Book Banning in Burlingame

Longtime reader Greg sends in a story about the latest controversy surrounding the use of South African writer Mark Mathabane's memoir Kaffir Boy in a middle school classroom at Burlingame Intermediate School. Mathabane's book has aroused controversy before, most notably based on parental objections to a brief hint at boys willing to peform sexual acts on older men in order to feed themselves. This passage, hardly at the center of a book about growing up black in apartheid South Africa in the 1970s, recently caused the superintendent of Northern California's Burlingame School District to abruptly withdraw the book from an 8th grade class after a parent complained about the supposedly offending passage. To his credit, Burlingame Intermediate School principal Ted Barone reacted by inviting Mathabane, who now lives in Oregon, to speak to his school, and many local parents were disquieted by the fact that Superintendent Sonny Da Marto unilaterally caved in to censorship.

Children, especially tweens and early teens, are smarter and more capable of handling sensitive issues than most adults would ever give them credit for. The acts of sodomy that Mathabane implies are nowhere near as offensive as the conditions that created the desperation to carry out those acts to begin with. Aaprtheid is the affront in this situation, and yet I would hope that we will never reach a point where we begin banning and censoring books because we fear that the historical situations they depict might make kids uncomfortable. education, at least in part, should be about shifting comfort zones and exposing people to reality in a generally open and questioning environment.