If you’ve read this blog of late, you know I’ve written a fair amount about Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick, the Carmel, N.Y.-based mother who is my home region’s face and voice and mouth of Critical Race Theory resistance.
Now, she’s jumping into a slightly different arena—deciding which books are OK for children to read …
And, on the one hand, I admire Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick’s devotion to the triple exclamation mark. It’s bold, it’s creative, it screams I’M YELLING!!! LISTEN TO ME!!! I’M A BOT!!! WHITE POWER!!! STILL YELLING!!! And yet, I’m also a bit bewildered. I mean, if you’re going to back someone’s judgement on, oh, literary endeavors, shouldn’t that person (at the bare minimum) know how to spell and punctuate? Shouldn’t you know the difference between “then” and “than”; between spaces and commas? Shouldn’t that person grasp the correct usage of the word “entices”?
Call me a skeptic, but I sorta kinda definitely doubt Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick has ever read “The Hate U Give.” One, because it’s 444 pages, which is about 150 stacked issues of The National Enquirer. Two, because it’s not illustrated. And three, because it’s not anti-police. It’s actually one of the best books I’ve ever read, and an insanely important here’s-what-the-world-looks-like document for the geographically sheltered kids of Putnam County, N.Y.
And, really, that’s the greatest harm being committed by amateur dolts like Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick. Because she’s a sheltered half-baked ham with on fleek eyebrows and an IQ of seven (OK, OK—five), she doesn’t realize that the kids growing up in towns like Carmel and Mahopac and Brewster need access to diversity; that it’s not enough to watch a Will Smith film and call it a day. You can be a #MAGA lemming like Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick and still (I suppose) acknowledge that once your daughter graduates high school, she’ll encounter people from myriad countries, religions, races, creeds. And that—even if you disagree with them—it’s important to at least understand whereof they speak.
Not to get all Me-Me-Me, but one of the greatest things to happen to me as a kid was Jonathan Powell, my boyhood friend, introducing the music of Public Enemy. My first favorite song was a little Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick ditty called, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” about a prison riot involving black inmates and white guards and a racist governmental system. It’s powerful and intense and fucking jamming—and at no time during or after listening to it was I inspired to start a prison riot. See, that’s the bullshit about people like Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick. They’re terrified of their kids—in “Truman Show” speak—seeing what awaits beyond the bubble. So they cocoon their sons and daughters by turning everything into an Us v. Them jamboree. They (in this case—educators, liberals, black people) want to change things. They want to infringe. They are trying to brainwash our precious little ones, and we won’t let them.
Only, exposure isn’t brainwashing. It’s exposure. You can read, say, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and not walk away yelling, “All whites are evil!” You can read “The Hate U Give” and think, “Wow, I never know this is how [fill in the black group] feels.” Fuck, you can read a book about the rise of the KKK and not wind up joining the KKK.
Ultimately, it’s all about exposure. Life is about exposure. Tasting different foods, hearing different voices, visiting different lands, listening to different viewpoints.
Unless you’re Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick.
Whose life is merely about scaring the shit out of her followers!!!
PS: Sister Genius posted this on her Facebook page. It’s always 1956 in Tanya Esposito•Tatiana Ibrahim •Tanya Brahimi•MC Mellie Slick World …
