The Growing Movement to Ban Books

In recent years, book banning has become an organized movement backed by right-wing organizations, politicians, and conservative donors. Under the guise of ‘parental rights,’ books centering on LGBTQ+ characters and people of color are being disproportionately targeted, putting both our democracy and free speech at risk.

In this episode of ‘The Cost of Extremism,' we’ll take a deep dive into the leading forces behind these book bans, the impact they have on our kids, and what we can do to protect our freedom to read.

Resources:
https://pen.org/issue/book-bans/
https://diversebooks.org/
https://www.beckyalbertalli.com/
http://www.nicstone.info/

For a transcript of this episode, please email theswppod@redwine.blue.

You can learn more about us at www.redwine.blue or follow us on social media!

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Transcript

Cost of Extremism - Season 2, Episode 2

Jill (host): Only a few years ago, book banning seemed like something you would read in a history textbook. We grew up reading books like Fahrenheit 451, which warned us about the dangers of censorship. But somewhere along the way, students' freedom to read has come under attack by right wing extremists. This prohibits our kids from fully exploring the world and its vast ideas and diverse perspectives. It's hindering their growth and critical thinking, while simultaneously telling people that their identities are shameful and unworthy of being seen in literature. So what exactly is a book ban? 

Kasey Meehan: The way we think about book ban is anytime a book that was previously available to, let's just say, a student in the case of public schools and public school libraries, anytime a student has access to a book and then that access to a book is restricted, we consider that a book ban.

Jill (host): That was Kasey Meehan, the program director for Freedom to Read at PEN America, a nonprofit that sits at the intersection of human rights and literature and defending free expression in the United States and abroad. Their program aims to oppose book bans, activate public will in opposing book bans, and raising awareness around the state of book bans.

Kasey Meehan: So really, the focus for us, the guiding light, has always been student access. And when that student access is restricted or access is diminished, or completely removed, we count that as a book ban. You know, book bans can, can be permanent, they can be, you know, long term, and it can be following a decision to formally remove and prohibit a certain book from being available in classrooms and school libraries. Book bans can also be temporary. So this could be a book that has been removed from access while undergoing a review. We would still count that as a book ban. 

Jill (host): The history of book banning spans over the generations. Over the last two centuries, book banning and censorship have persisted worldwide, often driven by changing social, political, and cultural landscapes.

In the 19th century, governments and religious institutions continued to censor materials perceived as threatening to their authority or moral standards. The 20th century witnessed significant censorship under totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, where books conflicting with state ideologies were banned or burned. Additionally, during wartime, books considered unpatriotic or detrimental to morale face censorship in various countries.

Even now in the 21st century, the reasons behind book banning overlaps with the history that many of us wrongly assumed was over. The reasons behind bans or challenges vary widely and include objections to explicit content, racial themes, LGBTQ plus representation, political viewpoints, and cultural sensitivity. Schools and libraries often become focal points for these challenges. Some communities object to specific books included in school curriculum, citing concerns about age appropriateness or conflicting with certain culture or religious beliefs. Others challenge books and libraries aiming to restrict access to materials they deemed controversial or objectionable.

Kasey Meehan: Book bans have a very long history in the United States, and we do see these episodic moments of book bans where they, you know, they surge at different points of the U. S. history. Some of the books that we see banned also have, like, their own history of being banned. I mean, Judy Blume is an incredible advocate for reading, and the freedoms to read, and many of her books that are being contemporarily banned have also, you know, were challenged and banned in the 70s and 80s. So, you know, it's interesting to see these cycles. 

Jill (host): So how prevalent is book banning today? Is it really as bad as the headlines make it seem? In short, yes. 

Kasey Meehan: We now have been, this will be our third school year tracking book bans. We started in 2021 for a few reasons. We heard from authors who were getting alerts that their books were being removed. We heard from advocacy groups in states like Texas and Florida that were saying, you know, something's going on. We're seeing and we're hearing the ways in which other districts are removing books based on certain content. And then from there, you know, we, it just kind of took off and we just started tracking and counting all these instances of book bans and could see a really clear trend the way in which books that include included LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color were being overwhelmingly targeted for removals across states, you know, across districts in the U.S. Certainly in some, you know, hotspots or surging districts and areas and states that were, you know, were and continue to be leading the way for book bans. 

