Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

Screenshot of Vicki Baggett via Facebook/Studio 850

When meddling Vicki Baggett, an English teacher at Northview High School in Florida, began whining about the acclaimed The Perks of Being a Wallflower, little did she realise there would be a blowback that includes allegations that she’s a racist who opposes interracial marriage for biblical reasons.

Last year, in a video interview with Studio 850, Baggett explained how the novel, adapted in 2012 for the big screen, prompted her to start a campaign to remove “inappropriate” and “obscene” books—many with Black and LGBT+ affirming themes—from school libraries and classrooms.

She said that by September 2022 she’d identified 117 titles. That’s now risen to almost 150.

The publicity her campaign garnered in Florida and beyond led to some digging into her views, and this week Popular Information revealed that, while Baggett claims she is merely keeping inappropriate content away from children, her former and current students are now saying that Baggett openly promoted racist and homophobic beliefs in class. 

Interracial marriage

Peggy Sunday, who graduated from Northview in 2021, told PI that, during a 10th-grade English class, Baggett said she opposed interracial marriage.

[Baggett] said in the Bible somewhere it says that it is a sin for races to mix together and that whites are meant to be with whites and blacks are meant to be with blacks.

Another student in the same class, Stone Pressley, said that Baggett was opposed to “race mixing” because “she wanted to preserve cultures” and “didn’t want everyone to turn the same colour eventually.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that the bigot would not only like to see books banned, but would support the prohibition of interracial marriages, such as South Africa’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (no. 55 of 1949).

The Act banned marriages between “Europeans and non-Europeans,” which, in the language of the time, meant that white could not marry people of other races. It also made it a criminal offense for a marriage officer to perform an interracial marriage ceremony.

The law was designed to “protect” white political and social dominance by preventing people from blurring the line between white society and everyone else in black majority South Africa.

The law was passed to strengthen the existing Immorality Act of 1927 which prohibited, amongst other things, sexual relations between white people and people of other races.

In 1971 the apartheid regime was held up to ridicule worldwide when five white men—pillars of the community—and 14 black women were put on trial for under the Immorality Act in the village of Excelsior.

I was there to cover it for the Johannesburg Star, and was gobsmacked by the sheer number of reporters from all over the globe who converged on this dusty little dorp populated by godfearing, racist Afrikaaners.

The trial was abandoned at the very last moment, apparently due to the fact that prosecution witnesses were “reluctant to testify.”

Not bloody likely. Like all fascist regimes, the SA government hated being laughed at, and I firmly believe that the trial was halted to prevent further embarrassing coverage.

PI reporter Judd Legum also revealed that Baggett was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, which has been designated as part of the Neo-Confederate movement.

War on books intensifying in the US

In covering the Studio 850 report last year, The Los Angeles Blade pointed out that a report released by the American Library Association (ALA), covering its annual assessment of books being challenged or banned in the US.

According to the ALA, nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries and library systems across the nation involving race, gender and the LGBTQ community, were targeted by conservative groups.

In many cases banning campaigns were led by anti-LGBT+ groups like Moms for Liberty, established to fight “for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” 

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2021, resulting in more than 1,597 individual book challenges or removals.

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