it rejected 35% of social studies textbooks submitted to them. What were the rejections about? A section for sixth through eighth graders, which reads:
“New Calls for Social Justice During the 2000s, one effect of an increase in the use or mobile devices and social media was the spread of images of police violence, sometimes deadly, against Black Americans. The deaths of Black Americans outraged many Americans and led to a crowing awareness of systemic racism that permeated the broader society. In 2013, a new social and political movement called Black Lives Matter formed to protest violence against Black Americans. The movement called for an end to systemic racism and white supremacy.”
Meanwhile, more mature books like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and “Beloved” have also been banned in Florida. The argument is that there are depictions of rape, incest, molestation, and violence in those books—so I guess only senior citizens should be allowed to read them? Surprisingly (see: not surprisingly), Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” where a guy obsessed with his mother’s sex life ends with everybody being murdered, and “Romeo and Juliet,” where two minors have sex and then die by suicide, are still on the shelves. Also not on DeSantis’ ban list is “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway, which features descriptions of gang rape during the Spanish Civil War.
Ever since the Republican Party decided to forgo having even the most basic policy platforms, they have run far afield from the majority of Americans’ concerns and headlong into the dangerously absurd.
“Jelani and the Lock” read aloud:
“Houses and Homes” read aloud:
“Guess What?” read aloud:
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