Jill (host): In the 2022-23 school year, PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of books banned, an increase from 33 percent from 2021-22 school year. These book bans affected at least 1,557 unique titles, and out of those books, the most frequently banned titles are largely young adult novels featuring female, queer, and or non binary protagonists.

These book bans occurred in 153 districts and 33 states, with a shocking 40 percent of them occurring in Florida school districts. That's 1,400 recorded bans in a single state. Following Florida is Texas, Missouri, Utah, and Pennsylvania. Out of those books, over 1,400 individual authors, illustrators, and translators have been impacted in the 2022-23 school year.

Nic Stone: My initial experience with banning was in 2019. I learned from a frustrated teacher who emailed me telling me that Dear Martin was one of three books that her superintendent had ordered pulled from all of the schools in the county. I think even knowing that it was a possibility, it was still jarring. I was pretty bummed out, to speak euphemistically. During that first experience, I wound up going down to Columbia County and hosting a public event. And I basically sat on the stage for the duration of it and like cried. 

Jill (host): Nic Stone is the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and several other young adult and middle grade fiction. Her debut novel, Dear Martin, is about a Black high school student who writes letters to the late Martin Luther King Jr. after suffering a dangerous encounter with white police officers. Since its release in 2017, it has been banned in schools across the country. One Black teacher was even allegedly fired after a parent complained about him reading Dear Martin in his classroom, despite the fact that the book was already approved by school administrators.

Nic Stone isn't alone in this. A countless number of authors have similarly had their books banned due to their quote unquote inappropriate content, which is typically just a code word for content involving the experiences of marginalized identities. According to research done by PEN America, 37 percent of books banned in the last two years include characters of color and themes of race and racism. Another 36 percent include LGBTQ plus identities. Best-selling author Becky Albertalli knows what it's like to have her books banned for their queer content. While she's best known for her debut novel, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which was turned into the movie Love Simon, Becky has written numerous other young adult contemporary novels that have been banned.

Becky Albertalli: I'm one of the most widely banned authors in the state of Tennessee or something. I'm not sure what metric they use to determine that, but it's been a weird couple of years for that because, you know, there is this disconnect between why they say these books are being challenged and, or banned and why we know it's happening.

So they're being banned because they're queer. They make it so obvious, but try to claim that it's, you know, about inappropriate content and protecting kids. And, you know, it's like we're having these two different conversations that are kind of layered on top of each other. And we all know what is right there beneath the surface of what they're saying.

Jill (host): The impact of book bans on students is undeniable. The people who are challenging these books on the basis of sexuality and race are sending the message to these kids that their identities are harmful and obscene. They're repeatedly drilling the idea, not only into their heads, but into the heads of their classmates too.

Kasey Meehan: There's also a messaging piece that is quite harmful when we You know, call certain books inappropriate or when we label representation as sexually explicit or, you know, when we, when we identify books as, as harmful, again, when these books are representing images that look like oneself or one's family or one friends, you know, there's real, like, I would imagine emotional harm in that messaging too, and we hear that from students all the time of like, what does that, you know, what does it mean to be removing an experience that it's you know, I have because of its quote unquote harms.

Nic Stone: There is damage done when children in a classroom are not permitted to see themselves reflected in the books they're told that they have to read, right? Like I spent a lot of time struggling to figure out my place in the world and in society because I didn't really have an example. Narrative is what creates the world that we live in. Narrative is how we structure societies. It's how we learn how to relate to one another, right? So if you're not existing in any of the narratives, then you don't know how to place yourself. 

Becky Albertalli: There's so many layers to it because they're the stories themselves and you know, the ways in which kids who read them can feel seen or can. Understand experiences that are different from their own, but maybe similar to something a friend is going through, or just, you know, just building empathy in general. 

Jill (host): Diversity in books is invaluable, and nobody knows that better than Elleh Oh, an author and founding member of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that strives to diversify the publishing industry. Their goal is to create a world where everyone can find themselves in the pages of a book. 

