The following is a manuscript I wrote in reaction to the 2021 list of banned books that Matt Krause published. I figured that in light of the recent required works list adopted by Texas, it was worthwhile to put out this more conceptual piece I wrote.
Abstract
In this conceptual paper I apply King’s (2019) method of shoaling to the bad faith narratives around book censorship in United States’ public education. I argue that the techniques of (neo)liberalism are inadequate to resist renewed efforts to ban books from the school curriculum. Through shoaling, I weave disparate scholarship together to create a lens that allows for the analysis of book bans from outside the epistemological and ontological assumptions of modern liberalism. Scholars of Indigenous studies, Black studies, Decolonial philosophy, and critical theory are rubbed together to imagine a pluriversal approach that allows one to envision an alternate means of analysis regarding book bans and education. I conclude that censorship is paradoxically a feature of western modernity, and the techniques of liberalism are unable to address the problem of book censorship. Instead, we must turn to wisdom that falls outside hegemonic, liberal discourse.
Keywords: decoloniality, Western modernity, censorship, liberalism, critical theory
Shoaling Book Bans: Resisting Censorship
Reading has always been a path toward liberation and fulfillment. To learn to read is to start down the road of liberation. It is a road that should be accessible to everyone. No one has the right to keep you from reading, and yet that is what is happening in many areas in this country today. There are those who think they know best what we should read. These censors are at work in all areas of our daily lives.
—Rudolfo Anaya, Take the Tortillas out of Your Poetry
In October 2021 Texas Republican State Representative Matt Krause requested the Texas Education Agency provide information about specific books present within their schools. Krause sent a spreadsheet of 850 titles, ranging widely in themes and topics.[1] He wanted to know three things: if each school had any of the books, where they were located within the school, and with what funds they were purchased. Ellis (2021) explained that this spreadsheet listed books about human rights, sex education, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer (LGBTQ) people or characters. Ellis found it troubling that so many LGBTQ books were targeted in this sprawling list, but she explained, "I cannot overstate what a weird, jumbled mess this list is, and after considering it seriously, I can conclusively say it should not be taken seriously" (n.p.).
According to Ellis, we do not need to take Krause seriously, but I will take these claims seriously, for claims like Krause’s continue to abound and affect policy (e.g., Najarro, 2023; Rummler, 2021;Schulten, 2022; The Learning Network, 2022; Will, 2022). Harris and Alter (2022) explained that book banning efforts surged in 2021 and listed ten of the most targeted titles: (1) Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, (2) Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, (3) All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson, (4) Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez, (5) The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, (6) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, (7) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews, (8) The Blues Eye by Toni Morrison, (9) This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson, and (10) Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin. These books all deal with the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. They are challenged under the notion that they contain explicit references that are inappropriate for a school-aged audience—usually sexually explicit passages or derogatory terms about race or gender. This is a bad faith narrative, that according to Jean Paul Sartre is the condition “in which one averts one's gaze from facts, or options and choices, that at some level one knows to exist, but about which it is more convenient to be ignorant” (Blackburn, 2008). There are plenty of books that are in the heteronormative white canon that contain derogatory terms about Black people and women that are not on this list: The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Romeo and Juliet, for example. This paper will examine the phenomenon of book bans through a conceptual lens that is outside the assumptions of liberal modernity to make sense of what is happening here.
Someone with a liberal mindset (the social theory, not the political mindset) tends to think that society is making progress toward a more just future (Mignolo, 2011). These efforts to ban books and censor the curriculum are framed as something to resist via free speech (Cossman, 2013). However, they are indicative of a deep rot that festers in the liberalism of modernity that is rooted in colonialism (Quijano, 2007). The United States government and its citizens continue to make moves aimed at correcting the wrongs that were perpetuated in the past, but fail to address how the underlying conditions continue to create a system that will continue reproducing those harms (Harari, 2018). Many operate under the premise that as long as you condemn the actions of the past, you can continue operating in an unexamined present. Every time we think we have cut out the weeds of racism, sexism, genderism, classism, etc. the rotted roots of coloniality instantiated as liberal modernity produce the same destructive oppressions in new varieties time and again. Pirsig (2005) has a useful analogy to think of how a system can continue to produce the same-yet-different oppressions: If “a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.. . . There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding” (p. 98). A purpose of this paper is to understand the system from a perspective outside of (neo)liberal modernity.
