CC Answers the Censors
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WHAT WILL YOU FIND HERE?
POSTED (chronological order)
RESPONSE -- Iowa Challenge to WHALE TALK
Essay -- Crutcher's Thoughts on Censorship
Typical Private Email from a Censor
Crutcher Response to Censor Email
RESPONSE -- Iowa Challenge to ATHLETIC SHORTS
RESPONSE -- New York Challenge to SARAH BYRNES
RESPONSE -- South Carolina Challenge to WHALE TALK
RESPONSE -- Alabama Challenge to WHALE TALK
RESPONSE -- Rev. Heimbaugh Challenge to WHALE TALK
RESPONSE - Kansas Challenge to STOTAN
RESPONSE -- Michigan Challenge to ATHLETIC SHORTS
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6 March 2007
To the Citizens of Missouri Valley, Iowa
Hello. My name is Chris Crutcher. You may have heard of me. My book Whale Talk and the teacher using it in his classroom have recently come under fire from Pastor Slaughter at the Missouri Valley Church of Christ. The pastor and I have recently had email correspondence, and I was lead to believe his part in the controversy was relatively low key. Then I found a copy of his original letter to the editor.
So here’s mine. I spent ten years as a teacher and then director in a small k-12 alternative school in Oakland, California back in the seventies, then began working as a therapist with families involved in child abuse and neglect for the eighties and much of the nineties. Though I only do a little of that work now, I’m still chairperson for the Spokane Child Protection Team, consulting with social workers on particularly difficult cases. I say that only to let you know where many of my stories come from. Real life. Hard times.
What Pastor Slaughter neglected to mention after scanning the early pages of my book is that the language is reflective of a vicious racist character in the story, and when the five year old girl who has lived in the verbal (and sometimes physical) crosshairs of that character gets into a play therapy session, she screams them out to let the world know what her world is like. It’s a cry for help that gets answered.
The pastor’s tactic of giving you the harsh language completely out of context is a time honored one. Believe me, I know. That, along with his call for the teacher to be publicly chastised (“The teacher involved should put forth a formal apology to the three groups the school has promised in their own words to support”) is, in my opinion, nothing more than thinly veiled bullying. And like most bullying, it’s ill informed.
In his email he assured me he didn’t want public visibility, that this was for a greater cause. Yet no one who has contacted me about this issue doesn’t know his name. I have a feeling this is one of those issues that could have been settled quietly. I know there is some argument regarding whether or not the kids were told they could select an alternative book, but I’m guessing the offended kids or parents could have walked into the teacher’s room, stated their complaints and had a different book assigned. I don’t know the teacher involved, but I haven’t been in a school in this country in the past ten years where that isn’t true, and I visit at least fifty schools per year.
When Pastor Slaughter says the themes in the book are not for your tenth grade students, I wonder whether he even knows what the themes are, having read (by his own admission to me) only the first third- to half of the book. What seems to have offended him was language. A lot of that language offends me, too, in the sense that there are people out there being talked to like that. If we really believed that merely hearing, or reading, that language does as much damage as Pastor Slaughter intimates, we would put monitors in the halls and all over the school grounds and expel anyone who uses it. And in most cases we would be expelling the pearls of our youth.
After quoting as much “bad” language as he could in nineteen lines, Pastor Slaughter asked in his letter to the editor what the class discussions must “sound like?” I allowed my imagination to go there. I imagined the teacher and the kids agreeing to be respectful in their discussion. I imagined them talking about what a horrible life was being lived by the girl in the eye of that racist hurricane. I imagined anger and rage that it happens, and I imagine dealing with some solutions. That sounds dangerously close to my idea of good education.
It bothers me that Mr. Slaughter feels the need to “protect” the members of his church from stories like this and language like this and pays no attention to the kids who live those lives. All of you know kids who grow up in hate. They sit in the classrooms of our schools, distrustful, betrayed; feeling like second-class citizens whose lives don’t matter. When folks like Mr. Slaughter call for censoring their stories, they don’t realize they are censoring the kids themselves. “Your life isn’t worth being talked about. We don’t care what you feel like; we just want you to behave. Don’t rub off on our kids.”
Whatever happened to “the least of my brethren?” What ever happened to leaving the flock to save the one lamb in peril? Mr. Slaughter heads a far less courageous church than the one I grew up in.
The pastor teaches out of a book that promotes love and forgiveness as well as any book ever written. It also calls for the killing of homosexuals, describes adultery, lying betrayal and all kinds of violence. I’m guessing he doesn’t have an alternate book for those readers who take issue with those things. My own pastor, when I was in high school, sat me down and talked with me about the times in which those things occurred and were written, and worked with me to understand the majesty of the book. I’m not comparing Whale Talk with The Bible, but the process opened up discussion that put my pastor on the short list of people to turn to in any of my many adolescent crises.
I have a feeling I haven’t said anything most of you don’t already know, whether you agree with me or not. In his email to me, Pastor Slaughter said the parents of your community “have had problems in the past of being isolated and made to feel stupid for questioning things.” He didn’t necessarily want me to repeat that, but after he called my book “filth” I didn’t see a lot of reason to honor that particular wish. I grew up in a town about a third the size of yours. We called ourselves “hicks” and sometimes felt “less than” kids from the larger more cosmopolitan towns down around Boise and Nampa. But there was plenty of wisdom in that town, as I’m sure there is in yours; plenty of capability for rational thinking and for making connection with our youth.
What I would encourage you to do, rather than censoring the book, is listen to your kids’ responses to it. And for you kids, stand up and let the adults of your community know who you are. For some reason our culture makes it hard for adolescents and adults to communicate, but that doesn’t need to be.
Should the school board decide to censor the book, let me make some recommendations for others that should also go. Start with all mine. Then take out Pulitzer Prize winners To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple. Huckleberry Finn has to go. Walter Dean Myer’s stunning book of a young man going to war (how much more timely could that be) Fallen Angels had better be cleared out also. The list goes on and on.
