About a month ago, a Mississippi school banned the American classic "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee from its curriculum because its racist language makes readers “uncomfortable.”

Well, the high-and-mighty school board of this random school, let me ask you this: Isn’t that the point? Isn’t racism supposed to make us uncomfortable?

According to the Washington Post article cited above, the n-word appears in Lee’s novel about fifty times. Which, when you think about its setting, Depression Era Alabama, is a tame number. Each time it is used it’s powerful, used not superfluously or in vain the way we now use the word “God” in times of extreme emotion, but to show just how vile the word is. This was not a word in Harper Lee’s regular vocabulary.

If this novel, or any novel, makes you uncomfortable, that’s fantastic!

Your discomfort, anger, or sadness shows where your beliefs lie, and where you stand on important issues it tackles, such as racism in "TKAM".

Banned books are great, especially when they’re ones banned due to not too inappropriate language or material, but because of the impact, they have on their readers. Books like "TKAM", "Lord Of The Flies", and the iconic "1984" invoke discomfort and fear in us to wake us up to the world we live in. And when they do this, we can only hope that change can be made in the world to keep these works of fiction just that, fictitious.

If you ever come across a list of banned books, do yourself a favor: print it, run to your local library or bookstore, and read as many as you can. I can promise you these books will help you grow for the better, and help make this world a better place.