Banning Books to Control History
Attempting to ban books is about fear and control. I’ve studied hundreds of challenges over decades and fear drives nearly all of them. This can come in many varieties but as Judy Blume once noted it is basically driven by a changing world that the book challengers don’t understand and thus fear. As it is Banned Books Week, it is a good time to reflect a bit on this as the 2020 most challenged books were overwhelmingly driven by the moral panic over an essentially fictitious critical race theory.
Next year’s list will almost certainly continue this trend as conservative activists target any expression of diversity in the classroom and/or libraries. One of the more extensive battles this year is ongoing in Williamson County, Tennessee, a rich white suburb of Nashville. As CNN reported, a local “Moms for Liberty” group has been actively pushing for a purge of anything they don’t like. This has included demonstrations and disruptions against minimal health protections during the pandemic because true liberty is about spreading a dangerous contagious illness. But they have also bought fully into the moral panic around diversity. You see, to such white conservatives, any instruction of the lives and history of people of color (POC), especially Black people, is illegitimate social engineering. It is an attempt to shame their precious white children and that cannot be allowed. So the Moms for Liberty have pushed to purge not only fiction that depicts such experiences of POC but also any history of it.
Two of the complaints made against Ruby Bridges books by the Moms for Liberty. The first is Ruby Bridges Goes to School by Ruby Bridges and the second is The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles.
The Moms for Liberty cataloged all of the books used by the schools in its Wit and Wisdom materials, you can see the full list here, and I have pulled just two on Ruby Bridges above. Bridges is one of the icons of desegregation. At six, Bridges desegregated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans. Faced with a white mob screaming hatred at her, Bridges was escorted to and from school by U.S. Marshals. The complaints above are bizarre because in essence they argue that the books are too accurate. And this is where fear comes in. These parents were never taught this history; the norm of history in K-12 for a long time has been a sanitized story of American exceptionalism. The push for more diversity in perspectives and accounts is done to give accuracy to this bad history. But Moms for Liberty don’t want their children learning of this. The only proper history is that America is a land of equality and the triumph of liberty and any minor deviations from that, such as slavery and institutional racism, are to be downgraded and the focus shifted to the white saviors that overcame this. The fact that the lead Mom for Liberty in the story cannot define the age at which students should learn this is telling. She knows it shouldn’t be elementary students but isn’t sure when kids are old enough. This is because censors never want it to be learned. You can see this from an Oklahoma City Community College decision to cancel a course because a student and parent complained that another professor teaching that class had the gall to teach about racism in redlining and its lingering effects on American equality. This is knowledge that simply should not be taught to anyone, it makes vulnerable white students of any age sad.
Unfortunately, this attack on history and reality is supported by the Critical Race Theory moral panic. Now CRT is a real thing. It is grounded in legal scholars and has spread to a few other disciplines and explores the ways in which legal and political institutions are shaped by racism. The CRT that is talked about in the far right eco chamber is a fabrication of white grievance politics. It pretends that this CRT, which is taught in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, is about teaching white students how they are inherently racist and are the enemy to society. While a myth, the lack of reality has not stopped the modern Republican Party that is everyday pushing closer and closer to authoritarianism grounded in white grievance. As the CNN story explains, Tennessee passed an anti-CRT law forbidding lesson plans if students “feel discomfort, guilt, or anguish.” As area expert Jeffrey Sachs notes, the law requires that the lesson plan says that people “should” feel discomfort and exempts “historical oppression.”
Regardless of the legal form of the law, its goal is to make it expensive and a hassle for schools to teach actual history or social studies. The path of least resistance will be to default to the story of American exceptionalism and triumph. This then teaches their (white) children that America is perfect and any calls for change must be from dangerous elements of society bent on destroying that perfection. It is the playbook of every anti-equality campaign whether it was the folks defending slavery, segregation, the subjugation of women, or the oppression of LGBTQ folks. I try to take solace in my common refrain that the only reason this anti-CRT nonsense is so widespread is because schools have finally started to include diverse voices, after all this kind of backlash isn’t necessary when the education was the same as I received in the 1990s. But it is hard to be optimistic when states have deployed the governmental apparatus to support this kind of mass censorship. All we can do is continue to fight the authoritarians who push this censorship and hope that truth wins out.
