Because book banning is clearly the answer for things you don’t like, or rather, in this instance, do not properly understand.
A Tennessee mother, Jackie Sims, is asking her local school district to ban the New York Times best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a biography of a woman whose cervical cancer cells were used for medical research without her knowledge or consent, because she considers certain passages to be “too graphic.”
I’m sorry, are you a student at this school district? Were you assigned this book to read? Will you be reading this biography? No? So why are you running your mouth?
Sims told her local news station, WBIR, that she considers the book to be “pornographic.” She believes that the story could be “told in a different way.” She claims that “there [are] so many ways to say things without being that graphic in nature, and that’s the problem I have with this book.” The book was assigned to her 15-year-old son.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks deals with questions of medical ethics, racial inequality, and scientific progress. Her son attends a high school that is focused on science and math.
But what is the graphic content? The WBIR report doesn’t say. However, the author of the biography, Rebecca Skloot, has an idea. In response to the controversy, she took to venting her frustrations in a Facebook post.
Interestingly, not once in the story does the reporter quote the supposed “graphic” “pornographic” content the parent is objecting to. So I’ll tell you what it is: Henrietta’s husband was unfaithful, and he brought home at least one sexually transmitted disease. Also: Using her finger, Henrietta found a tumor (caused by a sexually transmitted disease) on her cervix, just as women find lumps in their breasts with their fingers. So is a breast self-exam pornography too? #sigh
On Twitter, Skloot continued, tweeting that Sims “confuses gynecology with pornography.”
The school district has since planned to assign Sims’ son a new book, Fahrenheit 451, a book that is critical about book censorship.
Another parent, Shelly Higgins, told WBIR that banning The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the equivalent of a “modern day book burning.”
Thank you, Shelly Higgins, for restoring my faith in the humanity of Tennessee.
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