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A book available in at least two public school libraries contained inappropriate language and in one scene made reference to anal sex.
The Daily Mail reports that on Wednesday, Kara Bell, a former school board candidate for the Lake Travis Independent School District, “hijacked” the school board meeting to discuss the content of the Young Adult fiction book “Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Perez.
The book is set in the segregation era at the time of a horrific explosion in East Texas that killed nearly 300 students and teachers. With this as the historical backdrop, Perez pens an interracial love story between two teens — a Mexican girl and a black boy. Not only does the novel include content that shows the bigotry in a segregated Texas oil town in the 1930s that may not be appropriate for some younger readers, but it also contains degrading discussions of sex by some characters.
Remember that middle school students are still pretty young. Middle school can begin as early as 5th Grade and can go as high as 9th grade — that’s between the ages of 9-15 depending on the school district and the student’s birthday.
According to the Amazon summary of the Young Adult novel, it’s recommended for students Grade 9 and up, not exactly the majority of middle school students.
Bell read some selections of the book at the school board meeting. It wasn’t well received. She had her mic cut off.
Do these selections look appropriate for middle school students to you?
On one page, [Bell] said, the book reads: ‘Take her out back, we boys figured, then hands on the titties.
‘Put it in her coin box, put it in her cornhole, grab a hold of that braid, rub that Calico.’
After reading that, Bell said she looked up what a ‘cornhole’ was in this context – only knowing it as the bean bag toss game – and discovered it is a slang term for anal sex.
‘I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school,’ Bell said.
‘I’ve never had anal sex, I don’t want to have anal sex. I don’t want my kids having anal sex,’ she continued. ‘I want you to start focusing on education and not public health.’
Her microphone was soon cut off, but Bell, herself a former school board candidate, according to KXAN, continued to demand the school board remove the book from its libraries, concluding: ‘Do not teach them about anal sex.’
Source: Daily Mail
On the plus side — sort of — literacy rates in the U.S. declined during the pandemic, so the book probably wasn’t being checked out of the libraries.
Bell was successful and the book has been removed from the Austin middle school library shelves pending a review, but how many other books like this are there in middle school libraries?
The brief video of Bell has gone viral.
Of course, the apologists are out in force defending the book because “overall” there is value there. The author said that she wrote the book about a historical event about “people on the margins of history.” Advocates insist that the novel has value due to its “diversity” — because it is viewing a historical event from a different perspective.
Jonathan Friedman is with Pen America, a nonprofit organization that defends diversity, inclusion and free expression in literature. He says contending views about what students should learn in school are at a boiling point, with debates over the content of books becoming more heated…
… Friedman says many books with sexually explicit content have holistic value, teaching a diversity of viewpoints and exposing young people to the realities of the world.
“I think to pretend books that deal explicitly with sex or sexual assault are in some way a threat to young people are doing them a disservice,” he said. “This is about having access for young people to a wide variety of literature that people from different backgrounds are reflected in.”
Friedman added: “You have a small contingent in many cases of parents who decide that they disagree, and that they must know better than those who are in the classroom.”
Source: KXAN
Don’t you love how the “experts” want to tell parents what is and is not appropriate for their children?
Heaven forbid you might want to keep your child sheltered from overt depictions of sex until after they’ve gone through puberty. It also doesn’t seem to matter that the book is recommended for high school, not middle school students. (And many parents would say that even that is questionable.)
Many of these people that think that “Out of Darkness” is just fine because it’s a story written by a Latina author about minority teens falling in love during segregation, would also oppose the classics “Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill A Mockingbird.” What about the actual message of those books? Apparently, the anti-racism messages in those books don’t matter probably because they were written before 2015 and by white authors.
It’s also funny that the “woke” activists aren’t concerned about this blatant objectification of women that is perpetuated by this book. Because, as we’ve been told endlessly by the wokescolds, all of the ideas presented in every book written — especially if it’s by someone from an intersectional group — is endorsed by the author and should never, ever be questioned.
Clearly, that’s asinine, but that’s what the “experts” are claiming when they grab their torches and pitchforks and go after Shakespeare and the classics.
Yes, it’s impossible to shelter your children forever. Pop culture, social media, and public schools have made maintaining their innocence extremely difficult.
But maybe, just maybe, there are limits and public schools should focus on educating kids rather than ensuring that they are exposed to highly sexualized fictional content that “holistically” might be beneficial because it may offer a different perspective. Maybe save that kind of content until they’re out of middle school, hmmm?
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Raising Boys Feminists Will Hate
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