North Carolina School Board Bans Classic Novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Update: Ban Reversed)

[muzikfrk75]

My damn state

 

[88m3]

Kimiyutta could be any kind of person. Maybe a caclover. Maybe some Hispanic. Maybe a white girl with a weird name. Maybe she isn't even real. Think about that for a second.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

fukking commies

 

[NYC Rebel]

My damn state

I'm at a loss for words. My all time favorite book

 

[The Real]

fukking commies

Conservative social morals have nothing to do with communism. In fact, they're most closely associated with the Right.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Conservative social morals have nothing to do with communism. In fact, they're most closely associated with the Right.

only communists and facists ban books

and dont start your symantics

 

[Towlie]

i teach at a school in charlotte..middle school...

some of the girls read books about sex, toned down from jane, and i dont care as long as they're reading

 

[kermit da hustla]

Black people shouldn't rely on cacs to educate them. It's a great and relevant fictional treatise on the black (man's) experience that still rings true today. If we depend on whites to instruct us what to read, we already lost.

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

I find it peculiar that typically the people that make up school boards are the dumbest ever. I saw it in my district as well, and look at the texas board of education.

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/18/north-carolina-school-board-bans-ralph-ellisons-invisible-man/

A North Carolina school board has banned Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man from its reading list on Monday, citing a lack of “literary value.”

The Asheboro Courier-Tribune reported that the Randolph County Board of Education voted 5-2 to remove the book following a complaint by a parent, Kimiyutta Parson.

“This novel is not so innocent; instead, this book is filthier, too much for teenagers,” Parson wrote in a 12-page statement to the board. “You must respect all religions and point of views when it comes to the parents and what they feel is age appropriate for their young children to read, without their knowledge. This book is freely in your library for them to read.”

In his acceptance speech after winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, Ellison described the book as his attempt to bring back “the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy” common in 19th-century fiction.

“When I examined the rather rigid concepts of reality which informed a number of the works which impressed me and to which I owed a great deal, I was forced to conclude that for me and for so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, reality was simply far more mysterious and uncertain, and at the same time more exciting, and still, despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising,” Ellison said at the time.

However, board chair Tommy McDonald said on Monday that he considered Ellison’s work — one of three books recommended for summer reading for juniors at a local high school, alongside “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin and “Passing” by Nella Larsen — “a hard read.”

A motion to keep Invisible Man on the approved reading list was defeated 5-2 before the board voted to remove it.

“I didn’t find any literary value,” board member Gary Mason said at the meeting. “I’m for not allowing it to be available.”

In 2010, Time magazine named the book one of the top 100 English-language novels of all time, calling it “the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century.”

I read this book in the 7th grade

 

[Batz]

About to add this to my ever growing back log of reading.

 

[88m3]

I've been forwarding this to everyone I know

 

[88m3]

@GinaThatAintNoDamnPuppy!

 

[drewbreez]

Maybe still the greatest novel of the 20th century. Only now are novelists getting back to his level of advanced prose with multiple meanings and timelessness. Don't worry about some NC idiots, brehs. Pick up your copy and keep it available for your children.

'murica.

 

[Guitar Bains]

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/19/ralph_ellisons_race_classic_invisible_man_banned_in_north_carolina/

Students in Randolph County, North Carolina won’t have access to “Invisible Man.”

That county’s board of education voted 5-2 this week to remove all copies of the Ralph Ellison novel from school libraries, following a parental complaint about the book’s content and language when it was assigned as summer reading in local Randleman High School. “It was a hard read,” said board chair Tommy McDonald, who voted in favor of the ban.

Another board member said, “I didn’t find any literary value.”

“Invisible Man,” which won the National Book Award upon its 1953 publication and which has a place on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century, appraises the social conditions surrounding blacks in the decades before the eventual civli rights movement; the protagonist is invisible because white society refuses to see him.

The book’s fate is uncertain; a Randleman High School committee has recommended the book remain on shelves there. Randleman has recently been a flashpoint for civil liberties, with the ACLU demanding this month that the school stop invocations of the Lord’s Prayer at football games.