Thank you for your attention, and when I’m close to your community I’d be more than happy to take an extra day and talk with some of you, whether you agree with me or not. We all want the best for our kids.
Sincerely,
Chris Crutcher
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Some Thoughts About Censorship And Censors
And Other Things That Hack Me Off Big Time
by Chris Crutcher
The emails below are standard for what I’ve been getting for years, but particularly lately with all the censorship of Whale Talk. I’ve heard other authors who are admittedly less divisive than I am, say we should try to find common ground on this issue. I can’t see that there is common ground. I used to think that the one thing I had in common with the censors was that we all wanted the best for kids, and it was only the questions of what is best and how to achieve it that stood in our way. But I don’t think that any more.
The letters and emails I get are all about philosophy, nearly always Christian philosophy. Realistic language, gay characters, issues of teenage pregnancy, child abuse, deceit are called filth. Over and over I read and hear that word. If a gay teenager or a pregnant schoolgirl also reads that, she has to believe her life is thought to be filth. I’m sorry, but I can’t see how that is wanting the best for those particular kids.
I’m tired of hearing that I don’t have Christian values and morals, not because it hurts my feelings, but because it’s tedious. I spent Sundays during my teenage years dressed in robes lighting candles in the Episcopalian Church in Cascade, Idaho. The man who was pastor there is still a close friend, and there is no doubt I received guidance from him that I still follow. The picture of Jesus I received there is still one I respect. So get off my back about morals and values; they aren’t philosophies, they’re behaviors. Here’s a value for you. Be decent. Here’s a moral for you. Be decent. Here’s another one of each. Embrace it all.
I love the “innocuous” emails I’ve received lately asking where my research comes from stating one in ten people is gay, or that the gay teen suicide rate is three times the heterosexual suicide rate, or that one in three girls and one in six boys has been sexually mistreated. (One woman told me she was writing a book, as if she’s going to footnote Chris Crutcher instead of the real research.) I take middle numbers from the research I know, but that’s not the point. The point is that these people seem to believe if we get the numbers lowered enough, we can give up having to pay attention.
What happened to the Shepherd who left the entire flock to save one lamb? He didn’t leave to save ten percent of the sheep, he left to save one. Does the phrase the least of thy brethren (which I take to mean the person hurting the most) ring a bell? Look, it isn’t about one book or five books, or PABBIS’ list of legions. It’s about bringing up scary, tough issues that make people uneasy, but that exist for all of us.
I’m not anti-Christian. I’m not the anti-Christ. (Nor is Judy Blume, or Maya Angelou, or Robert Cormier or Kurt Vonnegut or Walter Dean Myers. Nope, not Brent Hartinger either). Christians write me all the time, expressing embarrassment for the conservative Christian ramblings and their mission to “cleanse” school curriculums and libraries.
I stand for the right of parents to forbid their children to read a particular book. Someone in my old line of work will make a hundred fifty dollars an hour when those children come as twenty and thirty year old adults trying to deal with the power struggles of their childhoods. I don’t like it, but I stand for that right. I don’t, however, stand for the right to decide what other people’s kids read.
So I guess I have one thing to say to the censors: Shut up.
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March 2006
Subj: ???
Date: 3/7/2006 9:50:43 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: shes4given@ ---
To:
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
I question your motives. Lets take out God, good and evil, morals, clean language, conservative viewpoints of any kind in our schools. Lets replace them with the propaganda that you so highly esteem to indoctrinate your own religious views (yes they are religious). Maybe we will have a nation of free thinking people that aren't really free thinkers at all. They have been ushered into a world whose reality exalts their own morality as the god of all tolerable thinking. No good or evil. No right or wrong, no parental authority, or school authority, or presidential authority. Sounds like an extremely political and personal belief system that you want to persuade our kids with. You appear to be extremely intolerant to those who disagree with you. Somehow in your thinking , right is wrong, and wrong is right? Maybe if we blur the words, we will all develop our own reality, which isn't our own at all. Tolerance, and free speech is believing that I also allow the free speech and opinions of others to have relevance. Why do you target young people? I am sure that as a therapist you are quite aware of the power you have to plant your own religious agenda into the minds of those who are discovering who they are. How about a book or blog on balance in free speech. How about challenging kids with a balanced book that would allow them to come up with some of their own conclusions about life, instead of yours. Maybe a story of tolerance of someone that you completely disagree with. Possibly a conservative, christian student who has lost his right to have any hope of free speech about his beliefs in our public schools. Maybe a family that has conservative viewpoints politically that comes into the overwhelming and powerful attack from those who disagree with them. Or perhaps a book on a girl who becomes pregnant and strongly disagrees with abortion and yet comes face to face with a society hell bent on showing her how wrong she is in what it consides to be narrow minded, uniformed, paranoia. These subjects I am sure would not promote your own agenda with our kids, and besides they would probably be censored because someone would decide that there is no tolerance when it comes to conservative or religious free speech. Again sir, I question your motives.
A concerned and conservative parent. |
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Crutcher Responds
Subj: Re: ???
Date: 3/11/2006 5:17:27 PM Pacific Standard Time
From:
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To: shes4given@ ---
I thought I'd give you a chance to identify yourself, but you seem to be satisfied with having said what you have to say. So I'll answer as best I can. I find your use of the word "sir" somewhat disingenuous, in that it is usually reserved as a term of respect and in this case the context does not warrant that. When you're writing tongue-in-cheek it is sometimes helpful to put quotes around words you intend to be ironic. Given your screen name, I'll assume you are a "ma'am."