There are dysfunctions of liberal modernity that social philosophers have addressed in its full right, but I aim to apply an eclectic approach of theories in analyzing how recent book banning efforts represent a dysfunction of the American education system. In this conceptual paper I will bridge theories from scholars of critical pedagogy, Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, and decolonial theory. To accomplish this, I will shoal these various theories to serve as a method to deconstruct the embedded truths and power that book banning confers in an educational context. The conceptual framework will add onto existing critical analyses of the systems and curricula of educational systems.
In the Shoals
At the center of my framework is King’s (2019) shoaling of Black and Native studies. A shoal simultaneously is and is not; it is in constant flux—shifting and transforming with no fixed position in the sea or land. Literally, a shoal is a geological feature that occurs in shallow water. Depending on the tide, it is either above or below the surface. A shoal is difficult to navigate when aboard a ship and is often a dangerous endeavor for large vessels. In this metaphor, Whiteness, coloniality, and liberal theory is the ship. For clarity, when I mention liberal modernity, I invoke a combination of embedded whiteness, colonial mindsets, liberal theories of governance, and the hegemonic actions that are taken within this ship of liberal modernity.
By driving this ship of liberal modernity through the shoals of Black, Indigenous, and critical scholarship, the ship is broken apart. The different lenses of seemingly disparate scholarship can come together to deconstruct and expose the underlying ontological and epistemological positions that are used to suppress and oppress while the shoals act as a resistance to that hegemonic force.
King (2019) explains that “by assembling, shoaling, and rubbing disparate texts against one another, unexpected openings emerge where different voices are brought into relationship” (p. 30). In this process, emergences “bring the reader to new and, at times, unthought terrain from which to reconsider . . . the liberatory practices of abolition and decolonization” (p. 31). As I will explain, this paradigm of liberal modernity has brought wonderful advances to humanity, but at the same time it has sought to exclude, oppress, and suppress other systems of thought. We have talked about the role of book censorship for decades (if not centuries) in the context of American education (Knox, 2015). Liberalism does not have the tools for considering how it affects the mind and soul of those who are harmed by censorship, so it is necessary to adopt a new lens for exploring these harms and violences wrought by censorship.
The Colonial Framing
Francis Bacon (who lived 1561-1626) held a belief that Europeans needed to command nature and force it to submit to their will to use it for their purposes—this position fueled colonial conquest of land and mind. This new conception of nature as natural resources "was a sign of progress and modernization and at the same time a sign that other civilizations stagnated and were falling behind the West" (Mignolo, 2013, p. 13). A Western concept of knowledge had emerged, and it would soon dominate the world as the colonial matrix of power spread to envelop nearly every corner of the earth.
Knowledge in the colonial matrix of power was a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it was the mediation to the ontology of the world as well as a way of being in the world (subjectivity). On the other hand, as far as knowledge was conceived imperially as true knowledge, it became a commodity to be exported to those whose knowledge was deviant or non-modern according to Christian theology and, later on, secular philosophy and sciences. (Mignolo, 2013, p. 13; see also, Wynter, 2003)
This export of knowledge flourished in the education system. We see this export of knowledge in the establishment of a literary canon that is "appropriate" for students to learn and discuss. There are subjects that are permissible and those realities and ways of being in the world that do not align to such beliefs are systematically censored.
Western notions of education came to dominate education systems. The tidy nature of geometric proofs proved to be the basis by which Western/modern schools were modeled: discrete subjects could be further divided into a series of steps to be learned (Davis, 2004). The process of school mirrored that of the logical, rational way of thinking that permeated Europe during the early 1600s through to the present day. There are pockets of resistance to these zero-point notions of knowledge, but the American schooling system's devoted reliance on universal curriculum, standardized testing, teacher evaluation rubrics, competition through grades, and other, "objective," gold-standard practices of teaching (see Goldstein, 2015) is indicative of the influence of the colonial matrix of power. Mignolo indicated several historico-structural nodes that articulate this power of which I will include those particularly related to education:
● "An aesthetic hierarchy (art, literature, theater, opera) that through respective institutions (museums, school of beaux arts, opera houses, glossy paper magazines with splendid reproductions of paintings) manages the senses and shapes sensibilities by establishing norms of the beautiful and the sublime, of what art is and what it is not, what shall be included and what shall be excluded, what shall be awarded and what shall be ignored.
