The assigned films include “Twelve Years a Slave” and “Lincoln”; the books include The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bluest Eye, To Kill a Mockingbird and Native Son. After last year’s presidential election, there was a spike in hate crimes nationwide, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. There’s been a 42 percent increase in anti-Muslim groups since 2014, and a 14 percent increase in the total number of hate groups since the same year. Due to these increases, the American Library Association has started tracking hate crimes in libraries, including those situated in schools. Studies do show that people who read books are more empathetic, but whether that’s causation or merely correlation is tough to control for.

Source: Huffington Post February 07, 2017 21:30 UTC