Ellen Oh: We just started this campaign online. It was really when, you know, I think it was the heyday of Twitter and Tumblr where you could really gain traction. And go viral and really reach out to a very large audience. And, you know, a whole bunch of us got together and came up with a hashtag, #weneeddiversebooks, which was much better than what I could come up with. Cause I'm not a hashtag person. I was like, we need freaking diverse books goddamn it. How long has it been? How long do we wait? And that's very long for a hashtag.

We need diverse books. And, it was really about asking people to explain why we need diverse books and how not having diverse books affected people. And I think that's what was so compelling about the campaign was that you had people coming out from every part of the world, talking about how the lack of representation really affected them. 

So that's where we started in 2014. And we are almost 10 years out now. In 2012, I think the number was out of 3600 children's books published, only 7 percent were about children of color. Now we're looking at over 40%. That is an over fivefold increase. So I can objectively say that We Need Diverse Books has made a big difference. 

That's also why we are now faced with book bans. We can't even celebrate the change, you know, how much of a wonderful increase in diverse books has been published. We can't celebrate that because it's in the last two years that the, you know, book bans have taken over throughout the country.

Jill (host): Campaigns like We Need Diverse Books would have helped these authors at a young age be seen and valued. 

Nic Stone: Well, I started writing books because as a kid, I never saw, like, I am a queer African American woman. And as a kid, the one time I saw myself in a book, I was 17 and I was reading The Color Purple. But other than that, I'd never seen reflections of myself, of myself in books prior to age 13. And then once I started having kids, I really wanted to write books that would reflect experiences that they were having and also just show them being kids, doing kid things. So all of the books I write are with that in mind for the past eight or nine years or so. 

We've been hearing the phrase representation matters, and I think we toss it around, but I think what people miss about that phrase is why representation matters, like representation matters because. It's what lets us know that we're not alone, right? Like, as human beings, we literally depend on connection to survive. You cannot thrive in a world as a person without connection to other people. And reading sometimes creates those connections, especially when, like, I was like the token Black girl, right? Like, I was the Black girl in the classrooms where I was the only Black kid in the class. And having something where I saw myself reflected positively, as opposed to seeing like, Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Robinson from Kill a Mockingbird and Crooks from Of Mice and Men, like these reflections of Black people that just weren't very positive.

There's something to be said for the white boys in my class who were watching Indiana Jones and therefore felt like they could go find the Ark of the Covenant, right? Like, like seeing a person who looks like you doing amazing things. Someone that you can identify with. It makes you believe you can do amazing things. Like, I still remember seeing a picture of Mae Jemison when I was in the 5th grade. This is right before she became the first African American woman to go into space. Seeing her in her space suit, I instantly knew that I could be an astronaut. 

Ellen Oh: I really can relate to that feeling of not belonging. And I think it's cause I'm Korean American. And when I was younger, I never saw a positive representation in a book. So like, I think the first time I saw Asians in the book was The Five Chinese Brothers, and I'm not talking about a new version. I'm talking about that original old, really, really mustard yellow, really really slitted eyes version of the five Chinese brothers. Very racist. And you know, that book, when we read it in like first or second grade, I remember feeling so uncomfortable and bothered by it, but not being able to pinpoint why, right? Until later, until I realized that this book was allowing kids to kind of like, you know, tease me, to chase me around with, you know, making slanted eyes at me. In art class, the boy next to me painted my arm mustard yellow, saying I was the wrong color for a Chinaman. I mean, these like episodes of racist incidents by other kids that don't know any better, but they just happened to be exposed to a book. I mean, like I have vivid memories of that. 

And it wasn't until I was in college that I finally actually saw myself in the pages of a book and that was the Joy Luck Club. Right. And it was the first, really the first time that I felt like, oh my gosh, this… this is me. This is my family. I know they're Chinese and I'm Korean, but this is my experience. This is the immigrant experience and knowing that this book's book was a bestseller, knowing that everybody was reading this book and finally seeing what it was like to be Asian American, you know, and the immigrant experience that was life transforming, you know, and all my life I couldn't help but think… What would have happened if I had gotten a book like that when I was younger? 