● An epistemic hierarchy that privileged Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies was institutionalized in the global university system, publishing houses, and Encyclopedia Britannica, on paper and online.
● A linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages privileged communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternized the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture, but not of knowledge/theory.
● A particular conception of the 'modern subject,' an idea of Man, introduced in the European Renaissance, became the model for the Human and for Humanity, and the point of reference for racial classification and global racism" (Mignolo, 2013, p.19).
Briefly, we see these aesthetic appreciations for what art is and is not through what is included in textbooks and classroom material. Book bans continue the domination of literary art and knowledge by American/European thinkers and historical perspectives. Most salient to this paper is that the English Language Arts canon is a reproduction of white, heteronormative values (see, Dyches et al., 2020, for a practical example of educators subverting this). Compounding this epistemic hierarchy is the linguistic hierarchy that considers any language other than English as anathema to learning in the American school room (see Flores & Rosa, 2015). Finally, conceptions of Man and what it means to be Human that is reinforced through social-emotional learning conceptions that continue to reinforce Whiteness and propagate an anti-Blackness mindset (see Love, 2019 for how 'character education' is anti-Black).
Critical Theories of Pedagogy
In Education, there are certain critical theories of pedagogy which are focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Two scholars prominent to my understanding of how to go about culturally relevant pedagogy are Gloria Ladson-Billings (culturally relevant pedagogy), and Django Paris (culturally sustaining pedagogy).
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Ladson-Billings (1995) was guided by four propositions: concrete experiences as a criterion of meaning, the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims, the ethic of caring, and the ethic of personal accountability. There are three goals of a culturally relevant pedagogy: achieve academically, demonstrate cultural competence, and understand and critique the existing social order. She explained that there are three propositions that make a culturally relevant teacher: conceptions of self and others, social relations, and conceptions of knowledge. Teachers should believe that all are capable of academic success, they are part of the community, fluid student-teacher relationships, connectedness and community, knowledge is not static, knowledge must be viewed critically, and assessment must be multifaceted.
When we rub the epistemic hierarchy of Western modernity against the epistemic criteria of Ladson-Billings, there is a considerable amount of friction. While Ladson-Billings does not oppose rationality as a source of knowledge, it is not the focus. Ladson-Billings's propositions and goals of a culturally relevant pedagogy are often represented in bad faith as an objectivity without parenthesis, also called a zero-point epistemology:
Zero point epistemology is the ultimate grounding of knowledge, which paradoxically is ungrounded, or grounded neither in geo-historical location nor in bio-graphical configurations of the bodies. . . It is grounding without grounding; it is in the mind and not in the brain and in the heart. Every way of knowing and sensing (feeling) that do not conform to the epistemology and aesthesis of the zero point are cast behind in time and/or in the order of myth, legend, folklore, local knowledge, and the like. (Mignolo, 2011, p. 80)
Ladson-Billing’s culturally relevant pedagogy should be considered as embracing an objectivity with parentheses because it is rooted in the lived experiences and perspectives of those present in the classroom.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. Paris (2012) expanded Ladson-Billings’s (1995) work and theorized culturally relevant pedagogy was a good step forward, which developed from resource pedagogy, but it still gets instantiated in bad faith as a deficit model of thinking or a way to bridge from one to the dominant culture (Sleeter, 2011). Perhaps it operates too much within the colonial matrix of power rather than attempting to subvert it. Paris (2012) argues that part of this is because of the word choice and not the aims as identified by Ladson-Billings. Reconceptualizing the movement as sustaining invites educators to imagine how their practices aren't just relevant but actually work to sustain the cultures of whom they are teaching. A sustaining pedagogy would help produce a pluralism; linguistic and cultural loss is perpetuated current pedagogies.
