Dear Governor DeSantis:
I am a big fan of your recent ban on those schoolbooks that convey the wrong message to the young impressionable minds of the children in your state. Those books clearly undermine the learning process, and if anyone knows anything about the learning process, it is the brilliant, insightful people who support you.
I write now because I wonder if you have yet chosen the new books that will be used to substitute for the banned ones. There’s no reason to come up with new titles. Why don’t you just revise the old ones. I have a few ideas. Allow me to offer them to you.
- Where The Sidewalk Ends. This would become a story about how we must eliminate government control over every aspect of our lives, especially how they make us put hard cement pathways in front of our homes. Why can’t I have my family walk on hot coals if I want to? Sidewalks are a prime example of socialism at its most horrible.
- Three Little Pigs. Of course, this can be turned into a biography of the Clinton family. It can teach the children that Bill is a pervert, Hillary kills children in the basement of a Pizza parlor, and Chelsea, well, just look at her.
- Where The Wild Things Are. This book can indoctrinate our children about how everything bad in society comes out of New York and Los Angeles. It will insist that if kids go anywhere near those horrible places the children will be contaminated with “newfangled ideas,” meaning those ideas developed since the first century A.D.
- Goodnight Moon. This will be a tract about climate. It will make it clear to the students that changes in the planet’s environment are just God’s way of keeping us on our toes. So, what if the moon goes away? Won’t we still have our oil depletion allowance?
- The Giving Tree. Along the same environmental lines as Goodnight Moon, this offering will also address sources of political power. Power, it will teach, is fueled by money, not by trees. It will include this little verse:
“Just remember next Christmas morn
When all your wrapping on your presents is torn
That your gifts were bought by people, that’s easy to see
The gifts were not given by, just placed under a tree”
- Winnie The Pooh. This entry into the book list must be included otherwise the rest of the curriculum will be meaningless. It will tell the story of a horse who whinnies every time someone says something that has the value of pooh. In other words, the horse has the power to identify bullshit. The last page of the book contains a picture of the magical horse pointing at you.
We were right 
At the risk of being skewered, let’s peek into literary censorship in this country. O.K., I’m a privileged white guy but I’ve never quite got the Black community’s broo-ha-ha over “Little Black Sambo”. Superficially it represents Blacks as jungle creatures. I get that. But read the damn book and see what it really says. A little Black boy has been given gifts from the efforts of his parent. Then, ‘other color’ forces outside of this innocent boy attempt to take everything from him with threat of death. These forces are so audacious that they argue who is the greatest until they succumb to their own grandiosity, leaving Little Black Sambo not only alive but back in his rightful possessions. (spoiler alert) His foes are melted into butter (not so subtle color reference?) to be eaten on his pancakes. Stupid racist story? Or a fable with the moral that even a Black child can overcome the forces of racial evil? I dunno. But I suppose if DeSantis saw this tale in that way, he’d be in the forefront of censorship right there along with the Black community he despises. Imagine, a Black/DeSantis coalition on censorship. Excuse me, I’ll be right back after I puke.
There, done. Still don’t feel any better. Anyway, I look forward to the forthcoming autobiography of Lindsey Graham: “Gay, Who Me?” subtitled, “Why My Butt Puckers When I Watch ‘Queer Eye'”. DeSantis secretly has wet dreams just thinking about it.
Go figure. It ain’t that tough. DeSantis is the poster child for the grandiose, but emasculated, shaking in his boots scared to death pathetic Southern white supremacist, who fears someday he’ll be made accountable by the Little Black boy he tried to take everything from, as he’s melted into a pile of yellow butter.
Pancakes, anyone?
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I have to admit that I have never read, “Little Black Sambo,” I have no reason to disagree with your description of it, especially. because it is yours’. My only concern is why the title? “Sambo”, as I understand it, is a historically offensive description of a black person. Maybe the author, Helen Bannerman, intentionally meant to use this term in order to demonstrate how wrong it was. I can’t know. It seems to me, though, that if that was the author’s goal, she may have better chosen a different title. She has now branded as inferior the very people she wished to demonstrate as heroic. But that’s just me. Thanks for your comment. All the best to Bev.
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Your comments are appreciated and sensible.
Written in 1899 by Scottish Helen Bannerman, daughter of clergy and married to a physician in the Royal Service stationed in India, Bannerman wrote several children’s stories with Black characters. Controversial indeed. An empowering story coupled with derogatory racial slur. Say what? It’s impossible to state Bannerman’s intent, as there is no official record of any statement by her in explanation. Yet, Bannerman’s books are not alone, as demonstrated by examples like Huckleberry Finn. Imagine it took until the 1980’s to see the demise of Sambo’s restaurants.
One way to address these issues is to confront, discuss and learn while another approach is censorship, banning and sweeping tough issues under the rug to just ‘make it go away’. The easier latter solution carries the day in our times of mass media hysteria, intolerance and ‘faux-expertise’. While racial name-calling may be hushed, the real acts of racial discrimination and sppression are alive and well, dressed up in all kinds of rhetorical ‘non-offensive’ fluff.
The title character of a 120 year old children’s book may be the least of our problems yet continues to invoke a visceral response. Two sides of the same coin, if not already banned from the Black perperspective of derogatory slurs, I suspect DeSantis would ban it for showing a Black child overcoming overwhelming odds against ‘other colors’ with cleverness and heroism.
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