I'd be interested to know where you ever read that I want morals, clean language or conservative viewpoints of any kind out of our schools. I've never said that and I don't promote it. I do promote separating church and state in the spirit of the U.S. Constitution because I believe that is best for the church and the state. I have no problem with studying the Bible in public schools when it is studied along with the good books of other major religions. I'm pretty sure you've never read or heard me say there should be no parental, school or presidential authority.
But let's get down to your accusations: targeting kids, pushing my "religious agenda," intolerance. I worked full time as a counselor for fifteen years and part-time for a number of years after that. Never in all that time did I counsel a girl to get an abortion, tell a kid there was no right or wrong, promote visciousness or intolrance against parents or schools (or the president). I'm not sure why it's convenient for you to think differently.
So here's what I think. I think you haven't read my work. I think you don't know that I have a character in a book who has an abortion and can't resolve it because she did it when she didn't have guidance or information. I think you don't know I have characters in books who are Christians and also heroes. I think you're shooting at me with approximate language because you haven't bothered to inform yourself. When you question my motives, you don't state the question. You intimate, I guess, that I sit around thinking of ways to corrupt kids; make their lives worse. It would be an interesting individual who would devote his or her life to that. Have you run that through your imagination to see what it would look like?
See, the problem with seeing the world in terms of good and evil is that if you think you're good, then people who don't believe and behave the way you do, are evil.
It would be helpful to me, "ma'am", if when you're questioning my motives, you'd be more direct. I thought your email was very well written, by the way. It is seldom I get emails from "concerned conservative parents" that are as articulate as they are uninformed.
Chris Crutcher |
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December 19, 2005 -- IOWA
Dear Superintendent Plugge,
I am the author of the short story “A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune” which, I understand, has come into the cross-hairs of the censors in your district. I thought you might find it helpful to have the author’s point of view. You probably know I have been in this position before, with this book and with others; some for the same reasons, others for different reasons. I say that only to let you know I have no personal investment in the outcome. From a financial point of view these challenges don’t affect me. They usually increase sales in the area where the book is challenged because of increased curiosity, and may dampen them in surrounding areas where teachers or administrators are afraid of getting into conflict with the loud minority who think we can best protect our children by keeping realities from them.
I’m also not interested in entering into the free speech/intellectual freedom argument wherein one side says we have to keep our kids safe by censoring what they see and the other says it’s fine for any parent to censor what his/her own kids read, but not fine for them to make those decisions for all parents. We either believe in basic intellectual freedom or we don’t. We either believe in our own abilities as adults to help our kids process tough information or we don’t, and not many minds are going to change regurgitating those arguments.
But when it comes to the question of removing material that addresses homosexuality, maybe we should have some considerations that land closer to home. It makes no more sense to say that stories like “Angus” or “Am I Blue” or any of Brent Hartinger’s or Alex Sanchez’s stories “promote” homosexuality than it does to say that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex promotes sexual fantasies about one’s mother, or that The Bible promotes crucifying our heroes and “laying” without “begetting.” Those are simply things that happen in the stories that are up for discussion.
When one of your teachers looks out over any given junior high or high school classroom, he/she sees one in ten children who are gay. Contrary to what the far right Christian community thinks, they didn’t choose to be gay. I’ve worked as a child and family counselor for more than twenty years and with the exception of a few female clients who had been horribly sexually mistreated throughout their lives, not one gay client has ever said she or he had a choice. You might ask your censors if they can remember back to the day they “decided” to become heterosexual.
Because they are forced to lead repressed lives, gay kids have a three times greater suicide rate than heterosexual kids. We cannot, as educators, pretend not to know those statistics, and when we know them and still choose to bow to the censors, we become accomplices in the results of their depression, because when we censor these stories, we censor these kids. We tell them loud and clear that they have good reason for that depression, and for thoughts of looking for a way out. We can’t pretend to not know what we know.
Educators, particularly social studies teachers, are fond of repeating the old saying, “Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I couldn’t agree more. Overwhelmingly, modern censors are made up of conservative Christians. You might want to visit some Ku Klux Klan history and listen to them evoke the name of God to back their bigotry. And make no mistake about it; if you engage in policy that diminishes a tenth (or even a hundredth) of a population that is born into their circumstances, you are a bigot. I don’t care how many houses you build in Latin America or how many days you volunteer to work at the local Food Bank or how much money you tithe or give to charity. We believe in equality or we don’t; we believe in justice or we don’t, and hiding the truths of people’s lives is unjust.
A thirteen year old gay boy that I worked with recently (who has given me permission to air his views) told me the thing that hurts him most is that for the next four years he will be unable to let anyone know who he really is. He can’t allow the most powerful forces of his adolescence to be made evident even in harmless flirtation because of the possible consequences. Nobody wants to be Matthew Shepherd. But he also told me the kids these days aren’t as bigoted as the adults. That gives me hope for our kids, but shames me as an adult. It should shame us all.
I believe there will be a time, hopefully before I die, when we look back on the way we have treated gays and the issue of homosexuality at the opening of the twenty first century, in the same way we now look back at the beginning of the civil rights era and wonder how such large portions of our population could have pandered to such bigotry. And we will look back at ourselves and be forced to say, in the privacy of our own thoughts, whether we were part of the problem or part of the solution. If you’re an educator, there will be no in-between.
You have teachers in your schools willing to take on these subjects and work with kids on the qualities of understanding and acceptance. Where that is done well, instances of bullying always decrease. Bullying is a top-ten hot button item in schools these days.
I should also say that in my travels to districts where my books are challenged and in my dealings with the teachers and parents who are affected, I have found, even in the most conservative areas, fewer people who advocate censoring books than don’t. And I have many letters from lifetime Christians who are embarrassed by the vocal fringe of their religion.
I don’t speak from outside the world of education. I was a high school social studies teacher, director of a K-12 alternative school for troubled kids in my earlier career, and currently give more than a hundred presentations per year to middle and high school classes, and another fifty or so to teachers and librarians.