Going Beyond
The notions of culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogy are admirable and worthwhile, but through a decolonial lens they continue the liberal idea of growth and development. This is not about a paradigm shift in education, but is aimed at predominantly white teachers learning how to be more inclusive in their classrooms. A decolonial pedagogy requires a rejection of the colonial paradigm and an imagining of new, emancipatory projects. De Lissovoy (2019) explained, "For educators, this suggests the importance of understanding struggles around curriculum and pedagogy as more than simply ideological. Thus, to engage in such struggles means more than elaborating a critique; it means engaging mind and spirit in a process of decolonisation" (p. 419). Paris (2012) and Ladson-Billings (1995) may be more than ideological, but, anecdotally, from how their theories are received and interpreted, much of their larger points are incorporated into a continuation of colonial thinking and not a transformation of school systems. This is through no fault of theirs but, rather, the colonial logics that continue to pervert decolonial aims.
A book must be argued for inclusion based on the merits of Western modernity. The relevance of Ladson-Billings (1995), perhaps, tacitly accepts the order imposed by modernity. It is still playing by the rules of the hegemonic epistemic values. There are defenses against censorship inherent in the culturally relevant pedagogy framework, but it also allows the avenue to feint the debate and find a book that is relevant to the culture of children and does not upset the sensitivities of the hierarchical ranking of literature or the innocence of the child. Paris's (2012) pedagogical move pushes against this and invites educators to sustain, but just what are we working to sustain anyway... It is an attempt in vain to work to sustain something one does not understand. A teacher cannot sustain something of which they are ignorant. Thus, the knowledges and theories from Decolonial, Native, and Black studies are necessary.
Decolonial Options
Alfred (2009) deliberately mentions that decolonial philosophies are not just for the Indigenous, minoritized, or otherwise colonized peoples:
If I am successful in conveying some of the wisdom inherent in our cultures, perhaps that wisdom will help others as well to deal with dysfunctional aspects of their own societies and to live better lives, both collectively and individually. . . It asks non-indigenous people to join in an indigenously oriented dialogue aimed at moving beyond those conflicts. (p. 22)
This invites those who have been on the benefactor side of the colonial matrix of power to consider decolonial philosophies to delink colonial practices from contemporary ones. It invites us to consider decolonial ideas and juxtapose them against those of Western culture and consider where our dysfunctions may lie.[2] Such an approach is within the wider methodological practice of the shoals as introduced earlier.
Discipline and Justice
There is a breakdown in the concept of Western notions of justice when it comes to debates about banning/censoring books to be included in the classroom. The First Amendment is held up to near holy standards in the United States and this is often invoked to argue against the banning of books in the classroom. This approach fails though. The books are not being removed from circulation, their ideas are not being prohibited from discussion, and they are not being flung into fires, purged from the collective reality. They are simply being expunged from consideration for curricular inclusion.
This is not a violation of liberal ideas; it is a feature of liberal ideas. They are being expunged because the world views that they present are not viewed as compatible or suitable with children. They are books that depict variants of normalized behavior and are often framed as including graphic material that is not suitable for children (e.g., sex, violence, drugs, derogatory language, etc.). The claims of “unfair” or “injustice” do not resonate in the halls of modernity. Another version of justice must be considered.
Alfred (2009) explained that there are three basic ways that Indigenous ideas of justice differ from Western ideas:
(1) They are not concerned primarily with questions of equity in treatment or distribution;
(2) There is no universalizing or leveling imperative that may be used to justify the limitation of freedom; and
(3) The cultural framework that determines whether or not power is used appropriately includes not only the set the set of human relationships that form our society, but all other relationships as well. (p. 66)
For Indigenous values and philosophy, justice is aimed at maintaining harmony and promoting coexistence. It considers all relationships because "re-establishing harmony requires not only consideration of all the elements concerned but their active participation in resolving the issue" (p. 67). Justice is not something that happens to a person; it is something that happens with a person and their environment and their relationships in a healing mindset. The current debates around the banning of books do not consider the harmony that allowing the books' inclusion would promote. Banned books draw scrutiny to the heteronormative values of modernity and therefore excluded—cultural relevance, extending empathy, and social harmony be damned. Schools are maintained for purposes largely beneficial to the status quo and empowering those at the margins of society is not included.
