A Miami-Dade County school has filed a complaint against poet Amanda Gorman’s book The Hill We Climb, citing that the work is “not educational” and contains hate speech.
The complaint, filed by Miami Lakes resident Daily Salinas, who has two children at Bob Graham Education Center, said that the book has the potential to confuse and indoctrinate children. NPR obtained access to the complaint through the Florida Freedom to Read Project and found that in the complaint, Salina replied “I don’t need it,” when asked whether she had seen professional reviews of the book.
“We are indeed troubled by this,” Daniella Pierre, president of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP Daniella Pierre told NPR Wednesday. “The form, based on what has been provided and shared with us, does not even appear to be completely filled out or express a complete thought,” Pierre said. “It is our collective goal to work on amending school board policy and effectuating changes to ensure that it takes more than one form to remove our history and heritage.”
Salinas has also filed complaints about four other books: The ABCs of Black History; Cuban Kids; Countries in the News Cuba and Love to Langston.
One week after she filed the complaints, the school’s leadership agreed that most of the books should not be seen by younger students after she asked that the books be
removed “from the total environment.”
“I am certain that many are fearful they will be investigated,” Raegan Miller of the Florida Freedom to Read Project told NPR, adding that the school’s move to remove the book was “very typical for Florida right now.”
Meanwhile, Miami-Dade County Public Schools said that “No literature (books or poem) has been banned or removed” but instead it was only available to older students in the middle school section of the media center.
Gorman took to Twitter about the matter, stating that “a school book ban is any action taken against a book that leaves access to a book restricted or diminished” and said in another instance that she is “gutted” that young children at the school could not access the poem. She added that she initially wrote the poem “so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment.”
The “hate speech” Salinas referred to stems specifically from pages 12 and 13 which reads:
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what “just is”
Isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow, we do it.
Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply
unfinished.
