You Can't Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news.
Hacked traffic sign in Los Angeles (photo credit: unknown)
YCRT! updates from Tucson, Arizona, where 80 textbooks, along with the entire Mexican-American Studies program, were banned from local high schools in 2012:
More YCRT! below the fold ...
YCRT! updates from Dalles, Texas, where we've been following an ongoing battle over books assigned to students at Highland Park High School (this is the school district where the superintendent at one time advocated red-flagging any book appearing on the American Library Association's banned book list):
YCRT! banned book & censorship news:
YCRT! book review:
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
This is an older review, previously published in a YCRT! column, but having just read about parental attempts in Dallas, Texas to ban the teaching of a similar book on poverty in America, I felt it would be useful to look at the subject of textbooks that address the experiences of low-income working people in America and the controversy such books invariably engender.
This book was recently challenged by parents in Bedford, New Hampshire, who wanted it taken off a high school finance class reading list. The parents' stated objection was to a sentence describing Jesus Christ as a wine-guzzling socialist vagrant, but I suspect their real objection was to the book's political message ... certainly that was the case with the many right-wing bloggers who took up the parents' cause and cheered when the school board buckled and removed the book from the reading list. I decided to read Nickel and Dimed to see what the fuss was about.
Barbara Ehrenreich, hardly the Marxist described by her critics, goes undercover and tries to make ends meet by working a succession of low-wage jobs. Her experience underscores the near impossibility getting ahead, or even keeping one's head above water, when you're making minimum wage.
What's interesting is that the book was written after the first wave of welfare-to-work initiatives imposed in several states during the Clinton administration. Things are undoubtedly much worse now. Then, there were still federal and state programs to help the working poor, if you knew where to look. Now there is almost nothing.
I must say, it's a shocking book, and a depressing one. Workers, often single mothers, cannot live on one minimum wage job. They have to work two and even three, and still cannot afford anything but the basics: a roof, food ... and often not even that. Cheap apartments or trailers are increasingly impossible to find, and the trend is for several low-wage workers to live together in weekly-rate motel rooms. Miss a day or two of work and you're out of a job. Get sick, ditto. Your junker breaks down? Sorry, Charlie, and where did you get the idea trash like you was entitled to a car in the first place?
After reading Nickel and Dimed, it occurred to me that if I were to re-read Les Misérables, I'd probably find that not much has changed since Jean Valjean's day.
Critics and political commentators have attempted to belittle Barbara Ehrenreich for undertaking her experiment, trying to make ends meet with a succession of waitressing, housecleaning, and low-end retail jobs paying, at most, $7 an hour, when all along she had an out: she could have returned to her comfortable life at any time, and she could (and did) move on to different parts of the country when she got bored and discouraged with any particular location and job. They characterize her as a rich dilettante, playing at being poor in order to sell books.
But the book needed to be written, and in my opinion high school kids (ye gods, especially high school kids) need to read it. Could a real single mom, slaving away at two or three part-time benefitless minimum wage jobs, have given voice to the plight of minimum wage workers in America today? I thank Barbara for taking on the project. It can't have been fun.