Here’s What is Really at the Core of Book Bans

 

In 1977, ROOTS was a miniseries on television. Those of us who watched experienced history with our whole souls, hearts, and minds, as some of the best actors of our time portrayed for us the story Alex Haley carefully researched, and for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.

Roots: The Saga of an American Family, tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century Mandinka, captured as an adolescent, and transported to North America. It explores his life and those of his descendants in the United States, down to the author himself, Alex Haley. The novel spent forty-six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including twenty-two weeks at number one.

Alex Haley, was born in Tennessee. Two days ago, on Friday, May 15, 2026, the schools in Knox County, Tennessee, banned ROOTS. The reasoning was that “it might make white children upset.”

BUT, here is what I know, as a parent myself, and as a former teacher who has had to listen to ineffectual, ignorant adults, be they parents, supervisors, or even other teachers, as they degraded and corroded a child’s ambitions, dreams, hopes for the world, simply because they themselves were too frightened, feeble-minded, and weak-spirited to break away from the dysfunctional societal norms that were engineered for us by those who wish to remain in charge:

The actual reason ROOTS, as well as many other mind-expanding books, are being banned is that the people who believe their progeny (and all other young people), should remain complacent and obedient,  should and must accept and adhere to their religion, their perceived echelon in society, their choices – such as marrying and having children, not being gay, not choosing any lifestyle or career that is outside what they consider acceptable – are now in charge. They are in charge of our school boards, our places of worship, our judicial system; they have infested our government like roaches crawling across the spilled grease and slime of a fast food chain.

And the one thing they clearly understand is that, if young people obtain any information at all that might cause them to rethink the life they have meticulously programmed their children to believe in, and society in general to believe in, if said young people learn the truth of what’s being kept from them, and they begin to understand that there is more that life has to offer them beside being a shill for “tradition” that keeps them firmly imprisoned in an ideology created for them by their parents, their pastors, and their government, those young people will surely rebel against that repressive, stifling, philosophical enclave they have been forced to live within.

The people who banned Alex Haley’s eye-opening book are not afraid it will make their children sad, they are afraid it will make them aware. They are afraid it will make them angry at the betrayal of being kept in the dark by those who were supposed to nurture them to achieve their best lives, to learn how to creatively elevate humanity as opposed to squashing it; they are afraid the knowledge young people can obtain in books will make them sit up and take notice that the older adults around them are complicit in their own demise, and that their one and only life is slipping away into the banality of violence and spiritual nothingness their parents are feeding them as sustenance.