The person who objected to Roots being in the libraries of Knox County Schools and the librarians and school administrators who went ahead and banned it have done something so brave and maybe stupid that I feel honored to be alive at the same time as them.
Seriously.
Listen, I know that you probably heard that Knox County Schools banned Roots last week after some anonymous person objected to its presence in school libraries. And you likely thought, "Well, racists gonna racism." But come on.
Kaitlin Riordan at WBIR over in Knoxville gives a nice rundown of Roots author Alex Haley’s ties to Tennessee in general and the Knoxville area specifically:
Haley is a beloved writer who spent part of his childhood in Henning, Tennessee, and spent some of his final years at a farm he fell in love with in Clinton. He said he drew inspiration for "Roots" from stories he heard on the front porch of his childhood home.
A giant statue of Haley, posed with a book in his lap, is in Haley Heritage Square off of Dandridge Avenue, atop Morningside Park.
Riordan didn’t mention this, but Roots is on the list of texts that state Rep. Gino Bulso (R-Brentwood) successfully championed to make Tennessee’s official state books in 2024.
The Brentwood Republican has nominated 10 works as official state books of Tennessee. Let’s dig in.
So I’m supposed to believe that a school system in a county with a giant statue of the author in a park named for him in the state that is so clearly tied to him that his book is one of Tennessee’s state books somehow didn’t know any of this or consider how bad it would look to ban the book? No one in the whole process was like, “Um, we’re cool with banning an official state book?” I call bullshit.
I’m especially suspicious of the timing, considering how the whole nation believes (for better or for worse) that our special session to break up Memphis’ congressional district earlier this month was the welcome ceremony for the return of Jim Crow. And even though Republicans in the state Capitol are insisting that trisecting Memphis was about breaking up Democratic power, not Black power, here’s this bit of evidence that the state is in fact attempting to erase Black voices from all facets of Tennessee life.
Librarians ‘horrified’ as hundreds of books are at risk of removal during temporary library closures
As far as political protests go, this is an ingenious one. You take the apparatus designed to oppress you, and use it to embarrass the censors. This direct evidence that Gino Bulso doesn’t have enough clout in the state to protect books he thinks are important from censorship should piss him off. Maybe he should call Secretary of State Tre Hargett and the state's librarian and archivist James Ritter and ask them to explain whether their little censorship project led to this, and how a book he championed as one every Tennessean should read has ended up banned from some libraries in the state. That’d be an interesting and informative discussion, I’m sure.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it just looks so obvious to me that banning Roots is a kind of malicious compliance designed to embarrass state leaders while shining a light on the absurdity of their policies. And I’ve been worried since hearing about it that it might blow back on Knox County in some way. But like, how? No one seems to know who filed the initial complaint. All the proper procedures to ban the book were followed. The process worked as intended. You can’t have a policy that people get in trouble for not following and for following.
So I think this is just going to stand as one of the most effective forms of protest we’ve seen in modern times in the state: malicious compliance peppered with plausible deniability.
