Represent Our Resistance: Banned Books, Banned People, and a Return to Our Cultural Value System

Bodies left to float in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans for days while the world watched on. The attempt to expel from the narrative of innocence the very “dirty” image of nooses hung on a tree with whitewashing words: “teenage pranks.” By banning the reading of Beloved, are the censors suggesting that the rape and milking of Sethe by Schoolteacher’s nephews is irrelevant now? Are white and Black children to chalk those past crimes against Black women as mere “teenage pranks”? If there are two Black literary texts on the list, there’s two narratives of the Maafa (the disaster) too many. These would be two narratives less that could serve as anchors for our children’s spirits. We can’t afford to look at these occurrences of the narrative of whiteness at work as isolated incidents.

We are criminals, violates of all American traditions and values. Therefore, crime is labeled Black. Everyone hears on the news, “a Black man killed…” Blacks understand that “a man killed…” means a white man killed someone. Criminality is identified as Black, something Black people do. That is what people hear. They do not hear in the “absence” of Black people crime, “evil,” or dirtiness. Thus, the rest of the news refers to the killing and suffering of hundreds adding up to thousands and then millions of people around the world by the white U.S. hegemonic power. How many children died from lack of milk and food because of U.S. economic sanctions? That is news too. But it is not heard as racial — and yet, what else is it? The victims experiencing hunger are Black and Brown skinned people, but white Americans don’t see themselves as a collective race responsible for slaughter and suffering on a daily bases. As “whiteness,” they are “everybody” in general and “nobody” in particular. And even in this thinking is the collective acceptance of an ideology that speaks of white privilege as an entitlement to dominance and a right to evade responsibility for any crime against humanity. Don’t pay any attention to the man behind the white curtain, the biggest gun dealer and drug dealer in the world. Focus your anxieties and fears on the Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow figures right around you! In the meantime, the U.S. military patrols the world, knocks down doors of the homes of Iraqi citizens looking for “terrorists” while, domestically, the state police apparatus in city after city is given carte blanche to apprehend and imprison the “usual suspects of crime.”