Your confusion follows from your premise that this is about “banning.” This is about what books are made available to kids in school libraries. It’s a response to a trend in education, which has embraced teaching non-white kids to embrace ethnic identity and think of themselves as oppressed.

Florida Hispanics see these trends as well, and one reason they overwhelmingly supported DeSantis for re-election is that’s not the worldview they want their own kids to have. They don’t want their kids to think of themselves as “Hispanic” (which is an artificial political construct anyway) and have teachers assign them books about how Hispanics are “marginalized.”

> Your confusion follows from your premise that this is about “banning.” This is about what books are made available to kids in school libraries

Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't look into the details. But it appeared to be a ban to me.

If all they did was say: "these are the books that must be made available at school libraries"

That would be very different, and we wouldn't be talking about a ban.

But if they specifically targeted certain books (who might have not even been at all the school libraries to begin with), and said here are the books that are not allowed to be made available... I mean, that's called a ban.

I support your desire to make sure your kids feel at home and are able to, like everyone else, consider themselves American. I'm from an immigrant family, and it bothers me when people ask "what am I", I'm American, and they're always like... Come on! What are you really? And it's like, dude, you're also 'not really" American, you're German, you're British, etc. Except we're all really American, born and raised.

So I'm with you on that point, and the "born and raise" part, yes it means you should be raised the same as well, raised American.

Where I'll have to disagree with you, is that the books made available and the school curriculum isn't about any of this. It should focus on education, kids shouldn't be dumb, they need to learn history and it's effects, they should engage with hard topics and real problems, they should be exposed to well reasoned and intelligent diverse opinions from all sides, etc. You don't achieve that by selectively banning books whose narrative you personally don't like.

If you came at me complaining that the current selection of books and curriculum goes against that, that it's pigeonholing kids into "brown" and "not brown", and so on, I'd be like, damn right that's a problem, and I'd put forward the same argument I'm making now for why it's an issue that needs addressed.

But like I said, banning books just feels like pigeonholing and propaganda the same that you're trying to avoid just someone else's agenda.

Any which words we choose about it, we're still talking about a government mandate which books are not ok to read. I don't doubt your personal experiences, but the leap to blacklisting literature is a huge one and doesn't follow logically at all.

While this is a ground one should tread most carefully, surely you can see the historical precedents?