By Alaina Baumohl, Editor-in-ChiefArtwork by Eric Kim, Assistant Design Director
The Wentzville School District, a county 30 miles west of St. Louis, recently made national headlines for banning Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” supposedly due to passages containing incest and child rape. In response, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of two students. It argued that the ban violated their First Amendment right “to be free from official conduct that was intended to suppress the ideas and viewpoints expressed in the Banned Books.”
This ban is part of a larger wave of challenges over the past year as to which books belong in American classrooms. In Tennessee, one school district removed the Holocaust graphic novel “Maus” for explicit language and nudity. In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office nearly charged librarians for stocking the books “Sex is a Funny Word” and “This Book is Gay.” In Oklahoma, the State Senate received a bill which would prohibit public schools from having books which included sexual activity, sexual identity, or gender identity. Ibram X. Kendi’s award-winning “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” has been targeted by bans for not discussing racism against all people.
The American Library Association (ALA) says they have seen a significant uptick in the number of books removed from school libraries, with 330 bans filed last year, many of which include multiple books. This is the highest number of book bans or challenges since the ALA first started recording them in 1990. The problem is likely even larger than these numbers reflect: the ALA estimates that 82-97% of bans go unreported: According to the Washington Post, around 2010 a Missouri student filed Freedom of Information Act requests for every school district in the state. These requests unearthed 83 different challenges, only 12% of which the ALA had heard of.
Book bans are not new to U.S. history. One of the earliest occurred in 1650 in the British, Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. William Pynchon’s “The Meritous Price of Our Redemption” was called blasphemous for arguing that obedience, and not suffering, granted one atonement. In the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, large scale book ban efforts were led by the Moral Majority. They prompted book bans through lists of ‘objectionable’ books, many of which included sexual themes. Most frequently targeted during this time was Judy Blume’s “Forever” since it explicitly addressed teenage sexuality. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against book bans in the most significant case including libraries and the First Amendment, The Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico. More recently, in the early 2000s, the most commonly banned books were the Harry Potter series for promoting the occult or Satanism.
This wave of book bans in 2021 and 2022 is unique in scale and tactics. Book banning efforts are now taking place much more rapidly than before and are using social media and legal challenges in new ways. One strategy of these legal challenges includes criminalizing librarians for “pandering obscenity”. While these legal challenges have failed thus far, the threat of them alone may be enough for educators to censor themselves. Prior bans also tended to focus on sexual content or inappropriate language, whereas these bans target books that address race, LGBTQ identity, and sex.
The extent of these bans may be attributed to conservative grassroots organizations like Moms for Liberty, which promotes book bans as a part of parental rights. Their organization emerged as a part of conservative backlash to mask mandates in schools and curricula discussing critical race theory, discrimination, and LGBTQ+ rights. Another organized called No Left Turn “fights the radical indoctrination in K-12 education.” No Left Turn maintains a website which posts lists of books categorized under critical race theory, anti-police, or comprehensive sexuality education. A handful of the books on their site include: “A Kids Book About Racism by Jelani Memory,” “A People’s History of the U.S.” by Howard Zinn, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, and “Seeing Gender” by Iris Gottlier.
These titles are often pulled from anti-racist book lists which became popular after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent police-violence protests which spread across the U.S. The list curated by No Left Turn is often passed around in conservative circles, inspiring parents to inquire about the availability of those books in their children’s libraries and promoting bans of their own. An analysis done by St. Louis Public Radio also showed that two-thirds of the books banned in the St. Louis region were by authors of color or those who identify as LGBTQIA+.
While the frequency of these bans falls far short of a national crisis, free speech advocates say they are still cause for concern. According to “Vox,” these bans are representative of a larger movement on the right to use state and local government to control teachers and push an ideologically slanted vision of what children should learn about American history and culture. The timing of these bans seems to suggest they part of a larger conservative resistance to supposedly liberal mask and vaccine mandates as well as the increasingly mainstream nature of conversations regarding race, racism, sexuality and gender.
The hypocrisy of these conservative book banning advocates is evident. Many public schools already have mechanisms in place which allow parents to prevent their children from checking out specific genres or book titles. By banning books for a district or school as a whole in an effort to protect their child from supposed obscenities, conservative parents are infringing upon the rights of other parents and students to decide for themselves what media to consume.
Ironically, it has also been conservatives who complained about cancel culture or Facebook and other social media sites for censoring their posts as a violation of their free speech. Conservativism once stood for limiting the role of government to maintain individual freedom: Now they are using mechanisms of government to restrict ideas that they believe threaten their own.
If conservatives were truly so concerned with protecting their children from obscenity, they should not focus their efforts on school libraries, but rather onto social media and the internet. Kids nowadays are much more likely to be exposed to inappropriate content like pornography and graphic violence due to time spent online, and yet you don’t see the same energy directed towards online censorship.
These bans make evident that conservatives don’t care about protecting their children, rather they are more interested in controlling them. Books teaching about the legacy of white supremacy in America, the Black experience and living with racism, or normalizing queerness in gender and sexuality threatens the power of white, patriarchal supremacy which makes up the core of conservative ideology. By pushing these book bans and succeeding, conservatives are reassured that they still have control over which narratives get to belong in American society.
I grew up attending predominantly white institutions as a mixed-race, Chinese, Jewish girl. For my entire childhood, I never knew anybody else with a similar background to my own or saw myself represented in any popular media. I often struggled with feeling as if I belonged in any of the communities I was a part of . Banning books which share and validate the experiences of those with marginalized identities not only prohibits the education of those from a more privileged status, but further marginalizes students who are already excluded. As I’ve gotten older and witnessed the expansion of media and books to be more inclusive of kids holding marginalized identities, I have felt both sad and overjoyed: I’m sad that I never got to experience these books for myself during my younger, formative years, but thrilled that many kids growing up today will get to read them and feel validated in their identities. My experience is one that’s echoed by many minority students who also spent the majority of their schooling in predominately-white institutions or in environments without other students similar to them. We will be the first to tell you of the importance of keeping these banned book titles in schools for the purposes of affirming kids with identities like ourselves.
Book bans are intended to silence voices which were only beginning to be heard. We must play close attention to them and fight back.