By Madeleine Higgins
In recent years, there has been a significant, alarming uptick in book bans in school libraries across the United States. The American Library Association commented in a 2022 press release that this year, there were 1,269 demands to censor library books, a near-double from 2021 and the highest number ever recorded by the ALA.
While people have been banning books in classrooms for content deemed inappropriate for a long time, the latest censorship trends are different because of who is behind the bans and why certain books are targeted.
A report from PEN America, an organization dedicated to defending free speech, broke down the subject matter of banned content. The reasons school boards give for banning books like All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir centered on growing up Black and queer, and The Hate U Give, a story of a Black teen girl witnessing a white policeman kill her friend, are typically not for the messaging of their stories, but for “sexually explicit content” and “inappropriate language”. However, the numbers are staggering—41% of banned books contain LGBTQ+ themes and protagonists, and 40% have prominent characters of color.
Hidden in the issue of banned books are the contradicting rights of a parent to control their child’s education and the rights of all children to their education. ‘If one parent decides a book isn’t appropriate for their child, why should other children at the school be deprived?’ is an argument of many anti-censorship advocates.
This brings us to the who of current censorship. Proponents of censorship tend to be conservative-leaning parents-rights groups who want the right to review and veto what their children are being exposed to. “No Left Turn in Education” is one such group that condemns books used to spread harmful, “racist” ideologies to their students. A member of censorship group “Moms for Liberty” stated that the increased parental concern is due to the at-home schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic, when parents had an unprecedented up-close look at what their children were being taught.
Generally, it is within the rights of parents to be involved in conversations about curriculum. However, politicians have begun to interfere, complicating the issue. Matt Krause, a Texas legislator, produced a list of books that he argued were harmful to children due to content related to race or sex. A Floridian county official ultimately overturned the decision to approve All Boys Aren’t Blue for school libraries. Other Republican officials have harnessed the energy behind school censorship to their benefit in their political strategy.
The endgame of this conflict is impossible to know, as is whether or not we’ve reached the peak of such bans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60261660
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-05-15/15-most-banned-books-2022-2023
https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/
https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-bans-2022
So relevant!