Sincerely,
Chris Crutcher |
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October 2005 -- NEW YORK
When STAYING FAT FOR SARAH BYRNES is challenged, there are things a school board might want to know. For example, the event of Sarah Byrne''s burning comes from a real life event; I didn't dream up something for the sake of shock. The story is meant to be a celebration of friendship under fire: a young boy is saved by an unlikely ally and returns the favor when the stakes are at their highest. What I like most about the mail I receive is the number of kids who say they wish they had, or could be, a friend like that.
If the attacks the book receives are from the religious right, I can say this: the book was never meant to be an attack on Christianity, but rather to expose the dangers of rigidity.
Steve Ellerby and his father are every bit the Christians Brittain and his father are and I think they portray those ideals well. I know the discussions about teenage pregnancy and spiritual values held in CAT class often irk the religious right, but those are issues I've heard day in and day out in my office as a child and family therapist, and I can't tell you the number of kids I've counseled who refuse to turn to their parents for help when they make a mistake in an arena in which those parents appear to be unforgiving.
School teachers, counselors and administrators are under siege in our culture these days. A classroom of twenty five or thirty contains one in three girls and one if six boys who have been sexually mistreated. There are likely two or three gay kids there; or at least kids struggling mightily with their sexual identity. Then there are those who are physically abused, or who are never allowed to be "good enough" or are physically neglected to the point that school work becomes almost impossible. Those kids turn to eating disorders, cutting and other self destructive behaviors. There is no way for educators to figure out who those kids are; most are expert at hiding their misery from adults.
Educators are put into further difficulty, being asked to up the anxiety all the way around by testing kids into comas. Good stories are one of few resources we have left to make connections with kids. They provide a level playing field for adults to talk about real life with kids, while allowing both to keep their personal safety. It's a lot easier to talk about the struggles of a character in a book than it is to divulge personal information, and therefore make connections they would be otherwise unable to make. Hey, school is tough enough, for everyone.
The argument that "We can't have kids reading language we don't allow them to use," is also kind of silly in my view. I know all kinds of people who work in banks or offices who don't go there and speak Stephen King-ese though they read Stephen King. What people need to remember about a story, particularly one told in first person, is that there is an intimacy created between the reader and the character; the same intimacy created between the writer and the character. Those stories are told realistically so they will be received realistically.
More and more is being asked of educators, with fewer and fewer resources, and larger classes. Learning is supposed to be interesting and passionate and fun. To make that happen we need avenues of connection, and good, tough stories provide that. I'm often told that, even though there may be kids in our schools who have gone through what my characters have gone through, and worse, what about those kids who have "healthy" home lives. My answer to that is that they should know about the people around them; compassion is created through that, and we can use as much of that as we can find. And even kids with "healthy" backgrounds sometimes feel outside and alone. It seems foolish to think we can protect our kids through ignorance.
The voice of Sarah Byrnes is a real voice. The situations come from real life situations. It has been my experience, through talking with teachers and kids and from receiving letters and emails, that the book brings about lively discussion and often makes kids re-think their opinions of others who have had tough times.
It is interesting that on November 8, the night of your meeting, I'll be in your state receiving an intellectual freedom award from the National Coalition Against Censorship for my participation in this struggle all over the country. Good luck, and let me know if there's anything more I can do.
Thanks for your good work. I can't tell you how aware I am that you and those like you are on the front lines with stories like Sarah Byrnes and Whale Talk etc., and how much I appreciate it. Good luck, and let me know if there's anything more I can do.
Chris Crutcher |
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March 2005 -- ALABAMA
To the Citizens of the Limestone School District, and to the Board of Education:
I understand there is a challenge to the use of my book Whale Talk in your schools and I thought it might be of some help to talk about what is behind the story. From what I have been told, the major issue is the language used by the characters in the book. Probably the most offensive scene, taken out of context, would be on page 68 and 69 where a four and a half year old mixed race girl is working in a play therapy session, mirroring what her life is like living with a racist stepfather and a mother who won’t protect her. In the course of her therapy she is taking the role of the offender, yelling out all the names that she herself endures on a daily basis. Because she is screaming the words, they are in large font, which, I assume, makes them even more offensive to those paging through the book. The scene read in the context of the story, I believe, is heartbreaking. It is also true. It is something I have seen played out by a real four and a half year old mixed race girl in that very situation. Of course some things have been changed to fit this story, and to mask it from the real event, but it is real, and it is actually milder that what I witnessed in that case, and in hundreds of others.
Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don’t allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn’t give them stories in which it is used. But that’s an easy thing to deal with, and I’ve seen it done a hundred times. Teachers bring up the offensiveness of the language and talk about why it’s used to make a story real. We don’t have to use the language to talk about the story in the classroom, but we can certainly talk about the raw power of any good story told in its native tongue.
I worked full time as a therapist in the world of child abuse and neglect for fifteen years, and continue to do pro-bono work even today. I hear stories like these and stories far worse on a regular basis. I am struck by the fact that the kids I hear them from, populate our classrooms. They do not tell their stories because many of them feel shame because they are treated that way, and they hold the secret; the only real power they have over their situations. They would rather be angry or depressed than vulnerable, and so they sit, many of them believing they are alone. Stories like Whale Talk and other, far better stories, let them know they are not alone, while not forcing them to talk about their personal situations at the same time. When we censor these stories, we censor the kids themselves. Imagine falling in love with a book because somehow it mirrors your life, and gives meaning to it, and may even offer solutions to your personal situation, only to have those in power over you censor it because it is offensive. All but the most hard nosed of us might think our very lives were offensive.
I think people who believe we can protect our children by keeping them ignorant of hard times and the language those times are told in, don’t realize that by showing our fear of issues and language that are “everyday” to our children, we take ourselves off that short list of people to turn to in a real crisis.
