Episode 16: Banned Book Review #3: Brown Girl Dreaming

Are you doing these critical things to help your child succeed academically? Take the quiz now to find out the important actions you can take to enhance your child's education. Go to my website, liberationthrougheducation.com quiz and take the quiz today. Foreign K12 education untangled My name is Dr. Kim Fields, former corporate manager turned educational researcher and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into the space after dealing with supreme, frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as the micro discriminations that I experienced while raising my two kids who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. If you're looking to find out more about current topics in education that could affect you or your children, as well as practical application that you can take to address these issues, then you're in the right place. In today's episode, I will review one of the books from the banned book list Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. The intent of this and other monthly books book reviews is to examine, to analyze, and to investigate why these books were on the banned book list for K 12 public school reading. Here's a summary of Brown Girl Dreaming. This book is written in poetic verse style as a storytelling book about the author's heritage and life experiences. It is a National Book Award winner as well as a Newbery Honor book and a Coretta Scott King Book Award winner. The author was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1963, which provides sufficient indication and backdrop about the political, economic and social events of that time, but her family had roots that reached back to South Carolina. Jacqueline Woodson the author had an older brother who was three years older than she was and an older sister who was less than a year older than she was. Her sister's name was Odella, who was named after Uncle Odell, who was hit by a car and killed while on leave from the Navy in South Carolina. Odell's death was tragic for Jacqueline's mother, and it left a hole in her heart that couldn't be filled. Every winter, Jacqueline's mother, whose name was Marianne, traveled by bus to South Carolina, specifically Greenville, South Carolina, usually after she had a fight with her husband. The Last fight occurred one year later, that would be 1964, and the mother and three kids left for Greenville, South Carolina for good. They lived with Jacqueline's maternal grandmother and grandfather who loved on them and the grandmother tells them stories from the Bible as well. Pretty much that's what it was like Living in the south, that was slowly changing. Odella, who is Jacqueline's sister, is the reader in the family. Jacqueline's brother's name is Hope. He doesn't do well in the south because of his allergies and eczema. In the grandparents house, the children were admonished if they ever said words like ain't, huh, git, ma', am, and gonna. Marianne, who was Jacqueline's mother, said, you're from the North. You know the right way to speak. This era was highlighted by civil rights marching and fighting for freedom in South Carolina. The story tells a remembrance about Saturday night being hair night, when hair was washed, brushed and oiled with Dixie peach and then pressed. They washed their hair ribbons with Ivory soap, hung them on the clothesline, and when they were dry they ironed them out. Jacqueline's mother, Mary Ann, goes to New York City to look for a place for them and their grandmother, whose name was Georgiana, pulls them into the Jehovah Witness religion. When the kid's mother returns from New York City, she's had another baby, a baby boy named Roman, and she tells the kids that they're leaving Greenville and heading up to New York City to live. Jacqueline doesn't like the new baby and pinches him. She enjoyed being the baby of the family for five years until he came along. When the kids arrived in New York City, Jacqueline thinks of it as a loud and strange place and nowhere that she'd ever call home. They end up settling in Brooklyn, New York. Jacqueline and her siblings, including her baby brother Roman, all have gaps between two front teeth, just like their mother. The apartment that they live in in New York City is one floor below Aunt Kay, who is Marianne's sister. And there are other friends and relatives from Greenville who live in the building. One night Aunt Kay was running up to her apartment and fell. She apparently hit her head hard enough and she died. The family moves again after Aunt Kay's death. There's also Uncle Robert, who is Marianne's brother, who lives in New York as well. He lives in Far Rockaway, New York and comes to visit the family, bearing presents for everyone. Odella is a gifted child and Jacqueline is a teller of stories. Words are her brilliance, but she's also a tomboy. After leaving Ohio, no one really speaks about the kids biological father. For many years, the baby boy, Roman, liked to eat paint off the walls in the apartment and ends up in the hospital from lead poisoning. He goes back and forth to the hospital for several months and finally returns home. He's four years old. Now Uncle Robert ends up taking the kids back to South Carolina for a visit one summer, but Roman isn't allowed to come. When Jacqueline returns back to New