andrewkarre Profile picture
May 31, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
An experience from a couple years ago has never been far from my mind throughout all this. When I was on the PTO of my children’s school, we organized a fun-run as a fundraiser. We invited community members to show up—the mayor, the fire dept. and the police, etc. And they did.
The mayor ran laps with the kids, the fire department brough a truck, and the police...well, first a K9 unit showed up but that wasn’t all. We also got a huge armored vehicle driven by officers dressed in what I’d characterize as military gear—body armor, etc.
Suffice it to say the presentation was not friendly neighborhod police officer. Very different from the K9. The officers were friendly, and their gear was, of course, popular with the kids in exactly the same way an F15 landing in the school’s garden would have been popular.
But I still can’t shake the feeling of horror at the decision making process that led officers to think it was a good idea to introduce themselves to any school community in that way—clad in the tools of urban warfare, it seemed like a friendly but very misguided show of force.
Keep in mind that this is a school community where a staff member was killed by a police officer live on Facebook in 2016. His image and name are all over the school. His memory fills the halls. These are kids who have indisputably been traumatized by police violence.
And still, the police arrived ready for violence. This was the face they chose to present to children.

I cannot shake this. As a white man with no fear of police violence acting on behalf of a very diverse school, I deeply regret not speaking up. #georgefloyd #PhilandoCastile
(Also, I'd bet dollars to donuts the total value of the urban warfare rig the cops pulled up in far exceeded the annual budget of the school, but that's another thread.)

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More from @andrewkarre

Feb 2, 2022
Bans go after books, but in this wave it’s clear truth in the discourse about schools and libraries is as much or more the target.

If challengers talk enough about “age appropriate” books for high school students, people accept that age appropriateness is somehow science.
If they call books “pornographic” loudly and often, some people will start asking about the porn in school libraries.

If they talk about books “grooming” young readers every chance they get, some will accept that grooming is a thing books do.
If they say librarians make collection development decisions based only on journal reviews with no way of knowing what’s in the books often enough, it starts to seem true.

If they misrepresent school libraries as K-12 free-for-alls over and over again, some will believe it.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 1, 2022
I find this letter sickeningly disingenuous. Out of Darkness does contain these depictions. It is also 400 pages long and narratively quite sophisticated. Like all novels, it immediately eliminates whole swaths of readers who are not ready for it. This how books work.
Meanwhile, the parent seems to believe that a kid picks up a book, somehow encounters a depiction they’re not ready for, and is harmed. A parent is entitled to this belief, but no one is obliged to pretend that because she believes a nonsensical thing, her wish is their command.
There’s nothing in this letter that even approaches an argument for her having a role in making library curation decisions. Instead, this document is an argument against the idea of libraries in schools. I suspect she’d be fine with that.
Read 12 tweets
Jan 27, 2022
In light of a Tennessee district banning MAUS, I'm sharing the greatest two pages ever written and drawn about the importance of children's literature and protecting children's access to books, starring Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak. From the New Yorker, September 27, 1997.
I have turned to this comic as a compass for what I believe in as an editor for a very long time (it's been framed over my desk for almost a decade and if I ever got a tattoo, it'd be panel #8). It's no less orienting as a parent navigating the limits of "protection."
Protection from history, protection from the other, protection from the intricacies of the spectrum of human identity—all of these "protections" inevitably extract a toll on the protected and, most acutely, on those children cast outside the walls of the "quaint and succulent."
Read 10 tweets
Sep 30, 2020
Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. Trump is not childlike. THREAD.
What happened last night—what's happened regularly for an entire presidency—is not a toddler's temper tantrum, and it doesn't resemble one. To call it that is to reinforce the ongoing delusion that we have a problem with one immature, erratic, anomalous man.
In the real world, you will find many, many more white adult men who regularly resemble Trump than you'll ever find children. The rage. The incuriosity. The cruelty. The reflexive dishonesty. These qualities are abundant somewhere in America, and it's sure as hell not children.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 29, 2020
“Graphic novels are like ice cream. You can read them after you read prose books.” Or so the 12-year-old’s English teacher reportedly said regarding what books he can pick for assignments.

LOOK. Virtual school is so hard. I want all the slack for teachers. But come on.
Can we not do this literary elitism bullshit now? In a virtual learning environment where you can’t put an alternative in a kid’s hand and support that redirection, why in the world would you tell a kid not to read something?
Are there teachers who are saying no verse novels? Is this a thing yet?
Read 4 tweets
Sep 28, 2020
THREAD. We're almost a month into virtual school, and it's really hard. Doing this for many more months feels impossible. The Trump tax story should be a reminder of *why* it feels this way. It's not impossible simply because virtual learning is inherently challenging.
It's fair to say fighting WWII in the Pacific was always going to be challenging. What would have made that difficult task impossible would have been refusing to spend the money to build insanely expensive aircraft carriers faster than any other country in the war.
If you think this is analogy is a stretch, I'm sorry, but I don't know how else to get you to understand the gravity of the situation.

We can repeal a tax cut, allocate hundreds of billions to support virtual learning in a serious way, or we can lose this war. It's that simple.
Read 6 tweets

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