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Brown Bear, Brown Bear, on the blacklist?

If you thought dictionaries were offensive to children, you should also be wary of Bill Martin, Jr.’s beloved picture book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? According to the Dallas Morning News, Texas’ State Board of Education banned the kidlit book from the third-grade curriculum after confusing its author with another Bill Martin, who wrote the 2008 book Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. From the Morning News:

Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books [Martin] had written for adults that contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.”

[...]

Hardy said she was trusting the research of another board member, Terri Leo, R-Spring, when she made her motion and comments about Martin’s writing. Leo had sent her an e-mail alerting her to Bill Martin, Jr.’s listing on the Borders.com Web site as the author of Ethical Marxism. Leo’s note also said she hadn’t read the book.

The author of Ethical Marxism is a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago, while the kidlit author, who died in 2004, never wrote anything more political than a book teaching kids the Pledge of Allegiance, the Morning News notes. A final vote on curriculum standards will take place in May.

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