A Texas school district has removed books by an award-winning children’s illustrator and author and canceled a planned appearance because parents complained that his book teaches critical race theory.
According to a KPRC 2, Katy Independent School District near Houston temporarily removed Jerry Craft’s books from its library and will conduct a review before making a longer-term decision within the next 15 days.
Craft was also scheduled to appear virtually before students and staff at Roosevelt Alexander Elementary School on Monday. Parents were given the option to opt their students out of the visit, and at least 30 parents chose to do so, according to KPRC 2.
Craft is the writer and illustrator of graphic novel “New Kid” which was awarded the John Newbery Medal in 2020. The book tells the story of Jordan Banks one of the few kids of color in a prestigious private school.
“It is inappropriate instructional material,” parent Bonnie Anderson, a former candidate for Katy ISD school board and a party in a lawsuit against the district’s mask mandate said. “They are pointed at white children displaying microaggressions to children of color. The books don’t come out and say, ‘we want white children to feel like oppressors’, but that is absolutely what they will do,” she added.
Anderson started a petition on Change.org calling on the district to cancel the virtual visit and ban the books. The petition received 500 signatures before it was removed from the website for violating the Change.org community guidelines.
“Critical race theory is definitely not about teaching white kids that they are inherently racist,” Darius Benton, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Downtown said. “It’s really more so about understanding how institutional racism is instituted in society, organizations and government,” said Darius Benton, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Downtown who contributed to a book about critical race theory in 2021.
Craft said in a statement, nothing will deter him from his goals of “helping kids become the kind of readers that I never was; letting kids see themselves on my pages; and showing kids of color as just regular kids,” according to NBC News.
“As an African American boy who grew up in Washington Heights in New York City, I almost never saw kids like me in any of the books assigned to me in school,” according to Craft’s statement. “Books aimed at kids like me seemed to deal only with history or misery.”
In September, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a bill into law that bans the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 public schools.
“A teacher may not teach that an individual by virtue of the individual’s sex or race is inherently racist sexist or oppressive,” the bill’s co-author, Rep. Steve Toth (R) said.