Whale Talk is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book, about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn’t draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.
When a teacher looks out over his or her classroom, he/she is looking at one in three girls who have been sexually mistreated, one in five boys. That doesn’t take into consideration the number of kids who have been beaten, locked up, or simply never allowed to be good enough. Stories are buffered in fiction and therefore allow discussion of issues that would not otherwise be brought up. They save many students. I’d think twice before I allowed them to be taken away.
You should know that I have no personal agenda in whether or not you keep Whale Talk. It get challenged some certain number of times every year and it gets praised some certain number of times every year. Your decision won’t impact my income or my self-esteem. You have a lot more to lose here than I have, and that’s why I take time to state my case. The kids you turn your backs on when you take away their stories, are the ones who lose, as well as you as a community of adults who may appear to fear their truths. Remember, if you take Whale Talk out, you can take any book out, and could easily cheat your children out of Alice Walker and Judy Blume and Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain and Walter Dean Myers, and Christopher Paul Curtis and Lois Lowry and Pat Conroy to name a few.
Sincerely,
Chris Crutcher |
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March 2005 -- ALABAMA TEENS
To the Students of the Limestone School District:
Recently my book, Whale Talk, was banned in your school district, and I thought I might address that. First, let it be known that I don’t take it personally. None of the four school board members who voted to take the book out of your reach knows me and I have no reason to believe any of them bear me ill will. From all I have read, I believe the stated reason the book was banned was for “curses”, which, where I come from are called “cuss words.”
Arguably the two most offensive passages in the story occur when a four and a half year old bi-racial girl screams out the names she is called on a regular basis by her racist stepfather and later when that same racist stepfather is drunkenly threatening the foster family that is keeping her safe.
In the 1980’s and early 1990’s when I was working as a child abuse and neglect therapist in the Spokane (Washington) Community Mental Health Center, I worked with a young bi-racial girl living in circumstances much like those depicted in the book. Her biological father didn’t even know of her existence and her mother didn’t have the emotional strength to keep her out of the eye of the hurricane of her stepfather’s hatred. She couldn’t eat at the table until her younger, white stepbrothers had finished. She wasn’t allowed to play with toys until they were broken and handed over to her. The first time I saw her she was standing over a sink, trying to wash the brown off her skin so her (step) daddy would love her. Time and time again in therapy she expressed the self contempt she had gained believing there was something fundamentally wrong with her because there was no way to find acceptance in her his world. In play therapy she was allowed to work through her life trauma to ultimately better understand that it was not her fault she was treated as she was, and to come to a better understanding (in a four-year-old’s way of understanding) of the world she lived in. The language that little girl used was even tougher than what my character used in Whale Talk.
When Whale Talk gets challenged or banned, it’s often because a parent who hasn’t read the book runs across that passage or one like it, sees the words (which in this case are in large font because the little girl is screaming) and decides they are a danger to you. They describe the story, more often than not without reading it, as obscene or vulgar or evil --or all three.
But what’s truly obscene is that I know a real girl in the real world who has gone through this. What’s obscene is that so do you, even if you’re not aware of the specifics. What’s obscene is that you know kids who have gone through, and are going through, worse.
What’s obscene is that kids who are mal-treated often grow up angry and depressed and anxious and desperate. They experience crippling difficulties in school, in social relations and in all matters of self-esteem. They use the language I use in the story and worse because it is all they have to try to match what is inside to the outside world. They need to be recognized, and brought into your fold. Often we adults can’t help them, but you can. I write the stories I write to bring things like this to your attention because I believe if kids who are treated badly are to survive, they will survive through the acceptance of their peers, and that acceptance will come from understanding. It’s true; I’m asking a lot from you.
Let me tell you something else I think is obscene. I think it obscene that your school board doesn’t trust you enough to know you can read harsh stories, told in their native tongue, and make decisions for yourself what you think of the issues or the language. It is astonishing to me that grown men, in this case, don’t believe you can think for yourselves. Some of you could have voted in the last election. Many more of you will be eligible in the next. Some of you may be going to war.
It is not a big deal that Whale Talk was removed from your school library shelves. There are plenty of good books out there that your school board hasn’t had a chance to ban yet. But consider this.
About a decade ago, a stellar author named Walter Dean Myers wrote Fallen Angels, a story about a young African American man fighting in Vietnam. Walter told his story, using the language of soldiers at war. It was pretty much the language I used to talk about this four-year-old girl, who was also at war. Fallen Angels, a critically acclaimed book is constantly under the same attack that Whale Talk is under from your school board. Think about this a minute. In the not too distant future many of you will be soldiers also asked to fight in the name of your country. Statistics say a few of your number will also be writers. Imagine risking your life in war, coming back to tell your story in as real a fashion as you can, only to have your children told they can’t read your story in your school because the school board won’t tolerate the realistic language in which you tell it. They not only tell their children it can’t be part of their education, they tell your children it can’t be part of their education.
I have no problem at all with any or all of you pick up Whale Talk, reading a couple of chapters, or even a couple of pages, not liking it, slamming it shut and never opening it again. I don’t even have a problem with that if you do because you are offended by the situations -- or the language. I don’t have a problem with that because it’s your choice. I trust you to know what you like and what you don’t, and what’s good for you in terms of literature; the same way the United States Supreme Court trusted high school students when they ruled in their favor in the landmark case of known as the Board of Education vs. Pico.
I can’t change the minds of people who believe that the best way to keep kids safe is to keep you ignorant. What I can, and will do is this: Donate copies of Whale Talk to your public library, which is a lot less likely to try to think for you. I can urge you to take a look at it and decide for yourselves. I can encourage you to stand up for your own intellectual freedom; to choose what you want to read about and talk about and explore. I can encourage you to let those members of your school board who don’t trust you with tough material, know you are a lot more savvy than they think you are, and that there is no way they can capture your intellectual freedom with the silliness of banning a book from the library shelves. There are plenty of places to get books.
