Toronto’s Catholic school board has banned from its classrooms all books by non-Black authors that contain the racist slur known as the N-word.
The new protocol also bans the word from being spoken aloud except by Black students in the amicable sense. It came into force this school year after being circulated internally last spring and approved in May.
Since September, the policy has forced the removal of familiar literary classics from high school curricula, such as Of Mice and Men. Other books that would be caught in the ban include Lord of the Flies, a common high school classic, and Gone with the Wind, less so.
Carl James, professor of education and Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora at York University, said that to describe the Toronto Catholic District School Board’s N-word protocol as a book ban is unnecessarily provocative.
He said he appreciates the effort of the school board in “attempting to respond to the issues and situations that students in that board face.”
He said he hoped that simply removing the word from classroom content would not be the end of it, but rather just one part of a more complete education about racism.
“Is it banning or is it calling into question the words that we use and also having us think critically about what something conveys to the community?” he said.
Read the full article in the National Post.
