Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” begins: When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? / The loss we carry. A sea we must wade. She made history in January 2021 as the youngest poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration. Her long-form poem, which she read at the age of 22 during President Joe Biden’s inaugural ceremony, doesn’t contain a single obscene or vulgar word — yet a complaint from exactly one parent has prompted a Florida school to prohibit elementary students from accessing it.
The poem does explore the issue of race in America, which in itself may have been the offending factor, given the political right’s movement to banish so-called “critical race theory” from the classroom. When critics of that movement warn that this is a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to barring kids from any discussion whatsoever of race, this is what they’re talking about.
Florida, like Missouri and other red states, has been passing legislation that treats school teachers as if they can’t be trusted to make reasonable decisions about teaching age-appropriate materials to kids — which is what they’re trained and paid for. The laws tend to set vaguely defined standards for what kids can and can’t read, which in turn tends to make school officials skittish about leaving materials on shelves during the slightest instance of controversy. The story behind Gorman’s poem is a perfect demonstration of this dangerous dynamic in action.
Daily Salinas, mother of two students at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes, wrote the school to protest the availability of a book version of Gorman’s poem, along with four other books, all having to do with race or Cuba. Salinas (who has told interviewers she is Cuban) alleged the books contained “indirect hate messages,” without specifying what those were.
Salinas has acknowledged to interviewers that she hasn’t even read Gorman’s entire poem. She also has apologized for reposting anti-semitic material online, saying she thought it was anti-communist: “I didn’t read the words.”
That hardly sounds like someone who should be determining whether kids should be allowed to read a historic inaugural poem. Yet based on nothing but Salinas’ complaint, a school committee reviewed the materials and decided to limit four of the five books, including Gorman’s poem, to middle-school students and above.
The committee explained that it had “erred on the side of caution.” No — it erred on the side of censorship and cowardice, driven by cynical politicians who are determined to make kids pawns in their culture wars. More than ever today, those kids should be able to read words like Gorman’s: We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation / because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.