I have to be honest. I don’t think the only reason those four school board members wanted Whale Talk out of your schools was language. I could be wrong - it’s certainly happened before - but I think there are other issues in the book that make them uncomfortable. But even on language alone, if you accept the banning of this book, you should demand that they also remove other books in which that language exists. Start with Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Color Purple, then go to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. You certainly can’t allow any of my other ten books there, nor any of Robert Cormier’s, many of Walter Dean Myers’ or Tim O’Brien’s (The Things They Carried may well be one of the ten best written books of the twentieth century). Sherman Alexi, the great Native American writer is out, hands down and there is no way you can be allowed to cast your eyes upon Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. If you accept this “protection” from your school board, demand that they step up and truly protect you.
I may seem somewhat flip here but I believe that adolescence is an extremely important time in any human’s development. There are hundreds of questions about relationship and career and identity, and you are handcuffed to look at them when a group of men who believe that the depiction of true, rough language is a top-priority moral issue. I trust you to read my book, or any of the other, far more familiar books mentioned above, and decide for yourselves what you think of them. It wouldn’t be completely over the top for you to expect your school board to do the same. Remember this: your school board is there to make decisions to further your education, not keep themselves in their own comfort zones.
I do want to compliment those members and the superintendent who voted against the banning. It does my heart good to know there are many educators out there who understand that good education requires the opening rather than the closing of minds. Again, this isn’t about Whale Talk, it really isn’t. It’s about you.
Sincerely,
Chris Crutcher |
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February 14, 2005 -- Rev. Himebaugh
To Whom It May Concern:
I read the “Letter to the Editor” from Reverend Ken Himebaugh with interest The Christian Right has launched an assault on literature and curriculum all over the country and this one seems no less unimaginative. My books are not even in upper fifty percent of the top 100 banned books list, so it isn’t just a fight about Whale Talk that is coming. It’s a fight about a canon of wonderful literature they want to take away from your kids because of accurate language and tough issues. I will forever fight for their right to take it from their own kids – I can deal with those kids when they come into my therapy office, haunted by control issues – but I will also forever fight to stop them from taking it away from yours. And I will fight for schools and teachers to stand up for that canon of literature and for educators’ expertise on issues of curriculum and student-teacher relationship, the latter being the absolute cornerstone of effective teaching.
Reverend Himebaugh references you to page 125 in Whale Talk, hoping, I think, to get you to read the words and not the context. Let me save you the effort. You will find the “f” word, the “n” word and the “b” word, which references an earlier scene in which a four-and- a-half year-old bi-racial girl, working out in play therapy the life trauma visited upon her by a cruel, racist stepfather, screams out the names she hears herself called every day. The therapist working with her – also bi-racial, and color blind – walks through the hell of her life with her, encouraging accurate expression in the quest for some sense of congruence. It is a spot-on depiction of real therapy, based on a real life in the U.S. of A. The scene on page 125 shows the drunken racist stepfather at work.
The Reverend Himebaugh takes an easy argument: it’s damaging to let our kids read language that corrupts the mind and attacks innocence. The Christian Right he represents says it to you and me time after time. They capture the language, using words like “vulgar”, “corrupt”, “trash” and “evil”, in an attempt to get us to accept their context for these terms. If they really believed it, not one of their kids would attend public school, because the language used is the native language of adolescence and the native language of hard times. When a student reads a book in which the narrator is a teenager, the relationship that student develops is with the narrator, not the author. Think about it, when you read To Kill a Mockingbird, were you listening to Harper Lee or Scout? When you read Huckleberry Finn, were you engaged with Huck or Mark Twain? If I’ve done my job adequately, the last time you’ll see Chris Crutcher is when you turn the title page. After that, you’re in the world of TJ Jones.
At the risk of being offensive, I have to say Reverend Himebaugh’s argument is a lazy one. It ignores basic child development. Adolescents are in a developmental stage of “pushing away” to find their own identities and they need something solid and non-judgmental to push away from. If I could cure one significant ill of adolescence by making my stories unrealistic in the way Reverend Himebaugh would have me, I’d do it in a minute, but the only ill I’d affect is one that plagues adults suffering from control-based dogma, and another would replace it before the first slash of my editor’s pen. You can’t keep those thoughts out of kids’ minds, you can only appear righteous by standing up to attack the morals of people like Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Robert Cormier, Judy Blume and Walter Dean Meyers.
I grew up attending a fundamental Christian church that believed they could scare me into being moral rather than letting me find my way to morality through my relationships with others. They scared me to a less fundamental church where I was an acolyte for all of my high school years. That church entertained my flexible spiritual ideas. The pastor was thoughtful and wise and encouraged curiosity. He knew how we talked and asked only that we didn’t talk that way around him. Because he respected who we were, we respected his wishes and listened engaged him. Where are those Christians today when the likes of Reverend Himebaugh spews forth with his ill-thought-out judgments? Where are the Christians I used to know, who believed in freedom, and in discourse and dissent? Where are the Christians who had some idea of what Jesus was really all about in his time? They better step up, or they will once again be embarrassed by the likes of Ken Himebaugh.
My father was a World War II B-17 pilot who had flown thirty five missions over Germany by the time he was the approximately my college graduation age. He was the Valley County Republican campaign chairman for every candidate from President of the United States to state representative. He once told me, only half-jokingly, that if he ran the zoo the Republicans would run Dan Smoot for President, Curtis LeMay for Vice President and let Barry Goldwater run the liberal wing of the party. (For you readers under 45, read that as, “Right wingers called my ol’ man a right winger.”) But he’d have run a nail through his eye before allowing a book to be banned on his watch, and he’d have fought his party to the death had they shown even the remotest signs of embarking on this current right wing/religious quest for mind control. He believed there was no subject that couldn’t be discussed rationally and he believed in embracing a wide range of ideas in order to come to a conclusion. Where are those conservatives, the ones who understand that the words conservative and conservation come from the same root?