Becky Albertalli: You know, it's so hard to even imagine what it would have been like to have, you know, either my own books or you know, some of these queer books written by my friends and colleagues. Like, I can't even imagine having them as a teenager. I didn't understand queerness and what that could look like and what that could mean. You know, it was something that I didn't even see for a very long time. 

And it's hard to talk about that because I realize that for, you know, if there are any Moms for Liberty hearing this they're probably like, bingo, that's the point. Like, you know, “the books turned her queer.” But you know, I didn't have the books and I still came out of this realizing I was queer. Still here writing these queer books, and didn't understand why at first, fully. It's sad, it's, it's kind of sad to think about how different it could have been even if I ended up in the exact same chair that I'm sitting in right now, just to be able to understand that about myself decades earlier. 

Jill (host): When kids see themselves in the books they read, their lives can change.

Nic Stone: Dear Martin is a bit of a gateway book for a lot of kids. I've had so many kids reach out to me in DMs on social media networks, they'll shoot me emails, like they find a way to get in touch with me just to tell me this is the first book I've ever read and now I want to read more, which is a very powerful thing, right?

My first true encounter with a kid who had read and loved Dear Martin, I got a DM on Instagram from a young man named Jabari. He told me he was 14. He was in eighth grade. Initially, he sent me a message telling me he had just started Dear Martin. I was like, “Cool, friend. Let me know when you finish.” So he reached out after he was done. He's like, “This is the best book I've ever read. I've never finished a book before. Will you please come to my school?” And so we set up with, with the, the media specialist for me to come to his school. And the stipulation was that if I came to his school, he had to be the person to interview me in front of his friends. And he was like, “Bet”. 

So I show up to his school. He looked good. He had on like a button down with a bow tie, like he was super cute, super cute kid. And I just watched him blossom. As he did this interview, and I posted it on Instagram recently because he just turned 20. But he and I are still very close, right? And he's like in college now, right? This is a kid who did not think he would go to college, and now he loves reading. 

And I tell people all the time, sometimes it's just about finding the right book. But the truth of the matter is, the people who are willing to ban books, the people who want to keep quote unquote certain books out of the hands of children, don't actually value reading.

Ellen Oh: Being part of We Need Diverse Books, I've been to schools all over the country. I meet students everywhere, in every school library, where most of them find their safe havens. You know, they'll come to me after presentations, they'll tell me how important seeing themselves in a book has been. That it wasn't just life transforming, but that it was life saving.

Because what it did was it made them aware that they're not alone. And it made them aware that representation was like the key not only for themselves, but for other people to see that they, you know, they should be happy and that they deserve having happily-ever-after stories, just like anyone else. And I'm still scared for them now, because a lot of these students are losing those safe havens.

Jill (host): By banning books, we're keeping children from experiencing different people, places, and cultures. We're hindering their ability to build empathy and narrowing their view of the world. We're telling them that it's okay to censor ideas or viewpoints just because we don't agree with them, all because one parent thinks they should have control of what other people's kids read.

And there's a financial cost, too. Here are a few examples. The Spring Branch Independent School District in Harris County, Texas, spent 30, 119 and 226 staff hours reviewing just one book, The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person, by Frederick Joseph. It was banned by the school board in January 2023. Since then, the school board voted to cut the first two stages of the book reconsideration process. That means the school board will make decisions about banning books with almost no teacher, administrator, or parent feedback. 

A top library staffer in Spotsylvania County Public Schools in Virginia estimated that a team of 11 people spent 40 hours per week last school year on just one person's challenges. A new Florida law requires all schools to digitally chronicle each book available for students in classroom libraries and make all of them searchable on local websites. Many of the schools have had to outsource this work, recording thousands of books to a third party company. Those services are costing districts between $34,000 to $135,000 annually. In Pennsylvania, the Nazareth Area School District may have to spend more than $100,000 to review 23 books because of a local Moms for Liberty group. Suffice to say, extremism is expensive. 

