We change people through conversation, not through censorship.
Jay-Z
Book bans and the censorship of “sensitive subjects” are nothing new in the US. However, we are seeing an alarming epidemic of attacks on books that focus on race and LGBTQ+ issues.
Parents, lawmakers, conservative activists, and even school board officials around the nation are challenging books at a blistering pace. Last year, The American Library Association stated that it has received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which includes multiple books. Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of the free-speech organization PEN America, stated in an interview that “It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians.”
Last year in Oklahoma, the State Senate introduced a bill that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books on hand that focus on sex, gender identity, and sexual identity. In Georgia, a bill passed the State Senate last month that would require all school districts in the state to outline steps whereby a student’s parent or guardian can file a complaint alleging that certain reading material available to that student is “harmful to minors.” This January, there were formal requests from at least 100 school districts in several Texas cities to ban books about race and sexual orientation from libraries during the first four months of this school year. In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an eighth-grade module on the Holocaust because of swear words and nudity.
The arguments about parents’ rights to monitor books their children read are not really the issue here. Many school libraries already have guidelines in place to prevent students from checking out books that their parents disapprove of. The discomfort that parents express with books that discuss racism, sexism, and LGBTQ+ issues is not a valid justification to remove a book from library shelves.
The 1619 Project, a best-seller about slavery in America that has drawn wide support among many historians and Black leaders has been named explicitly in several proposed bills, and LGBTQ+ titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue (a young adult memoir about a Black Queer boy growing up in New Jersey) are also targeted in multiple states.
The mayor of Ridgeland, Miss., recently withheld funding from the Madison County Library System, saying he would not release the money until books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes were removed, and in Texas, Governor Abbott ordered that the state’s education agency “investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography.” The governor of South Carolina asked the state’s superintendent of education and its law enforcement division to investigate the presence of “obscene and pornographic” materials in its public schools, referring to the term “Gender Queer” as an example.
The banning of books that discuss race has a history.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, was the first book in the US to be banned on a national scale. The southern states barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda but because it aroused heated debates about slavery.
The banning of books that discuss sex also has a history.
After the Civil War, a government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the US Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of “pornography” was quite broad, and included such publications as anatomy textbooks, all publications authored by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales.
This practice was soon dubbed “comstockery,” and continued into the 20th century. However, in the 1920s, political and social shifts saw booksellers as advocates for a person’s right to read whatever he/she wanted. It wasn’t until 1933, that an influential court case, The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, ushered in a new era of the legal interpretation of the First Amendment as relating to publications and books.
Just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the works by Oscar Wilde fueled literary bans in the past due to their subjects of race and sex, in the words of Yogi Bera, it’s “deja vu all over again.”
Pulling titles that deal with subjects such as race or sex is an outright attack on such subjects and makes it harder for students, educators, and parents to discuss such issues. By ignoring our nation’s history of slavery we will be unable to move beyond the institutional racism that exists in every facet of our society. By ignoring the humanity of LGBTQ+ youth, we are laying the groundwork for increased bullying, disrespect, violence, and attacks in schools and in the workplace.
In order to solve racism and eliminate discrimination against LGBTQ+ citizens of this nation, we need to continue the conversation, not resort to comstockery and censorship.