Forty-two-year-old Florida mom, Daily Salinas, doesn’t mince words about her own education: “I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person.” Despite this admission, she has single-handedly convinced a Florida public school to remove books from their elementary classrooms that she skimmed and didn’t like.
What’s on her list? First, we have Amanda Gorman’s widely admired poem, “The Hill We Climb,” created for and read at the last presidential inauguration. Salinas thinks Oprah wrote it. Seriously — that’s who she listed as the poem’s author in her complaint. She doesn’t like Oprah’s poem because she spotted the word “communist” in it and decided to complain to her children’s elementary school. To be clear, “The Hill We Climb” does not include the word communist. One line contains constructive and crisp alliteration using the letter “c.” Maybe that was confusing.
Upon realizing that the poem doesn’t, in fact, include her trigger word and instead repeatedly references the importance of democracy, Salinas changed her tune and called it “hate speech.” These two portions of the poem are her “evidence.”
Example 1:
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what ‘just is’
Isn’t always justice.
Example 2:
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow, we do it.
Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
Salinas, who has proudly posed for a photo with Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and shared antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media, successfully stripped the poem from the hands and minds of elementary-school children at Bob Graham Education Center, a public school in Miami Lakes.
The school claims it’s not censorship or book banning, instead referring to it as “aging-up” the content so only middle school students have access. Gorman eloquently disagrees.
In a statement made after learning of the school’s decision, Gorman lamented on Twitter, “I wrote ‘The Hill We Climb’ so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment … Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”
What else has Salinas’ sole campaign removed from bookshelves? “The ABCs of Black History,” a picture book that Common Sense Media deems most appropriate for 8-year-olds, is now restricted to middle schoolers. There’s no word yet if they’ll need to go behind a curtain to view content celebrating W.E.B. Du Bois, Fannie Lou Hamer and The Little Rock Nine.
When you’re on a roll, you keep pushing the winning streak. With so much acceptance and commitment to censorship, Bob Graham Education Center gave Salinas a blank check to ditch any books she deemed “woke.” She’s also gotten “Love to Langston,” celebrating the life of one of America’s most beloved poets, Langston Hughes, out of classrooms. Stories about his love of travel and desire to build a career as an author are too “divisive” for her liking.
Finally, Salinas convinced the school to ditch “Cuban Kids,” an educational picture book combining photographs of contemporary Cuban children with a narrative describing their lives at school, home and play. This choice is particularly baffling, as Salinas herself is a Cuban American. Is she protecting her children from knowledge of their own cultural roots?
There will always be absurd people who subscribe to ridiculous ideologies. Ask a flat-earther, and they’ll tell you to eliminate any books referencing NASA and ban biographies about the fraud Neil Armstrong.
Florida’s leaders and school boards are willing to embrace this absurdity in the name of “parental rights.” They’re adopting thinly veiled excuses to ban books. They’re channeling the censorship that helped Stalin thrive and letting it play out in American schools. They’re also giving me an excellent idea for my next children’s book: Don’t Let Karen Drive the Bus.
Theresa Pogach is an educator who lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