Now let's take a look at who's pushing these book bans. Many of these ban requests are coming from what's known as serial book challengers. In May 2023, the Washington Post analyzed over a thousand challenges. What they found was shocking, to say the least. Only eleven individuals were behind 66 percent of the book challenges. These eleven people objected to books in their districts by the dozens, sometimes close to the hundreds. Meanwhile, a poll administrated by We Believe and Ipsos found that only 7 percent of parents believe that books should be removed at the request of one parent.

But it's more than that. While these 11 people might be at the forefront of the movement, that doesn't mean it's an individual effort. The influence of parent and community led book banning advocacy groups cannot be ignored. In a September 2022 report, PEN America identified at least 50 groups pushing for book bans nationally, statewide, and locally. The three most prominent groups are Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents Rights in Education. These groups have formed hundreds of chapters across the country. Out of the 152 districts that had instances of book bans, 81 percent of them had chapters or affiliates with these national groups nearby.

Kasey Meehan: Our research points to two, we call them pressures, like two key pressures behind the movement to ban books. We look at these two pressures of, of local, very localized individuals, activists, or, or advocacy groups, coupled with increasing pressure from state legislation that is. Ultimately, you know, driving an immense amount of book, book bans across the country. 

Jill (host): And just how are these bands being accomplished? Members of these groups push for book bans through challenge forms, and at school board meetings they use provocative phrases such as “porn in schools” and “indoctrination.” They stoke fear into the public. And that type of language is strategically chosen and shared across online platforms as a way to convince other people to do the same. It's organized. 

One example is a site called BookLooks, which was created by a Moms4Liberty member from Florida. It's an online catalog of book content designed for finding objectionable material. You scroll through the countless number of books they find inappropriate, click on any one you want, then magically see a summary of concerns. Each book comes with a list of quotes that can be taken out of context and deemed improper. A lot of times, the people trying to ban books don't even read the novels to begin with. They find a catalog like this, take a quote out of context, then use that to make their point. Let's take Becky Albertalli's book, The Upside of Unrequited as an example. 

Becky Albertalli: So my second book, The Upside of Unrequited, is about a teenage girl who is basically very stressed and anxious about the fact that she hasn't had her first kiss and she has a lot of crushes on guys. There are a lot of queer secondary characters in the book, which is sort of why this one has been frequently targeted, but you know, she's kind of spiraling internally and she has like an inner monologue where, you know, she's speculating about all of these different types of experiences that it feels like everybody around her is having. And again, this girl has never been kissed. Like, I don't even think of that, like, I don't think she held hands with anybody at that point, you know, like, she is as pure as freshly fallen snow.

And then I don't know if it was like a, you know, a search function or something like that, but, you know, Moms for Liberty or whoever it was who brought this to the attention of their school board you know, found the word “orgy,” for example. And again, the context of that word was not this character or any characters participating in an orgy. If there was an orgy in this book, I'm sure it would not have been graphic, but there's no orgy to speak of. It is like a word that my character kind of offhandedly thinks about while spiraling about how other people are more experienced than she is. 

Jill (host): So I found Becky's book on the Book Look site and found a few other examples of what these parents are using as a reason to ban the book. They point out page 40 and the line, on page 171, it's the line “with Patty being bisexual.” I could spend hours going through the site and finding examples of where simply stating your sexuality is deemed reason enough to keep a book out of the hands of a whole school district. We're talking about students as old as 18 not being able to hear the word bisexual. You know what other book I found on the site? To Kill a Mockingbird, the book that almost every single one of us grew up reading in school. 

Ellen Oh: I can't even tell you how many times I'm in conversation with people who are like, “Well, you know, they're not wrong. Nobody wants porn in schools.” And, you know, and I'm just like, but there's, there's no, it's not, it's not, there's no porn in schools. I promise you, right? There's no porn in schools. 

I think there's this misinformation of people using this term, but the fear mongering. Right? To make people think that these book bans are somehow good, good for children. And we have to fight back. We have to push back on that. You know, really boil it down to what it means. What is really at stake, right? This is actually about prejudice. This is actually about bias. This is about racism. That's what's driving the book bans.