If we follow the words-and-ideas-poison-the-mind philosophy of Reverend Himebaugh, our message to teenagers says, don’t fill your minds with information and make choices for yourselves. That philosophy requires that we turn our backs on our trial-and-error nature, and in doing so we broaden the chasm between ourselves and our kids. I’ve spent most of my adult life working with kids in crisis of one kind or another and telling stories based on what I learned from them. I know that when teachers look out over almost any classroom they stand before one in three girls who have been sexually mistreated, one in five boys. That doesn’t count the number who have been physically, emotionally and psychologically abused in other ways. There are kids who cut their arms, starve themselves, eat and throw up, drink alcohol, take drugs, in order to keep themselves out of black holes of depression and anxiety. They have no way to tell us because the only control they have left is control of the secrets of their lives, and because our culture allows the loud scolding voices of the Reverend Himebaughs to go unchallenged. Those voices are so shrill our kids can’t be heard. Reading about characters with whom they can relate makes them feel less alone. Discussing those characters lets them know how others feel, and may bring them closer to talking about their lives and moving toward responsible resolution. I have a thousand emails telling me that is true. When we ban their stories, we are banning them. To those who say their children don’t have those kinds of lives, I say this: Don’t be so sure, but if you’re right, they still spend six hours a day sitting in a room with other children who do have those kinds of lives, and learning to lead lives of inclusion couldn’t be such a bad thing for them. You do not protect your children by keeping them ignorant.
It will easy for Reverend Himebaugh’s followers to dismiss what I say here. An article in the Grand Rapids newspaper only a few days ago stated my book, Athletic Shorts was flying off library and bookstore shelves. If Crutcher can keep this dialogue going, he’ll be rich. Hey, I get ten percent of every book sold. My take from this fiasco won’t pay the cost of all copies of Whale Talk I’ll send to your public library should you take this book off your school shelves. It’s always interesting to watch the Christian Right assign motive to those of us who write realistic stories. They almost always go with greed or fame or some evil wish to corrupt. But ask yourself if that makes sense. If you knew Robert Cormier (whose The Chocolate War is on top on the challenged list this year) or Judy Blume or Walter Dean Myers for crying out loud, you’d know that simply can’t be true. These are people of impeccable integrity; the best of the best trying to get the emotional information of adolescents out there in good stories, and making connections with those adolescents in the process. The Reverend Himebaugh has every right to keep his own child(ren) from what he considers the evil of controversial ideas. He has no right to keep your children from it, too.
Chris Crutcher |
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February 14, 2005 -- KANSAS
Blue Valley School District
I’d like to address the controversy in your school district regarding the proposed removal of certain books from the high school curriculum including my novel, Stotan! There seems to be a push by the conservative right across the country to become involved in school curriculum. I say that because other of my books are currently being challenged elsewhere, and the tactics are similar. I have to say I’m unnerved sometimes at the arrogance of groups who ignore the expertise of educators in pushing their agenda. I can’t speak for the authors of the other books in question, but I can say I wrote Stotan! with the idea of addressing questions of teenage friendship, racial issues, loss, and human responsibility. The language used in the story is the language used by teenagers. The issues they face are issues faced by teenagers. My belief is that when kids read contemporary stories about characters they can relate to, they become more discerning and better educated, and more sensitive to the plights of their peers. The idea that we can educate better through ignorance makes me shake my head.
But what I really want to address is the damage the censors do to their own relationships with their kids and to the school-student relationships in those few times when they are successful in removing a book from the shelves. You will find very few adolescents unable to handle the controversial material presented in most adolescent literature. You will find very few who don’t hear - in spades - walking through the halls, the words they read in any of those books. They’ve all confronted some version of the issues presented, or have friends confronting those issues. When we tell teenagers we don’t want them reading a story about them, told in its native tongue, we are saying we don’t trust them to handle it and we don’t trust ourselves to carry on a reasonable conversation with them. We tell them there is safety in ignorance. And when a crisis comes, we have taken ourselves off the short list of people to turn to.
Though I maintain a strong philosophy of intellectual freedom, more of my passion for this argument comes from my work as a therapist. Day after day I hear kids say they can’t tell their parents what they’re telling me for fear of the response. They worry about being disowned. They worry about punishment. But the biggest and most common worry is that of disappointment. “I can’t talk with my parents because I can’t stand their disappointment when I make a mistake. My parents are afraid to hear about my life.”
We telegraph our fear to kids by avoiding certain subjects. We set up what they will not tell us or what they will lie about. Good stories have the capability of bridging that gap. While teenagers may not find the courage to talk about their own lives, they can summon it in a minute to talk about fictional characters’ lives, and if we’re willing to engage them, the next natural step is to edge toward talking about the real thing. If a teenager hears his or her mother railing on about the evils of a story including teenage pregnancy, or eating disorders, or sexual behavior, what are they going to do if and when they get caught in the middle of one of those issues in their own lives? They certainly aren’t going to the person who can’t even stand to have the issue talked about in a work of fiction. You don’t protect your children with censorship. You diminish them, and you weaken your relationship.
If you could hear what I hear.
One last thing I believe should be considered by anyone passing judgment on these books. Don’t be fooled by the way the censors try to capture the language. I’ve been to a number of web sites, and I’ve heard their complaints first hand. They state their case using terms like “vulgar” and “ inappropriate” and “trash” and “evil.” They claim to know what is developmentally appropriate, ignoring what licensed child developmentalists say. If they can get you to accept their terms as descriptions of these books, they give themselves a significant edge in the discussion. I haven’t read all the books on the list, but those are not accurate terms for the ones I have read. It is dishonest to argue in that fashion and I encourage anyone who engages them to call it what it is.