A Pedagogy of Care
There is much focus on pedagogical practices that involve empathizing with students and creating safe spaces for students to express themselves. This type of thinking is still in a position where it reinforces the marginalization of students. Through character education, or its rebranded form of social-emotional learning, schools work at assimilating students to the neoliberal mindset of self-governance and reliance on personal ability over being vulnerable and relying on others for support. This concept of assimilation is also occurring at the literature level. Those books that may have questionable material, continue to work to enchant the reader into adopting the values and beliefs that are commiserate with Western modernity (Wynter, 1987). Those books that do not adhere to such narratives, and would otherwise work to disenchant the discourse, are erased and prohibited from the curriculum. While the Puritanical traits of perseverance, grit, dedication, etc. are not unworthy pursuits and aims in themselves, we must ask to what end are these character traits striving. In the vein of the colonial matrix of power, these character traits are developed to contribute to a capitalistic growth model of society that aims at developing one's "human" resources to contribute to productivity and growth. The outcome of developing these character traits is to increase the ability to cope with the demands of the American schooling system and not towards liberating pathways.
Porosity
Educators stress the importance of empathizing with their students but tend do so for the aim of shaping the student to a Western culture. Rather than an empty empathy, educators should recognize and embrace the porosity of people. King (2019) said, "porosity is explicitly engaged as a way to theorize entanglement and interconnection as a part of all human relations" (p. 115). Rather than the teacher only viewing themselves as a guide for the student to become a "developed" person, they should recognize the entanglement and interconnection of themselves to those of their students and communities. Furthermore, because educators are often working with students who are from backgrounds unlike their own, they must work at building a connection that overlaps with what they view as the other. Books that feature divergent characters would continue to promote that entanglement and interconnection. Teachers who deeply receive these books and use them in class would find parts of themselves in the characters and students would find parts of themselves in the character; the hard walls of our dogmatic, unique individualism would wear away and leave us with a further appreciation for how we can all interconnect.
Again, King explained "to coexist and love each other, they must confront and understand this profound generational trauma and form of brokenness to find ways to heal themselves and each other" (2019, p. 147). The ‘they’ in this quote is in reference to characters from Daughters of the Dust, but, nonetheless, humans carry trauma with them. Educators should work to confront and work with their students to heal their respective traumas. Such a pedagogy though is in opposition to the colonial notion of teachers as individuals who are only there to teach knowledge. The books that are often banned feature trauma and are replete with opportunities for finding ways to heal. When we ban books or are complacent, we pull the wool over our eyes and ignore that these traumas happen—that these traumas are occurring in our students' lives.
"World"-Traveling. To aid teachers in this pursuit of coexistence and love of students, I find Lugones's concept of "world"-traveling an expansion on the culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogies that encourages a porous interaction. She explains, "To travel to the worlds of those who are also oppressed but who are categorially isolated from us through the interlocking of oppressions involves acute fluency in the mechanisms of oppression and insight in resisting those mechanism" (pp. 18–19). "World"-traveling is thus being able to epistemically move back and forth between different worlds, hearkening to the idea that there are multiple "yous" and as such there are multiple worlds that one may occupy. This concept of students occupying different worlds is not new to education: recognizing that students have cultural funds of knowledge that they are able to bring from one space (home) to a second space (school) has been around for two decades (González et al, 2006). More so, there has been an effort to create a 'third space' where students are more able to bridge the divide between home and school life without fearing judgment and evaluation from teachers.
While these theories certainly add to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom they do not invert the epistemology of coloniality. In bad faith, the aims of these are still to indoctrinate a child to the Western notions of knowledge and teach them how their funds of knowledge are useful for life outside of their home. It runs the potential of marginalizing their knowledges and implicitly teaches them that the other things they know may be of use to the classroom and thus life. When a teacher asks a student to bring in outside information they are not "world"-traveling because there is no epistemic shift. It is a valuation of outside knowledge to the knowledge within the zero-point epistemology.
