They have not just removed Ralph Ellison's important work The Invisible Man from the curriculum, they have banned the book and removed it from the library. Basically, because one parent complained that it was hard and made her think about things that made her uncomfortable. Like the moral imperatives of a democracy. Thinking is hard. Facing previously unquestioned ideas can be uncomfortable. But that is also called "education."
From The Raw Story: North Carolina school board bans Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’:
Excerpts:
“I didn’t find any literary value,” board member Gary Mason said at the meeting. “I’m for not allowing it to be available.”
In 2010, Time magazine named the book one of the top 100 English-language novels of all time, calling it “the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century.”
In his acceptance speech after winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, Ellison described the book as his attempt to bring back “the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy” common in 19th-century fiction.
“When I examined the rather rigid concepts of reality which informed a number of the works which impressed me and to which I owed a great deal, I was forced to conclude that for me and for so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, reality was simply far more mysterious and uncertain, and at the same time more exciting, and still, despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising,” Ellison said at the time.
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