Letters to the Editor: Reading about racism is uncomfortable? Don't ban the book, change the system

To the editor: In her opinion piece on book banning, editorial writer Minerva Canto mentioned a teacher in South Carolina being forced to abandon her lesson about systemic racism using "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nahisi Coates because some students "complained about feeling uncomfortable."

What a powerful teachable moment that would have been, to ask the students what it was that made them uncomfortable, and why they were feeling that way. Of course, the answers to those questions are the real reason that lessons about racism, and books by people of color, are being banned.

The realization that our country's history is filled with cruelty and injustice directed at those considered "others" should by all means make us uncomfortable. But then it should motivate us to take action to change the unjust systems.

Marian Sunabe, South Pasadena

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To the editor: The books mentioned by Canto were not "banned." One can buy them at bookstores, order them online or borrow them from public libraries.

They were, as the article mentioned in passing, restricted. Some of the books were removed from school libraries for not being age appropriate.

Words, as some of my self-described liberal friends remind me from time to time, matter.

I do not remember much of an outcry when Dr. Seuss Enterprises yielded to pressure and ceased allowing the publication of several Dr. Seuss books. These books were "banned" from some libraries. Other books that have been taken off reading lists and removed from libraries include "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Of Mice and Men."

Outcry seems to depend a lot on whose foot the shoe is on.

Barry DuRon, Oxnard

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To the editor: Canto is right that book-banning parents and school board members want “their conservative viewpoint [to] be the only one represented in the schools."

I recently witnessed paranoid parents and the Murrieta Valley Unified School District's Board of Education ban an American history textbook because its inclusion of viewpoints other than those of straight white people made them feel depressed and ashamed. None of the board members, however, disputed the facts presented in the book, which is used in hundreds of high schools in both red and blue states.

I guess facts don't matter anymore.

Stuart Sheldon, Murrieta

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.