School libraries continue to shrink across the nation due to book banning and mass hysteria fueled largely by citizens who have never read the books they are working to ban. Florida, in particular, removed over 4,500 books, making up over half of all removals in the nation last year.
Book Removal Update
This forced mass removal comes in response to Florida legislation banning representation of sexual misconduct and requires that school districts come up with systems for review and removal. Because if kids can’t read about it in a book that may actually help them process and protect themselves from these experiences, they’ll never encounter them, right? Or such is the misguided and ignorant thinking of many who support these bans.
These laws effectively remove books from school shelves en masse; however, critics of the regulations point out their vagueness. Many schools are performing huge sweeps of removals out of fear of accidentally breaking these new regulations.
From history to romance to children’s books, works representing LGBTQ+ causes, black history, gender identity/expression, and racism are the targets of these bans. Beyond this, the fear intentionally being instilled into teachers by government targeting has caused many to quietly remove books from their classroom’s own collections, causing wider swaths of literature to be removed out of fear of repercussions.
Contextual Concerns
When you attack basic education — the biggest tool against hate and ignorance in a country — and threaten the careers of the wildly underpaid, exploited, overworked, and deeply passionate demographic of teachers, there are sure to be devastating consequences. Not only will this put our nation on a backward treadmill regarding basic knowledge of history and culture, but threatening this vital social and historical knowledge limits today’s student’s ability to develop empathy and learn from the past. As they say, when we don’t learn from our mistakes, history will surely repeat itself. And some in our country seem — for whatever reason — intent on making sure that happens.
Besides the frightening implications of this widespread censorship of literature, there is another huge hole in the argument made by book banners. They have utterly failed to consider or work to regulate the other forms of media that children consume. Perhaps it is a lack of knowledge about the truly terrifying and graphic videos that come up on many teen and youth social media feeds. Or, the more sinister (and more likely) truth is that they know that there is a much smaller chance of being able to enforce their restrictive will on the tech giants who formulate these algorithms. Much easier to attack the vulnerable — teachers, public schools, libraries, and publishers who already have limited resources to begin with.
There is a difference between truly wishing to protect children from dangerous and harmful material and simply not wanting them to encounter content that does not align with their personal beliefs. Heaven forbid they form their own ideas as children when they are impressionable and learning about how empathy and justice operate in the world.
Often, it is not the content itself that book-banners take issue with — rather, it is the concept of the books existing. Unfortunately, they may never pinpoint the real root of their feelings for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, the majority of the time, they have not read the books that they are pushing to ban. Evidence shows that when review boards are required to read the books up for banning, they usually decide to leave the books on the shelves. This is because advocates for the ban will take a sentence from the book completely out of context and manipulate the entire story in a warped retelling that suits their agenda.
When critics engage with the material with an open mind (or even one that is not completely locked shut by preformed conceptions), it is possible and easy to see the value that comes with representing topics like sexual identity and racism. The view that representation of a problem like homophobia or sexual abuse does not equate to advocating for its existence has somehow gotten lost in the conversation. The problem with so many book banners is that they are not pushing to ban books that address violence or aggression against minority communities as harmful topics, but in some places, they wish to ban books with any mention of ideas that do not align with their opinions.
That is to say; book banners are not just urging to ban books that talk about violence against the LGBTQ+ community or immigrants or POC, but books that address their struggles in our country, and sometimes, books that mention their existence at all. When people’s opinions become so engrained with fear and hatred that they are impermeable to facts and logic, it doesn’t matter how tastefully, or mildly, or delicately you represent the experience, because people in this mindset have already cemented their opinions and warp the facts to match them, as opposed to allowing the facts to guide their opinions.
It’s difficult to have genuine conversations with extremist book banners who have closed their minds to logic and left room for only hate. Because when you refuse to acknowledge fact and reason and, I don’t know, read the text you want to have removed from shelves, what is there to say? When one side is on defense with the information and the backing, and the other is on offense with the funding, the battle is uphill, and the consequences are terrifying.
Food For Thought
At the end of the day, it’s not the book banners or their ilk who face the consequences of having these books removed from the shelves. It’s the pre-teen who’s struggling with their sexual identity, the child who immigrated to the US and has never read a bestseller with a main character who looks like them, and the Indigenous student who has their heritage wiped from the shelves. It’s the people on the fringes, who do not have the power or the funding to represent themselves and make their arguments (not to mention, they’re usually children), who suffer from these censorships.
Despite everything, it is not over for literature and free press advocates. There are many organizations working to advocate for free press and the continuation of the telling of all stories. Pen America, the American Library Association, the Freedom to Read Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Advocate, and many, many more are working to protect our freedoms and our access to knowledge.
Curious about more of the best banned books to teach your children about the world? Click here!
Click here to browse the Bookstr team’s favorite banned books!
