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Excellent piece. Will be sharing as soon as it shows up on your Facebook feed (to score you some engagement points there as well).

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Nov 30, 2021Liked by Chris J. Karr

Every time I see this kind of debate I can't help thinking of the good old Winston Churchill quote. "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." We can't learn from it if we erase it.

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I read some of the objections to the book and they seemed bogus. I do have an objection, though. The reading level L2 ,which means second grade ,but they set the standards low so it really means advanced K and kinda sorta advanced 1 and lower end of readers for 2nd grade. To tell a story like this (and I do remember seeing it on TV in real time) you need to reach an older age group with a little more town bronze. Teaching history of any kind to young children is tough. If you talk about something before they were born they tune you out. To talk about something that happened in the 1960's is like talking about dinosaurs only the boys like dinosaurs better. If you want to reach children with historical biographies then you have to gear it to 4th thru 6th graders who can identify with other's emotions and situations. That is just beyond 1st and 2nd graders unless you have an adult sitting there pounding in their take. Teachers do that with these kinds of books. They are almost teaching aids. Sometimes teachers use this for their own purposes and sometimes they don't. There is a reason why 1st and 2nd grade books are full of talking mice and bunnies and swords and gremlins and not race relations seen through the lens of racial strife and anger.

So, if I had a beef against the book it would be along age lines. I'm a big fan of youth biographies if it's not too heavy handed and age appropriate.

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I think I agree with what you wrote. That racism exists and has existed since the USA was founded cannot be denied. The difference is that now it is an individual thing and not a public policy. Racism, in some form, will exist until humans are a uniform shade of beige and then some other form of bias will take its place. Left-handed vs. right-handed, brown hair vs. black hair, albinos as second-class citizens and who knows what else. Conflict seems to be a built-in human trait. There will always be democrats to make sure there are factions at war and Republicans to fight with each other. I'm not sure the earth will remain inhabitable long enough for the human intellect to evolve past all this.

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