TUSD’s book ban is an interesting feat of Orwellian double-speak.

The school district’s Ministry of Information (MOI) Cara Rene has been earning her $89,000+ salary spinning what all these teachers and students have seen with their own eyes.

By Lalo Alcaraz.

First of all, there are 7 books that are outright listed that MAS teachers are NOT allowed to teach out of.

Those books are even listed in the very press releases MOI Cara Rene has been putting out and even in superintendent John Pedicone’s own email to all staff that those books have been boxed up, in front of the students (video above) as if the district made the teachers box them up just to rub it in, and teachers will get in trouble if they teach out of them.

You can see the testimony for yourself in the video above.

The local media has decided to side with the former Vice-President of SALC, Tucson’s club for the 1%, saying there is no book ban as if these minority students are lying in their video testimony.

But the district did admit they boxed up the books and took them out of the classroom, so there is no lie but yet somehow the local media continues to take up the Orwellian viewpoint that boxed up and not allowed to be taught out of does not mean “banned.”

The district has said that Big Brother-like monitors will come by to make sure they are not teaching from these banned books. Their excuse is that they have not been approved by the district.

Then we find out at least 3 of the 7 banned books have been approved by the district, and as state superintendent John Huppenthal says, this is all about local control.

It was TUSD, not the state, that banned MAS classes and it was the district, not the state, that has taken these books out of the classroom.

The Ministry of Information Cara Rene says that these books are in the library, and students can get them there, except that sometimes there is only a couple of copies and at the place were Latino Literature is most taught at (Tucson High School) some books are not in the local library at all. Yet there are many copies just boxed up in the book depository, safely away from students who might learn something from them, and with only one copy if they are lucky to share from out of the library.

Talk about the TEA Party taking Arizona back… back to the pre-printing press era when there would only be one copy of important books, such as the Bible, in town.

And TUSD board president Mark Stegeman has staff looking for even more books to take out of the classroom!

But this is even worse. It is like have food for hungry kids boxed up and inaccessible to them. The food was even available for them, in their classroom, and the district came and took it away from them leaving them to fight over the few rations that are available at the local market/library where the shelves of their food are mostly empty except for that one can of nourishment.

Other books are “banned” also

Basically the requirements for book banning have changed.  Administrators told Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any class units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes.”  Read more on Salon.

There has been lots of double-speak on the “banning” of The Tempest by Shakespeare.

The MAS teachers have audio from the second-in-command, the assistant superintendent of high schools in TUSD, that says (or concurs with the THS asst. principal about this) that race and oppression cannot be taught.

The reason this is significant is because teachers don’t just assign books to read and that’s that. Teachers have lesson plans and ways that they will teach some theme using the book.

For example, The Tempest was written by one of the most renowned English writers of all time, William Shakespeare, and he wrote this at about the same time that the Pilgrims were starting their adventures across the Atlantic in the New World. The Tempest is a story about a European who goes to an island in the West Indies and makes slaves out of some of the Natives. Shakespeare was forecasting centuries of conflict and turmoil over race and slavery, and this work is a masterpiece…

… but MAS teacher Curtis Acosta cannot use it if he is going to talk about race in his MAS classroom, even though the story is about slavery!

So technically The Tempest is not banned, but using it and talking about race or oppression, even though it is about slavery, is not allowed. How can you just ignore racism?

Curtis Acosta is asked (video above) if he can teach about slavery without mentioning race, and then is told by the asst. superintendent that “once you begin to describe the Natives… the Critical Race Theory perspective” then this is not allowed.

In TUSD administration’s own words “The nexus of race, class, and oppression is the problem.” (in video of Curtis Acosta above). To make the racism even more obvious, even Tucson Values Teachers came out and noted that:

“Curtis Acosta was a literature teacher at University High School before he left specifically to teach Chicano literature at Tucson High Magnet School. At UHS, he taught William Shakespeare’s The Tempest from a historical context, which includes looking at issues such as slavery, race and the big bad word that gets people like John Huppenthal and state Attorney General Tom Horne all grumpy — oppression.” (Tucson Weekly)

Definition of oppression: unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power b : something that oppresses especially in being an unjust or excessive exercise of power.

Albert Einstein: “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

Teachers’ voices. Teachers’ wisdom. Teachers.

This goes along with what the TUSD board has been doing anyways; ignoring the racism in Arizona’s anti-Latino ban of only Mexican-American Studies, leaving African and Native-American classes in tact, and European history available for students to this day.

Tomas Rivera was the author who changed my life when I read his book And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, the pride I felt in reading a Mexican American author was inexplicable. Tomas Rivera was self-taught and read in the library even when it was still not “appropriate” for a Mexican American to have a library card.  This man eventually became a University President.  His book?  Banned.

Gloria Anzaldúa who wrote about the oppression and submission of women and about the duality of living in between two cultures, banned.

Matthew De La Pena’s book Mexican White Boy, a coming of age story about a bicultural young man who plays sports, banned.

Sandara Cisneros, House on Mango Street, banned.