York City after visiting her grandparents in South Carolina, she makes a new best friend who lives down the street in New York City. Her name is Maria. In school, Jacqueline becomes known as the other Woodson the because she follows in the same classrooms as Odella. The teachers remember Odella as being so brilliant, a great reader easily completing her work. They wait on the brilliance to be displayed by Jacqueline, but to them it never manifests. So they move on to another student. It turns out that Hope the brother can actually sing. This was discovered during a musical at his elementary school. Jacqueline wonders if there is something hidden like this in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered later on a few years, a new girl moves in next door whose name is Diana, and she becomes Jacqueline's and Maria's second best friend. Maria's mother, Diana and Diana's mother each have come from Point Puerto Rico and they knew each other there. Uncle Robert seems to engage in some shady business and he gets sent up to prison at Rikers Island. He then is eventually moved to a prison upstate. During this time, as the kids are growing up, they listen to music by the OJS. The Jackson 5 Sly in the family stone. As time passes, the maternal grandfather who they used to visit in Greenville, South Carolina and who the kids also call Daddy died in the early spring and their grandmother, his widow, ends up leaving Greenville and moves to Brooklyn. Jacqueline seemed to be the only one of the kids who had many of the ways of Daddy and her grandmother even considered both of them as two peas in a pod. When Uncle Robert gets out of prison later, he has become a Muslim. In the end of the book, because of Jacqueline's vivid imagination, her ultimate dream was to be a writer, which according to this book and others, she became quite good at. My overall impressions of the book are these. This is an excellent book for readers as young as 10 years old. The book is about the author's past, her people, her memories and her story. The story tells of changing and sometimes turbulent times of the 1960s and 1970s in the South. With remnants of Jim Crow and a growing awareness of the Civil rights movement. It talks about when blacks had to ride and then back of the bus that they weren't allowed to be served at the counter in Woolworths department store and where they had to cross the street if they encountered a white person while they were in the South. It talked about learning from the wisdom of grandparents and the importance of family. Some of the things that were familiar to me from my childhood in the book were humorous when I read about making Saturday night hair night and ironing hair ribbons and using Dixie Peach hair oil, which I remember quite well. The author often mentions going home as though time passes and more relatives pass away, but going back home is not really going home anymore. It's hard for me to understand why this book was on the banned book list because of the excellent storytelling of the author's background that she provides. The book discusses attitudes and perspectives of blacks living in the south in the 1960s, but it never explicitly described any specific interactions that would cause it to be objectionable enough to be placed on the banned book list. I'm beginning to sense a pattern of why a number of books have been placed on this banned book list, and it seems to be the One of the major requirements is that the author is a person of color. This is a shame and it shows the close mindedness and small mindedness of those who are in the position of making decisions about what readings public school children should be exposed to. It is unrealistic to try to portray the history of the United States through rose colored glasses and not expose children to the varied perspectives of those who lived during our most unglamorous historical events. We should all be informed about our true history so that the difficult conversations that need to take place can take place. I highly recommend this book for young readers as well as their parents to read to their children because it is written in such an entertaining and informative manner. If this is the type of subject matter and discussion that resonates with you, please subscribe to my podcast on whatever service you're listening to this. Also, I'd love to hear from you. So please leave me a comment or a review and share this episode with anyone that you think would find it valuable. Be sure to tell your friends, your family and your community about my podcast. Thanks for listening today. I hope you'll come back for more K12 educational discussions with even more exciting topics to untangle. By the way, if you have a book suggestion or if you have an urgent question about a current issue or a specific, specific topic that you'd like for me to cover and explore, shoot me a quick email@kimliberationthrougheducation.com to let me know what your question is. Until next time, aim to learn something new every day. Love my show. Consider being a regular subscriber. You can subscribe for as little as $3 per month. Just go to there's no contractual obligation. You can cancel at any time. If you choose to subscribe, give you a special shout out thanking you in an upcoming episode. Remember, that's tinyurl.com podcastsupport to subscribe.