THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Prominent Black Poet Laments ‘Ban’ on Her Inaugural Poem by Florida School

Prominent Black Poet Laments ‘Ban’ on Her Inaugural Poem by Florida School

One problem with the poet’s claim — it isn’t true. Poems are a dime a dozen anyway. There are fat books full of them. Only one in a million is widely memorable

A prominent American poet, Amanda Gorman, has riled up liberals across the country by falsely claiming that the poem she read at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 has been banned by an elementary school in Florida.

In a public letter posted to Twitter, the 25-year-old Ms. Gorman — the youngest poet to ever read at a presidential inauguration — claimed that a book that features one of her poems, “The Hill We Climb,” was banned by an elementary school at Miami Lakes, Florida. “I’m gutted,” Ms. Gorman wrote. “Robbing children of the right to find their voices is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”

Ms. Gorman posted a copy of the complaint that led to her poem being banned, which was filed by an unnamed parent in late March. The handwritten complaint stated in broken English that a book containing the poem was “not educational” and carried “indirect” hate messages.

“Unnecessary bookbans like these are on the rise and we must fight back,” Ms. Gorman said. “And let’s be clear: most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves. The majority of these censored works are by queer and non-white authors.”

She ended her screed with a plea for people to donate to PEN America, a free-speech nonprofit based in New York that has been fundraising in recent months to fight what it believes to be an epidemic of book bans across the United States. As of Wednesday morning, Ms. Gorman had raised more than $50,000 for PEN America.

The social media post generated howls of protests from very online liberals and spawned dozens of headlines in American media outlets repeating her claim that the poem had been banned by the school. In an appearance on MSNBC, PEN America’s chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, blamed Governor DeSantis for creating an “enabling environment for book bans” in the state of Florida.

“There’s an election on the horizon and there’s a notion that certain people can get energized and motivated by this and they are going to play to that segment and rile them up and it’s up to us to mobilize the rest — the majority,” she said.

The only problem with the narrative being pushed by Ms. Gorman and other activists, however, is that it isn’t true. After the uproar, the Miami-Dade school district released a statement saying that it felt “compelled to clarify that the book titled, ‘The Hill We Climb’ by Amanda Gorman was never banned or removed from one of our schools. The book is available in the media center as part of the middle grades collection.”

The district explained to the Miami Herald, which first reported the incident, that following the parent’s complaint a panel consisting of teachers, administrators, a guidance counselor, and a library media specialist at the Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes decided that Ms. Gorman’s book and a handful of others were more appropriate for middle-school-aged students than elementary ones and were placed on a different shelf in the same library.

On Wednesday morning, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Daniella Levine Cava, extended an invitation to Ms. Gorman to visit South Florida. “Your poem inspired our youth to become active participants in their government and to help shape the future,” she said in a post on Twitter. “We want you to come to Miami-Dade to do a reading of your poem.”

Following the uproar, Ms. Gorman also attempted to explain the discrepancy between her original complaint and subsequent reports about the ban. “A school book ban is any action taken against a book that leaves access to a book restricted or diminished,” she said. “This decision of moving my book from its original place, taken after one parent complained, diminishes the access elementary schoolers would have previously had to my poem.”

https://www.nysun.com/article/prominent-poet-laments-ban-on-her-inaugural-poem-by-florida-school

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Prominent Black Poet Laments ‘Ban’ on Her Inaugural Poem by Florida School

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