Hana Jaffe-Walt
Appearances
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
I learned about this particular banned book from Deborah Caldwell Stone. She's a director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. Her job is to track efforts to censor and ban books. And she was telling me she's never seen anything like this fall before. In her decades on the job, just the number of books being challenged, removed from school library shelves.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Many books about LGBTQ people, she says those have been contested for years. But more recently, Toni Morrison, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, The Hate U Give, a novel about the aftermath of police brutality.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Yeah, like comic book, the graphic novel? Yes, New Kid. New Kid is a book my children read. It's about a 12-year-old black boy who goes to a new school.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Wow. Jerry Craft has been invited to speak to thousands of schools over the years to do author presentations like the one in Katy, Texas, because New Kid was widely acclaimed. It won a ton of awards. It was a number one New York Times bestseller, translated into a dozen languages. New Kid is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a boy, Jordan, who wants to be an artist and go to art school.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
But his parents put him in a fancy private school. Jordan is one of only a few Black kids. A lot of the kids are wealthy. The campus is vast. And you watch Jordan, this funny, earnest kid, navigate a new environment. There's culture shock. There's new friendships. It's part fish-out-of-water story and part just kid in middle school figuring out crushes in the cafeteria.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
And things like, should he do sports or the musical? Jerry Craft told me when he put New Kid out there, the response was amazing. Everything. It was all like a great big hug from the world. People wrote him to say, my kid wants to be an artist now. My kid loved your book.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
This is not his thing. Controversy. Jerry was a kid who loved to draw, who became an adult who kept drawing. He spends most of his time in a room by himself making pictures. When he published New Kid in 2019, Jerry had been writing comics for decades. This was the book he'd always wanted to write. The book he wished he'd had as a kid. With a Black character who seemed just regular.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Jerry says he remembers going to the library as a kid, and it was always the general books and the black books.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
That's the thing about New Kid being banned. So many of the other Black authors with banned books are writing explicitly about racism or history. Books about how slavery has shaped America, police brutality, how to be an anti-racist. But New Kid, this is not a history book. It's not about police violence or slavery or civil rights. It's a story about finding your place in middle school.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
There are racial slights in a sort of daily way. White classmates and teachers make assumptions about where Jordan's from, that he's a great athlete. They say ignorant things, try to touch a Black friend's hair. Administrators continue to call a longstanding Black teacher a coach, even though he's never coached anything. Jordan often finds his stuff funny.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
He laughs about it with another black classmate. Sometimes he finds it confusing or annoying, but it's not tragic. These are just things that happen on the way alongside lots of other experiences with his white classmates and teachers, including good experiences. Honestly, the most dramatic thing that happens in this story is that Jordan loses his sketchbook. What is there to object to?
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
When I talked to Jerry, I didn't know the specifics of the objections in Texas, and I kind of expected Jerry to fill me in. But he knew even less than me. He read enough of one article to understand that a white parent had complained about his book, was calling it critical race theory, a term Jerry had to then Google, and he closed the article without finishing it. He had work to do.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
But friends and strangers kept messaging him. How crazy. Your book. Banned.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
So you knew, I mean, it sounds like you knew that that was something that you weren't going to want to watch.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
What did you imagine was down that rabbit hole that was scary to you?
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
That's how I do my interviews. I just, like, in the middle, I get a call from the opposing side, and then the two of you duke it out.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
I did not stage a call with the mom who complained about Jerry Craft's books. But I did talk to her. And I watched her testimony at the Katie School Board meetings, the ones Jerry Craft would not watch. Her name is Bonnie Anderson. She has three kids in the schools. She's very involved in local school politics. She's part of a lawsuit against the school district's mask mandate.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
And she ran for school board last spring, but lost. Bonnie told me she first encountered Jerry's book when she got a flyer in her kid's backpack announcing the author visit. So she got the books, New Kid and the follow-up book, Class Act, and read them both herself. I don't know if you've, have you read these books? Yeah, my kids read them. Okay, okay.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Microaggressions, meaning the everyday thoughtless stuff white people in the book say around black kids. Bonnie worried how reading those depictions might make white kids feel. The district told me there was another parent, too, who apparently filed the complaint that New Kid includes vulgarity, but they would not provide that person's name. Bonnie, though, was very public.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
She cared enough about this to create a petition demanding the district cancel Jerry Craft's event. It got 400 signatures. To Bonnie, the book has a clear agenda. Jerry set out to convince people systemic racism is real and show how privileged and awful white people are. He's dressing it up with funny or dramatic moments that to her seem totally over the top.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Like the scene where the dad gets pulled over by the cops and is super nervous. She says, you really think that happens? Or the white mom who worries her kid's black friend might take offense if she serves watermelon for a snack. Come on, she says. A lot of our conversation was Bonnie questioning parts of the book and me saying, I think that's based on Jerry's own life.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
He did. He went to a mostly Jewish school. He went to Fieldston, which is not a Jewish school. But I mean, I don't you're saying you don't believe that that actually happened to him.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
This is an idea that is repeated in a lot of the efforts to ban books. The idea that these books will psychologically harm children, usually white children. When you say it poisons the minds of your kids, what's the thing that you're worried is going to happen to your kids reading these books?
