00:00The writers' organization PEN America, a few weeks ago, issued a report in which it said that at this moment in the United States, there are 23,000 active book bans.
00:13And in many cases in schools, one parent objecting to the presence of a book on the syllabus or in the library can result in having that book removed.
00:2423,000.
00:25And these are not just any old books.
00:31These are Tony Morrison's Beloved or Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, some of the best books ever written.
00:39And there is a fight back against it because there is the defense of the First Amendment.
00:45And there's a lot of court cases.
00:47And in many cases, those court cases are succeeding, but there's just a lot to fight about.
00:52But the fact that they have come in at all, could you ever have imagined that in the U.S.?
00:57No.
00:58Because you've made the country your home for 25 years, I think.
01:0026 now, yeah.
01:01But no, I would never have imagined it because one of the reasons why people like me wanted to live in America is because of the fact that free speech is enshrined in the Constitution.
01:11I mean, the First Amendment is very powerful in a country of that kind that this should happen.
01:19And especially what you begin to notice is that many of the books that are being banned have something in common, which is that they deal with America seen from the perspective of people who are not white.
01:31You know, if you think about Beloved or To Kill a Mockingbird, I mean, books like that, that's what they have in common, that they tell the story of America from a different viewpoint.
01:45And there is, in my view, clearly an attempt, again, to erase that viewpoint.
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