Most of the time I don’t take these challenges personally, and that is true this time. I have had, however, great experiences with the teachers in the Blue Valley district and the Olathe district and I want to support those good people. |
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February 5, 2005 -- MICHIGAN
To the Parents and Students
(and the Surrounding Community)
of Ottawa Montessori Academy
Grand Rapids, Michigan
I spent last Friday dealing with the fallout after kids in Ms. Bouwhuis’ seventh grade classroom read my story “Telephone Man” from Athletic Shorts, and felt I needed to be sure you understood where the story came from and what I was thinking when I wrote it.
“Telephone Man” is a story about a young borderline autistic boy who lives in a home with a racist father. In public his father hides his racism, but in the privacy of his home and in front of his family, is unashamed and vocal about it. Telephone Man doesn’t have an “editing function” in his brain, so he repeats at his ethnically diverse school what he hears at home, and it causes him much difficulty. Because he believes what his father tells him, he thinks the African American students at his school mean him harm, but discovers they are more tolerant of his condition than he is of their race when they come to save him from a certain beating. In the end, he walks away for the first time in his life, beginning to see that his father is wrong.
I hate the words Telephone Man uses as much as any of you do. That’s why I put them in the story. They are the words of raw racism and they are depicted as such. The “n” word (and I use that euphemism only because it seems we have lost our capability to speak real truth) is probably the single most vile word in our nation’s historical vocabulary, a sadistic weapon of a word that has been used in this nation’s history like a hammer. You don’t hide a word like that. You expose it. You tell the truth about it. Unlike the people who are challenging the story, I have confidence in our children’s intellectual ability to understand that.
I grew up in a time when the words in “Telephone Man” were used openly, and I bear the shame of a race who allowed that to be so. When I was in the third or fourth grade I discovered that one of my good friend’s parents had been put into concentration camps during World War II simply because they were of Japanese origin. Our government called them “interment” camps, but in fact they had been given a few days to gather all the belongings they could carry and were then relocated to the camps. The belongings they couldn’t carry, as well as their land holdings, were confiscated and never returned.
In 1969 I was to be hired as the swimming coach at Eastern Washington State College for the following year, but was fired before I could actually take the position because I supported the Black Student Union and the few black football and basketball players’ right to raise their fists during the national anthem, a gesture meant to highlight the racial inequities existing in our country at the time. Many of you adults will remember that salute was first raised by Tommy Smith and John Carlos from the top of the Olympic podium in a hugely courageous gesture that cost them their Olympic medals.
I’m not particularly brave and I’m not particularly wise. My sacrifices in the name of racism don’t measure one percent of 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 compared to the sacrifices of millions of minorities in this country before and throughout my lifetime, but I have consistently tried to contribute what I could to the fight for equality. I have long believed my greatest contribution to that notion, other than my personal behavior, was my stories. So maybe you can imagine my heartbreak when I read that the head of your local NAACP called my story “trash.”
Most of the time I engage in this censorship battle with the conservative Christian right and I eagerly rise to it because I believe they want to take away our freedoms in the name of freedom. But the NAACP is an organization for which I have always held nothing but reverence. Their members stood resolute in the face of death during the fifties and sixties when our country was being torn apart because of our bigotry and when law enforcement in many parts of the country turned its back on the law and on basic human decency.
So my heart hammers in my throat when I have to say to Hazel Lewis, “This time I think you’re wrong. I think you read the words and didn’t read the story, and while I believe your heart and mind are in the right place, I also think you don’t trust our children’s capabilities for higher level thinking. ‘Telephone Man’ is about how bigotry flows down the generational river through innocence. It’s hard to imagine how you can go back over the sequence of the past few days’ events and call for Patricia Bouwhuis’ firing. I don’t know exactly what happened in the classroom, whether or not students registered discomfort, or what was said in preparation for the reading, but from all I’ve read I have to believe she brought the story into the classroom out of sensitivity, rather than insensitivity. I have never known your organization to be one that wasn’t active in the art of bringing together people with divergent backgrounds and views. The NAACP I know is about understanding. I should also say there are African American teachers all over this country who have lauded this and other of my stories.”
As I said, I normally have this fight with the conservative Christian right. When I talked to the Grand Rapids Press I mistakenly believed that was the case. I used the word “unapologetic” in my defense of “Telephone Man.” Now, knowing where the challenge came from, I remain unapologetic. “Telephone Man”, like at least five of my novels, is unflinchingly anti-racist. I trust the students of your school, including you seventh graders, to find that message in the story.
The color of our skin has to do, more than anything else, with our long-ago ancestors’ proximity to the equator. It’s a biological response to the sun. In other words, our skin color is mostly about ancient weather. The problems we have on this planet about different skin colors are man-made. I am as diminished as any other human by racism or sexism or any of the other ism that thrives on exclusivity. None of us is equal until we’re all equal.
Beyond that, censorship is un-American. It’s one thing for a parent to take a book out of the hands of his or her child, quite another to take it away from all kids. Censorship leads to ignorance, and for that reason alone, can’t be tolerated. If you are a student who is offended by “Telephone Man” my hope is that you will stand up and refuse to read it; demand to read another book in its place. If you are a student who does like it, I hope you will stand up for it, because in doing that, you’re not standing up for my story, you’re standing up for yourself.
In the end, I hope everyone walks away from this knowing something he or she didn’t know before. I certainly know a lot more about my allies and my detractors.
I’m going to be in Holland, Michigan at the Herrick District Library on March 10 at 7:00 p.m., and would be more than happy to spend time talking about this face to face with any of you, should you have the desire.
Sincerely,
Chris Crutcher |
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Chris Crutcher in '05
Banned Books Week 2006
Available now in hardcover. Paperback release: 8/30/06. Paperback on sale: 9/19/06.
Paperback
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