Discussion
We have observed and experienced the wonders of modernity that Western, liberal thinking has produced. There are untold scientific inventions that have been challenged forth into the world through the rationality and reason that is associated with enlightenment values and the darker side of modernity that comes with it—coloniality. On this darker side are the tools of oppression and suppression of all that has been deemed “other.” The reason and ration that produced flight, computers, the internet (to name a few) has been used in the same fashion to create and maintain a hierarchy of culture and race (Mignolo, 2011).
Shoaling impels an interrogation of these techniques of control that can bring forth new understandings of how to move through the world. Shoaling is a process of decolonial delinking of this Faustian bargain of modernity. Mignolo (2011) outlines the concept of “pluriversality as a universal project. . . read in complementarity with Quijano’s idea of ‘desprenderse’ (delinking)” (pp. 452–453). This delinking is the process of untangling that package of ideas of modernity and liberalisms where there is not a totalitarian regime of modernity’s reason and rationality that sustains a white-supremacist world order. Shoaling is the method I use to untangle, deconstruct, and dismantle the epistemic and ontological package of modernity as seen through the metaphor of a ship bursting apart on the shoals of Indigenous, Black, and critical scholarship.
The Silence of Others
I turn to poetry when I need to think through a knot of ideas (see Figure 1). In the poem, I think through the voices on the killing field and imagine a call to one another. This poem is a start of how I arrange these shoals on the shore of an educational future that is toward decoloniality and abolitionary schooling. I imagine hearing the distorted words that make a paradox of liberal values—an interpretation of how the mindset of modernity hearkens to enlightenment values of purity, reason, and logical argument. I see the techniques of liberalism utilized in their full right—not a perversion—to justify a continued silencing of discourse that threatens to disrupt the status quo.
In this poem, I convey the epistemology and ontology of liberal modernity.
There is a backlash against the ‘cancel culture’ that has sprung from ‘wokeness,’ and I posit that the renewed fervency of book bans is an in-kind reaction against this. Liberal rationality and reason is rearing its head against what can be conveyed as a violence to the enshrined liberal values of free speech and individuality. A colonial matrix of power (Mignolo, 2011) continues to exert its control over the narrative and execution of discourse through modern liberalism and neoliberalism. As Audre Lorde (1984) proclaimed, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
The debates around public-school book-bans continues to operate under the logic of the master’s tools, which will continue to go on enchanting the people of this country to sustain colonial thinking. The voices, the ideas, and the theories of the minority—the other—are what will dismantle this house. They are needed to disenchant the discourse of colonial modernity and its techniques of liberalism (Wynter, 1987).
Justice?
Western liberal conceptions of justice will not lend any weight to improving the representation of diverse books—it only prolongs and recycles the conflict. As Alfred (2009) explained, the white, western notions of justice are concerned with equity in treatment and utilize a universal application of the law (in theory) that precludes considerations of relationships and context. An Indigenous perspective of justice focuses on promoting harmony and coexistence while a liberal justice focuses on fairness and retribution. We need to approach the topics of conflict today from a perspective of healing. The liberal notion of a battle of ideas, where a thesis and antithesis engage in a violence which produces a new, better synthesis is not conducive to harmony. For white liberalism, read coloniality, justice satisfies our desire for revenge; it rights one particular wrong and does not look at the overall ecological relationship among people and the world they inhabit.
This justice system does not advance toward peaceful relations. Instead, it removes the offender, sequesters and silences them, and protects the rest of society from their corruption. This is the same tactic that is being employed against books. The books that are banned challenge the status quo and the majoritarian values that maintain the status quo. The rational response is to sequester and silence. This erasure leaves a mark on those whose ideas are silenced. There are competing values of justice: the majoritarian view it as just and the minority view it as unjust . . . conflict continues to brew.
Justice for the minority only works concomitantly with the interests of the majority, that is, when interests converge (Bell, 2018). What is just for the other is more just for us. This form of justice does not promote harmony. It continues to serve the majoritarian over the minoritized. Fair exchanges book bans with protests and continues to dismember the body politic until there only remains an unrecognizable pulp of humanity.
Healing restores.