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
It's a Mercedes, but sure. For Bonnie, these characterizations would be damaging to her kids if they read the books, which they haven't. New Kid is a book that is entirely focused on the perspective of a Black boy, the things he sees and experiences. There are white characters. Some of them are mean. Some of them are Jordan's best friends. One of them talks to everyone through sock puppets.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
But they're peripheral. The story is about Jordan. So I would assume, like with any well-told story, kids reading this book would identify with the main character, since he's the protagonist of the story. I want to say something here I feel obliged to say, but also feels a little embarrassing for all of us that I have to say it at all.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
This book, Jerry Craft's book, New Kid, is not critical race theory. Jerry Craft did not create a fictional 12-year-old black boy, Jordan Banks, to promote a complex legal theory about systemic racism. And although it is a work of fiction, most of what Bonnie objects to in these books did actually happen. Like how much of this is just your direct life experience?
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Jordan Banks felt out of place. Jerry Craft felt out of place. Jordan Banks' classmates all inexplicably wore pink but called it salmon. Same with Jerry Craft.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
And all the things Jordan Banks observes or experiences. A white mom who worries about serving watermelon. A nerve-wracking interaction with a cop. White classmates touching your hair, assuming you like basketball. They happened to Jerry or Jerry's kids.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
That's what's so interesting to me about this book in particular, being kind of drawn into this CRT battle that's supposedly about history. But your book is not a history book. This is like literally just you writing down the story of your life. Right.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
With one exception, those KFC gift certificates. Jerry says he made that up. One other thing Jerry pointed out that really happened to him. The last chapter of New Kid, it's called The Farce Awakens. It's when Jordan loses his sketchbook, the one he carries everywhere. He's super stressed because it has all his thoughts and drawings from that year. It's sort of like a visual diary.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
It turns out his teacher, Miss Rall, is holding his sketchbook when he comes into the classroom. She's read it.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Does it feel like a grown-up version of what happens to Jerry Banks in your novel?
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
I went back to that last chapter recently, and what stood out reading it this time, knowing it had been banned, is that even 12-year-old Jordan Banks knows that his account of his own life will not be acceptable to his white teacher and is better kept in the safety of his journal. He knows his teacher won't be able to read it without feeling personally attacked.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
He knows that what has happened to him will not matter as much as how it makes her feel to read about it. He already knows that even if it's all real, she'd rather he keep it to himself. Eight states have recently passed legislation restricting the teaching of racism and bias in public schools. Texas is one of them. Nearly 20 more states have introduced or plan to introduce similar legislation.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
These laws almost never list specific books you can't teach. They talk about feelings. They prohibit teaching any lessons that might make students feel, quote, "...discomfort, guilt, or anguish because of their race."
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
After Bonnie's petition and the complaint about New Kid including vulgarity, the district responded, launched an investigation, and said it was using the new Texas law to evaluate the book. It also pulled Jerry's books from the library and called off his author visit.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
In Pennsylvania, a group of parents got the school board to ban a list of diverse books, including a children's book about Rosa Parks. They worried the books could be used to make white children feel guilty. A group of white moms in Tennessee have demanded a book about Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington be removed from the curriculum.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
They also objected to a chapter book called The Story of Ruby Bridges because it makes it seem like white people are bad. These are parents who claim reading books about Black experiences or Black history, or just a Black kid going to middle school, will harm their children. And their desire to protect their kids from discomfort is now enshrined in the law.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
The investigation into Newkid lasted 10 days, at which point the district announced their findings. No inappropriate material. Children would be allowed to read this book in Katy, Texas. And Jerry's event with the kids was rescheduled. It went fine. Kids ask the same questions they always do. What inspired you? Is there going to be a movie? But that same day, the Katie School Board had a meeting.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Parents showed up to complain that the event was allowed to go forward, that critical race theory was infiltrating the schools, and they demanded a full audit of the whole library, which, just recently, they won. There was one mom who got up to defend New Kid and to say what the book means to her family.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
Her name is Courtney. She's a black woman standing before a line of board members who all appear to be white. Here's what she had to say.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
In so many corners of the country right now, parents, usually white parents, are showing up to meetings just like this to express their fear, to say they don't want their children harmed or feeling uncomfortable. Courtney is talking about harm that is already happening. And Jerry Craft is already uncomfortable. He wrote a whole book about feeling uncomfortable.
This American Life
758: Talking While Black
He told me, you just learn to deal with it. He never had any laws protecting him from discomfort or school boards worried about his discomfort. What he had was the ability to write it down, to talk about it.