Was over two years ago The Hill We Climb nominated at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Last month, a Florida school removed the poem from its library for students up to the age of 10 after complaints from a parent about “indoctrination.” The Miami Herald reported on Tuesday.
The mother of two students at the Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes found that this poem, and four other books, contained “indirect hate messages.” The Hill We Climbby the then 22-year-old African-American poet especially for the inauguration was written is a reflection on the history of slavery and racial hatred in the United States, with a serious but optimistic tone.
She writes, among other things: “Somehow we have endured and experienced a country that is not broken, but simply not yet finished.” It ends with the stanzas: “For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be.”
On the form the complaint filed says that the poem, erroneously attributed to TV presenter Oprah Winfrey, may cause “confusion” among the children. Another book the mother objected to, Love to Langston, a drawn ode to the black poet Langston Hughes, “starts” with CRT, she says. That stands for Critical Race Theory, an academic method in which subjects are examined through the prism of structural discrimination.
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An ‘infringement of the right to free thoughts’
In the Florida of Governor Ron DeSantis, who will announce his candidacy for president on Wednesday, it is illegal to teach students about history in such a way that they “feel uncomfortable” about the actions of Americans of the same race in the past. The law’s vague (“age-appropriate”) provisions leave Florida public schools uncertain about what is allowed and what is not. Books are banned everywhere and lessons are cancelled.
For example, a committee that considered the mother’s complaint ruled that four of the five challenged books were inappropriate for children in the lower classes and transferred them to the middle school library (from eleven years old). Among those books was the ABC of black history, which is labeled on the Amazon sales site as suitable for six to eight-year-olds. The only book the committee did not want banned from the elementary school library was Countries in the News: Cuba. The committee members found that “balanced and age-appropriate in its choice of words and presentation.”
When she heard the news, Amanda Gorman wrote Tuesday on Twitter: “I’m exhausted. (…) I wrote The Hill We Climb so that all young people could see themselves at a historic moment. Since then I have received countless letters and videos from children going through The Hill We Climb were inspired to write their own poems. Depriving children of the opportunity to find their voice in literature is an infringement of their right to free thought and freedom of expression.”
Also read this profile of Amanda Gorman: Amanda Gorman: a young poet who draws from deep sources