Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher from Escambia County, Florida has sent a spreadsheet of 149 books she wants banned from school libraries because of various things she finds objectionable about them, from “race-baiting” to acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people, Popular Information reports.

Her list of books includes a number of titles that do not have obviously objectionable material.  When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball, a children’s book that details the battle three-time gold medal winner in 1960 Olympics overcame to become a world-class athlete, including recovering from childhood polio and overcoming racism in the Deep South in the 1950s.  Baggett claims the book is bjectionable due to “race baiting” because it documents racial prejudice in the Jim Crow South, something that happened regularly.

Baggett also objects to What Girls Are Made Of, a 2017 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Finalist written for students in tenth grade or over that discusses a girl’s maturity into womanhood and her questions regarding sex, responsibility, and her anxiety about adulthood.

Ground Zero, a 2021 New York Times best-selling teen novel by renowned genre writer Alan Gratz that addresses the tragic and complicated aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack, was written from a child’s perspective to help kids understand the horror of the attack and the subsequent wars the US fought.  Baggett wants the book removed because, she claims, “American soldiers are portrayed as evil and terrorist.”  The novel accurately recounts episodes where US military were convicted of abusing prisoners at places like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

While rational people would see these books as providing young readers a way to cope with and understand the complicated world around them, Baggett sees them as a corrupting influence on children.  Baggett says the stories make students–presumably only white students–“feel uncomfortable” because “they are being white-shamed,” neglecting to address the centuries other races felt shamed, abused, attacked and enslaved in the United States.

Strangely, Baggett does not ask for a book that features slavery, forced sex, polygamy, murder, mass murder, genocide, misogyny and graphic depictions of torture–that is, the Bible–be banned.