You know, because Mexican American studies teaches people to overthrow the government.  It is this ideal that infuriates me. Knowledge and empathy come from education. Education comes from learning. Learning comes from books. Books come from people who are not afraid to write about what is the reality… even if you try close your eyes and pretend the 1950′s, segregation and racism never happened.

via Why You Should Protest the Arizona Book Ban

If you listen to Tom Horne and John Huppenthal’s words it is clear what they are afraid of even though it is the truth. John Huppenthal says over and over again that if some people are oppressed, then there must be an oppressor.

Ding ding ding!!!

Give that man a prize!

Now why would all these white males be afraid of teaching about oppression? Consider The Tempest example. Is it that big a stretch to extrapolate the lessons in that literary work about Europeans enslaving human beings in the Americas to what would be the foundation of the United States of America.

Right there in the Constitution… blacks are 3/5 of a person. They are being oppressed in the founding document by the founding fathers of our country from the very beginning, and yes there is an oppressor.

In the cartoon above by Lalo Alcaraz, even he was able to foretell what would come. He drew that cartoon last year, yet has the book being burned at the stake. Heck, over 7 months ago readers of the Three Sonorans were able to know what was coming using Huppenthal’s own words in the June 19, 2011 article: Huppenthal admits what attack on MAS is all about: Banning books!

The list of banned books is long. The filter that is applied is whether race, class, or oppression will be themes in that work.

Gee, that surely does narrow the literature down considerably.

Let’s see…
To kill a Mockingbird
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Othello
Animal Farm
The Lottery
The Most Dangerous Game

Anything by Women, especially Jane and her fighting against the system.

Oppression?  Possibly everything written by Holocaust Survivers, but they were excluded from this banning.

How many times do we see signs or bumper stickers that remind us to “Never forget.”

Never forget 9/11.

Never forget the Holocaust.

Remember the Alamo.

Always remember these important events… or in other words, keep the history alive!

Why must we never forget? Why must we keep this history alive? It is clearly important that we do so, and in Arizona our main interstate, I-10, is also known as the Pearl Harbor memorial freeway. The USS Arizona was the battleship that was sunk on that fateful day 70 years, and we must never forget, we must memorialize the past.

Failure to do so can be catastrophic for the people. Once links to the past are gone, they may be gone forever. We have to know where we come from. This is why many conquerors destroy the libraries first.

They did so with the Mexicas (Aztecs). In the Iraq war one of the first casualties back in 2003 was the museums and libraries, and the destruction continued. Iraq was home to the dawn of civilization, the home of the Fertile Crescent where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet. When we destroy any people’s history, we destroy our own history; the human history.

Iraq is not supposed to be a place that we came from and got civilized and learned about agriculture. Iraq is hell, home of Satan whose blood is dark as oil and that spews forth out of the ground, good for fires as in the fires that make our car engines move a ton of metal just so that we do not have to walk one step.

Mexico is the home of more devils and all they did was sacrifice humans (as if America’s war does not accomplish this also) but yet were able to do what no other people were able to do, and that genetic engineers could not do today even with our technology.

They turned a wild grass known as teosinte into corn, and corn is now the foundation of America. We love it so much that we turn it into ethanol for our cars. The Mexicas and Mayans must not have been that primitive with all these accomplishments, including knowing the concept of zero before Europeans finally learned it after the Dark Ages from the Muslims.

All these histories are important and linked, and truth should never be banned in any way, whether you call it a ban or just a banishment or forbidden curriculum.

Jessica Olivarez-Mazone finishes off her article:

I am Latina, this is my life, those are my stories.  How dare you decide I am not important enough to be heard.  How dare you belittle and begrudge Latinos who toiled and worked in the fields, and went to school, self-educated and became writers. They pulled themselves up by their bootstrapsand worked to get the grades.

How dare you hide the fact that in the 1960’s many Latinos were forced to choose industrial careers because a counselor thought that was the best fit for “those” people.

How dare you hide the 1930 deportation of thousands of AMERICAN Citizens with MEXICAN Surnames?  How dare you smother our culture?

How dare you hide the injustices of the Native American people?  How dare you force their stories of the poverty of the reservations away?

May as well pull out the gasoline, start with the Bible.  The most politically, emotionally charge book in history with thematic nuances of race, and ethnicity and oppression as central themes.

This week TUSD students will make more history, a history I am sure will be found in the 8th edition of Professor Rudy Acuña’s Occupied America; A History of Chicanos, one of the banned books in Tucson.

Also in that history will be the role of Pedicone and Stegeman, stooges for Horne and Huppenthal’s anti-Latino plan for the private prison pipeline; discontinue effective educational programs for Latinos so that they are more likely to drop out and end up in prison, thus benefiting the growing prison corporations in Arizona.

This is why this ban on MAS is not only racist, but evil. These are the lives of children we are dealing with. They continue to be oppressed, and the oppressor is obvious to all. They are the ones that are afraid of oppression being taught in schools.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2012 at 9:44 am and is filed under Headline news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.