Angela Orange Admits Book Banning Appeals Process is Fake
It was a ruse all along, dear reader.
Welcome to another day in God’s Green Marietta Fahrenheit 451, everyone! It’s a crisp 52 degrees outside, but boy is the temperature rising on the pearl-clutchingly dangerous words contained in the MCS Media Center and those who won’t cry over them. The board has announced their intentions to ban 23 more books, 13 of them featuring LGBT themes and characters. Did you think we only had teeth for far-right BOE members Jaillene, Jason, and Jeff (“J-Cubed”)? No, dear reader, we have equal-opportunity teeth, and this post will prove it.
Not even Elmo can save our books from Angela’s Orange Fury. In a strange episode of what must only be set in the Twilight Zone, Orange steps away from her day job as a social justice warrior to enable Mom’s for Liberty propaganda in our libraries. In doing so, she says the quiet part out loud: the book banning appeals process was fake all along.
Jenny Storino, Marietta High School parent, sent in an appeal to the board on Wednesday morning, November 29th. Within hours, Orange had brought down the hammer – that is, we assume she hadn’t had time to read the 200+ page appeal yet – telling the MDJ that she “supports Rivera’s judgement, and plans to show that with her upcoming vote.” It’s fake, folks, they admit they won’t genuinely consider them.
(Others have written in detail about the two most public titles that the BOE needlessly scrapped. You can review Flamer and Earl for yourself, if you like.)
How strange, indeed, for the Board to intentionally position their votes on appeals as yays or nays regarding “Supporting the Superintendent.” Language matters, here, dear reader. This allows the aggressors to appropriate a manipulatively positive narrative by saying that they support the decision of the superintendent – you know, the decision he had to make with the board’s proverbial gun to his head. It allows them to continue to scapegoat AB the G, despite being the only board member actually supporting the Superintendent.
Dr. Rivera has articulated that he would like to focus on the opposite of banning books. That’s right, fam, the superintendent is passionate about literacy and would himself choose to keep the banned titles on the shelves. When Jaillene Hunter sent her Elementary School PTA buddies after the librarians back in September, Rivera took a principled stand in support of MCS parents, students, and librarian, saying “he trusted the professional judgement of the staff member responsible for ordering media center resources.”
Remember, dear reader, the Board dictates what Rivera removes via the September Directive. If you ask the BOE about it, they say “it’s out of our hands.” When an appeal of the Superintendent’s decision goes back to the board—the decision they forced him to make—they then say they support the Superintendent. Does your head hurt yet? Ours does! This math simply isn’t mathing.
That brings us to our next question: What the hell?
What in the world is even going on? Why is the board forcing the superintendent to remove books that they arbitrarily deem inappropriate? Why is Angela Orange, the usually left-of-center voting board member, leading this charge?
A quick dig into her professional background left our heads itchy. We checked for lice, dear readers, but alas, it was just Angela’s Cognitive Dissonance causing dryness. Her resume screams “Competent Board Member,” so how did we get here? Orange was a Louisiana teacher for two years in the early 2000s. She quickly transitioned into the business world, moving to organizations peripheral to education: managing scholarship funds, working on teacher recruitment and training, then spending her longest stretch of time with Teach for America as a managing director. All of that sounded fine and normal until we came to her most recent position: Director at the DC Nonprofit group EdFuel. And this, besties, has left us boggled, glossy-eyed, and hung-over.
What the heck is the director of a nonprofit focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion doing banning books about gay kids of color? Orange claims she approaches her work with a “systems” analysis in mind. Did she forget to read Audre Lorde or bell hooks? Did she forget that the “systems” that impact Black Americans are linked to the “systems” that also impact LGBT individuals in MCS schools? Does she know some gay people are also Black? Somebody needs to tell her… (not it.)
EdFuel’s commitment to anti-racism is radical and unequivocal. It does not mince words on EdFuel’s desire to actively support people of color in a context of racialized discrimination in America. Why on earth is she dying on the hill of Flamer and Earl’s obscenity but condoning the far more explicit The Color Purple? Is “sexually explicit material” harmful to children or not? We find it odd that the BOE, in the last few weeks, has sent Orange out to repeatedly give these book bans her stamp of diversity approval. It’s almost like the board is self aware that it has a homophobia problem, and having Orange say “This isn’t homophobic,” with conviction will make us forget that more than half of the books they just banned are gay ones.
The board chair and members were scrambling in the days following their vote on the Directive, and communications obtained via Open Records Requests reveal that they turned to Jaillene Hunter for advice on how to manipulate the “comms” angle with the press. Hunter went on to encourage BOE members to obfuscate the details of the Directive to the community, telling parents that the titles removed were pornography, equating titles to rated X movies or Playboy Magazine. She continuously encouraged using the phrase “taxpayer funded K-12 schools” to equate adult high school seniors with their kindergarten counterparts. It’s not a stretch to ask whether she’d lobby to use Orange in the same way.
We won’t forget, Angela – you got tricked by right wing propaganda to ban a bunch of books about gay kids and kids of color. We can’t think of a better use of the “system” than that, to be honest: get your propaganda into the hands of social justice warriors, and they’ll do the work for you! But what we know for sure now, Marietta, is that there’s no point in appealing these books. The BOE is fine with lying to you, then sending out its lone member of color to be the face of the lies. They seem way too comfortable wasting taxpayer time, effort, and money.