Purple Haze
Don’t ban my books
By Lauren Bagian

April 16, 2009

After recently finishing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird for my junior year American Literature class, it occurred to me that this book and many others have been banned from high school classrooms across the country for their questionable subject matter. Thankfully, they are still present at Northern, and I hope they are here to stay. Without exploring these important pieces of literature that have been deemed “indecent,” American students would never branch out into the real world and miss vital issues that are discussed in America’s books.

Novels such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird tear into America’s racial issues, depicting it in its rawest forms by surrounding it with violence and livid language. Why is this important to the development of the American mind? Since this generation did not live during the times of slavery or the race riots, it is hard to wrap a young mind around such emotional and moral uncertainties. By reading the author’s narrative and viewpoint along with classroom discussion, students don’t just learn how to analyze literature, but how to analyze American society as well.

The questionable characters in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire show the world in shades of gray instead of the normal black and white. However, this American classic of shattered dreams and the binds of family and love has been banned from some class rooms for its discussion of homosexuality and the infamous climatic scene of Stanley forcing himself upon the protagonist Blanche. It is not that simple though, for both characters have good and bad streaks. Discovering the motivations of the characters is not spelled out for students or teachers, it is left up to interpretation. This fact is what makes American literature a beautiful and important thing for high school students to explore. The answer is not found in a study guide or on cliffnotes.com, the reader must come to their own conclusions based on what they read and their own experiences combined. This means that the books can be read five, 10 or 15 years later and the reader will learn something new each time. This is the magnificence of all literature.

I’m going to take this opportunity to thank the Northern School District and its surrounding community for keeping literature alive in its schools. Without these classic masterpieces of love, family, class struggles and life, students would never be able to see the world in its many shades, for nothing is black and white.