Jill (host): This is happening on the state level, too. Oftentimes, these challengers cite state laws as reasoning for a book's removal. In research done between July and December 2022, PEN America found that 31 percent of book bans were connected to state laws in Florida, Utah, and Missouri. These laws prohibit certain content in schools, specify new rules about how books need to be accessed and cataloged, and threaten punishment for teachers and librarians that provide students with material they deem explicit. 

Examples of these laws include Florida's House Bill 1557, also known as the Don't Say Gay Bill, which prohibits instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, and its sister bill, HB 7, which keeps educators from discussing certain topics related to race and racism. There are similar bills being implemented all across the country, and teachers and librarians are paying the price. They've been repeatedly threatened with having their teaching certification revoked if they violate any of these laws. 

And it's not just school libraries either. Public libraries are under attack as well. A place that is meant to serve everyone in the community, including adults. Their funding is being slashed and bomb threats are being called in on a regular basis, to the point where librarians are leaving in droves in fear for their safety.

Now this might all seem doom and gloom, but it doesn't have to be this way. There are real, tangible things that can be done to end book banning and allow our kids to keep their freedom to read. 

Ellen Oh: Well, I think there's a lot to do. And the reason I say it like that is because I think that not everybody needs to be a loud activist that is like, you know, has the bull horn and is screaming out to the crowd, right? There's so many ways that we can fight back on book bans. And I actually think one of the most important ones is we have to fight the misinformation that's out there. Secondly, we have to let people know there are many things they can do. They can do a postcard campaign. They can go, they should be going to school board meetings, library board meetings. 

They should be voting in local elections. They should run for school board, right? If they can't run, they should rally and help support a candidate who they know will be against book bans for the school board. You know, they should write their congressmen, they should write their senators, anything that they can do. And most importantly, they should come out and support their librarians and teachers. 

Nic Stone: I need people to go and vote in school board elections. I think people completely discount the power of local elections when it comes to like the children who live on your block, right? Like you have children who live in your neighborhood who are going to be impacted by who winds up on the school board. So even if you don't have children, if you care about the children in your neighborhood, go vote, go vote in your local school board elections. 

Leading these book challenges, it's like six people. Like there's so few people leading the challenges on these thousands and thousands of books. If there is one parent who can complain about a book and get it removed, I think that five parents can come together and be like, “actually, no, we don't want this pulled out of our classroom”. 

I think honestly, the biggest struggle here is that the parents like us, we don't like making waves. It's almost like, no, the people who make waves are the people who are on the negative side. But like John Lewis was very big on this concept of good trouble, make some noise, right? Like there has to be the same sort of boldness that the parents who are challenging the books are coming to the fore with parents who don't want those books pulled have to come with that same fervor. And, you know, because technically we are in a democracy and the majority does rule. 

Kasey Meehan: As more people bring awareness to what's happening, I mean, we know there's been polling data to say that, you know, most Americans continue to oppose book bans. I think even more Americans than that disapprove of government mandated book banning through state legislation. So there really is a, I don't know, like the most people really oppose what's happening. And I think the more we continue to raise awareness and bring folks into the fold around opposing book bans, you know, the stronger, that drumbeat is getting louder. 

There really are some amazing partners. Red, Wine, and Blue being, you know, one, we have NCAC, ALA, there's incredible like state advocacy groups, the Florida Freedom to Read Project, Let Utah Read in Utah, obviously, you know, there's Texas parents that are rallying and really, anywhere we see book bans, we see very localized efforts to resist book bans and to maintain the access to books in schools. You know, groups like We Need Diverse Books, Every Library, you know, PEN America, the list is so long of so many folks mobilizing and galvanizing and organizing to show up at school board meetings or to write to elected officials and to thank librarians and educators for being kind of these like frontline defenders of books.

It might get a little worse before it gets better. I feel like it's almost like when you clean up your house and it's just, like, it's going to be a bit chaotic before it gets better. Everything gets, you know, put back into pieces again. 

Jill (host): Every voice deserves to be heard, and every story deserves to be told. Join Red Wine Blue, where together, we'll defend the right to read without limitations, and keep the doors open for every narrative. Let's stand against censorship by raising awareness, supporting libraries, and taking action against restrictions. Together, we can protect the power of storytelling, and celebrate diverse literature. Join us and defend our freedom to read.