Some Thoughts for Banned Books Week
Somehow Banned Books Week snuck up on me. What can I say, between the pandemic, online teaching, and the election my attention has been a mess. Banned Books Week is both a celebration of literature that has been challenged as well as an opportunity to educate the public on the question I get asked most often: why would anyone want to ban books. My students are always amazed that we once threw people in prison for selling books. But they take heart that it mostly stopped by 1970 and we live in more enlightened days. Most are a little baffled when I talk about the idea of attempting to ban a book from a school or library. Having collected thousands of pages of emails, challenge forms, news stories, litigation files, and archival materials for more than 300 book controversies over three decades now, I could wax on for a long time about all the specific arguments for removing books. But nearly all of them can be reduced to a single word: fear.
Book challengers seek to remove, relocate, or restrict books in schools and libraries because they fear not only the specific content but also what the books represent: a changing world. You can take a look at the 2019 most challenged books list above and see that eight of them were queer-inclusive. A chaste image of two boys kissing in a school play is enough to drive people to try and ban Drama. Challengers will try and dress their opposition up in claims about books being sexually explicit but when you get into their arguments, this often simply means that a book dares to depict a person who is gay or trans, oh they really hate trans representation. They want their children to be ignorant of queer people until the parent’s message that such people are gross and wrong is imbedded in their children. Queer-inclusive literature undermines that by allowing students to simply learn that queer people exist and lead their lives; reading about diverse experience builds empathy and empathy is the enemy of intolerance and hate. I recently came across a Twitter thread from someone I’ll call SD who was very angry that the Prince William County Schools would even mention diverse topics. (As of posting you could find his entire thread here).
SD is outraged that a school would encourage his 7th grade daughter to read about diverse experiences. Note he describes the school as pushing homosexuality on 7th graders but from the context it appears to be just a list of options for reading assignments and the presentation ran through them. Reading a book, to folks like this, is equivalent to perverting their moral purity. Thus, making his daughter aware of such books is an affront to SD’s power as a parent. To SD reading a book about a gay boy is “political.” Anything that depicts the experience of people who aren’t white, straight, and cisgender is inherently “political.” Later in the thread he attacks Laurie Halse Anderson’s masterpiece, Speak, about a teen girl dealing with post-rape trauma. While SD admits that it is an important topic, he wonders “why [the school] doesn’t have any books in the reading list about boys who are falsely accused of rape who are presumed guilty and have their lives destroyed.” Nothing like wanting your daughter to learn the myth that girls and women often lie about sexual assault and it’s the boys and men who we should really feel sorry for.
The thread takes an interesting turn when SD notes that a bunch of the books appear not only to be queer-inclusive [GASP] but also about “Critical Race Theory subject matter!” What exactly makes them about “Critical Race Theory”? Basically if they center Black characters and Black stories. The one that I find funniest - you have to find humor in this insanity to research it - is Leah Johnson’s You Should See Me in a Crown. This book depicts a Black queer teen living her life happily in an Indiana town. Simply depicting the life of a Black queer girl is too much for SD, though. Any story about people of color (POC) appears to be horrifying to him: “Why is the leftist school board so obsessed with making white children so aware of race? Is it so that when they are labeled racist unfairly that they keep quiet?” Challengers of diverse literature have long complained in similar themes but the addition of critical race theory is telling. It represents the success of President Trump’s attack on the concept as a means of speaking to the politics of white male grievance. SD is using Trump’s white supremacist trope to attack any story that dares to suggest that POC have a different American experience than white folks.
SD and so many others like him see a world that is changing and they are afraid of the change that sees their power diminished in even small ways. Their attacks on literature reflects their broader exclusionary, racist, nativist, and/or homophobic politics. Only stories of straight white people are not “political” and thus they are the only ones acceptable (unless they depict issues of gender based violence) to present to students.
At one level I sort of agree with SD: inclusion of diverse voices is a political choice. I hate few things more than people who try to portray things as non-political. There is no neutral position in this discussion. Either you accept SD’s demand to exclude anything from the school that introduces students to diverse experiences or you make a choice to include such voices and show students a fuller version of the human experience as it actually exists. As a person raised in the exclusionary tradition, I can say happily that inclusion is the only responsible option. It tells the truth of American society by showing them more voices than most of us were exposed to. Schools have a duty to combat the ignorance that people like SD want to enforce. Oddly, this kind of racist, homophobic diatribe against books gives me a degree of joy. It is a sign of progress. Only a few years ago SD would never have had to make this complaint because the school would never have attempted to provide a list this diverse, especially queer-inclusive titles. The school would have been far too afraid to try to use them if the books even existed. Social change doesn’t happen without pushback. Backlash is a sign of progress. Now it will be on the school to stand by its decision.