“World”-Traveling to Heal
Encountering diverse books has often been discussed as a window, mirror, or sliding glass door (Bishop, 1990), and this is a starting place to at least acknowledge the diversity within classes. However, it is just a starting place. It is the same justice to diversity that is countered by Alfred—it is an equitable distribution. The mandate follows to have books about students of color if you have students of color in your classroom. A conceptual shift to “world”-traveling (Lugones, 2003) needs to occur to move this beyond an empty empathetic exercise in tolerance and recognition.
To travel to the “world” of others implies a recognition of our porosity, not just the potential for coalition and understanding. “World”-traveling is to move into that person’s being and take up their way of living life. A window or a sliding glass door allows a peering, a mere traipse through another path that is different—one is a voyeur here.
“World”-traveling involves the transference of body, mind, and soul into the “world” of another. This is not only a cultural recognition, but a valuation and embrace of the many lives of those around us. One does not simply slide open the door and observe the Martian landscape of others but bleeds into the other, into their world. Your many selves are still there, but you allow an openness and the possibility of your own selves to be poured into from the other. There is a visceral quality to such movement and departure to the “worlds” of others.
Modern subjectivity is under threat through such a journey. The unique, impermeable self is under siege when it is broken apart and blurred with others. A pluriversality is possible as one begins to realize that they, too, travel between different “worlds” throughout the course of their day. There is a “world” with friends, a separate “world” with parents, teachers, and loved ones that forms a complex network of selves, irreducible to an essence of one self. We are in the world and are shaped by the world as we ebb and flow in the waters of life.
Diverse Books Resist. Diverse books as well as those of the protected canon are a part of this permissibility of “world”-traveling. As we allow the edges of ourselves to wear away and open to others, we can abandon the universal conceptions of a colonial matrix of power. Such a move threatens the embedded hierarchies of race, culture, and thought, and, thus, it is challenged. America is fiercely individualistic—more than any other nation (Dubner, 2021)—and these concepts of harmony, justice, “world”-traveling, and disenchanting discourse threaten that individualism.
Conclusion
So, where are we left now? I have brought together scholarship from multiple disciplines and discourses in an attempt to dismantle our perception that the banning of books and the ensuing fight to keep them in libraries is dependent on the value of free speech so valued by western modernity. Charles Mills (1997) inscribed the dedication page of The Racial Contract with the following:
This book is dedicated to the blacks, reds, browns, and yellows
who have resisted the Racial Contract
and the white renegades and race traitors
who have refused it.
Western modernity and liberalism is propagated under this racial contract and it remains in effect today. To those reading this that are white, take this as a call to interrogate the basis of your beliefs and disenchant yourself from the idealism promised under liberalism. To the others, please keep showing the way and resisting the oppression of this over 500-years old contract.
We cannot continue to fight the inequities of the education system with the tools that entrenched those inequities. We must turn to other wisdom, delinking the deleterious and disastrous effects of modernity from the miracles of existence it has produced. I will close by turning to the wise words of Alfred (2009) once more as he invites the majoritarian to embrace other ways of being:
If I am successful in conveying some of the wisdom inherent in our cultures, perhaps that wisdom will help others as well to deal with dysfunctional aspects of their own societies and to live better lives, both collectively and individually.. . . It asks non-indigenous people to join in an indigenously oriented dialogue aimed at moving beyond those conflicts. (p. 22)
Erasure always leaves a mark. Let us begin healing.
References
Alfred, T. (2009). Peace, power, righteousness: An Indigenous manifesto. Oxford University Press.
Bell, D. (2018). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. Basic Books.
Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives, 6(3), ix-xi.
Blackburn, S. (2008). Bad faith. In The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199541430.001.0001/acref-9780199541430-e-331
Cossman, B. (2013). Censor, resist, repeat: A history of censorship of gay and lesbian sexual representation in Canada. Duke J. Gender L. & Pol'y, 21, 45.
Davis, B. (2004). Inventions of teaching: A genealogy. Routledge.
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[1] The spreadsheet is available via the Texas Tribune https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/94fee7ff93eff9609f141433e41f8ae1/krausebooklist.pdf?_ga=2.11573559.2091958781.1635513476-272773625.1635513476
[2] I use us and our not to exclude those who have not been on the benefactor side but to indicate my inclusion as a benefactor.
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