Most Challenged Books of 2021
It’s that time of year, the release of the most challenged books of 2021. The Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) of the American Library Association tracks challenges reported to it privately or that makes the news. As there is no representative sample of book challenges, this is at best a limited snapshot of censorship activity but that snapshot is still useful and illustrates the modern anxieties of conservative activists nicely. A definition is important to give context. A book challenge is any attempt to remove, restrict, or relocate a book or other material within an institution. This does not mean that the challenge was successful, though sadly a lot of schools this past year gave into censorship. In some ways, last year is a continuation of recent years in that the dominate themes of all challenges are driven by fear of LGBTQ people and stories that dare to suggest that people of color experience America differently. I’ve written a bit about prior years here and here.
Nothing in the 2021 list is remotely surprising. There are some old recurring favorites such as The Hate U Give which has long been targeted because it dares to depict that Black people have a different experience with police. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian continues to be targeted both because it suggests that indigenous folks are maybe not treated equally but also because it dares to talk about a teenage boy being interested in sex and masturbation - in the censors’s mind, teens never think about sex until they read these books. Juno Dawson’s modern classic, This Book is Gay, returns to the list because it dares to offer affirming support for queer youth including - you should gasp and clutch your pearls here - sex ed for queer kids. Daring to tell the true stories of trans youth has landed Beyond Magenta back on the list. The hatred and fear of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye frankly is amazing; one school district is fighting a lawsuit for banning it and other books (though it rescinded the ban of The Bluest Eye as I’m sure their lawyers told them it hurt the defense).
Where these are all frequent recurring guests on the list, there are a number of newcomers and it is these that really illustrate the driving force of antidiversity, pro-censorship activity of the past year. In 2020 we saw the list shift as white grievance politics took hold, especially in response to the renewed Black Lives Matter protests that year. This continues to drive a lot of censorship activity but it has merged with a thin veneer of pretext: claims that books are sexually explicit and obscene. So Maia Kobabe’s amazing Gender Queer graphic novel memoir tops the list. But the censors assure us that it is not because the book depicts a nonbinary, asexual person’s story but because it is obscene for a few panels of sexual discussion and acts. They claim that depicting these acts in drawings is beyond the pale. But then turn around and object to All Boys Aren’t Blue which has no drawings but discusses the author’s experience being molested and their first queer sexual experience. This has become the way of pretending that books are being targeted for supposedly neutral reasons of sexually explicitness and not because of dislike and hatred of the people depicted in the book. We can see this in the challenges to Lawn Boy which began when an unhinged mother showed up screaming at a school board and then tried to have the police charge school officials. The same thing happened when a mother invented an anal sex scene to attack Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness (you can see Pérez’s amazing response video here.)
Above is the OIF’s common phrases in challenges and it reflects the above. Sex has always been a ground to challenge books; in the 1970s and ‘80s Christian Right parents seemed to believe that Judy Blume was basically a pornographer for daring to suggest that teens have sex. What is different today is the organized nature of this antidiversity censorship. The Critical Race Theory panic of 2020 was merged into the classic conspiracy theory that queer folks convert kids to becoming queer (there’s also a lot of Qanon conspiracy about grooming in this) and national groups are coordinating attacks across multiple states using identical language. So groups like the ironically named Moms for Liberty or No Left Turn advise folks to attack any representation of people they don’t like but to dress it up in supposedly neutral terms such as “obscenity.” They organize through social media to share the locations of books and talking points. They never actually read the books but instead just pull a few excerpts of swearing, sex, and/or violence and pretend to be only calling for a neutral application of the law. As I’ve explained more times than I care to think of, none of these books are even close to being obscene, the argument is a joke.
But these groups don’t care because obscenity is just a convenient pretext to scare schools and public libraries into censoring their school libraries. Sadly some schools have given in and this activity is increasingly being reflected in statewide pushes to limit access to all kinds of material. PEN America compiled a broad report about educational gag orders. Florida’s recently signed “Don’t Say Gay” law is a great example of this because in broad, vague terms it seeks to prohibit any “instruction” in sexual orientation or gender identity in K-3 with a weird hanging declaration that only age appropriate material is allowed after that. People who dare to criticize this idiotic law are automatically labeled groomers on social media. LGBTQ teachers in Florida are already reporting fleeing the profession because of the harassment this law is already generating. A proposed bill in Louisiana seeks to extend the Florida model to 8th grade because these folks don’t think any mention of the existence of queer folk is age appropriate. In this world the only things schools (and libraries) should be doing is presenting straight, cisgender stories that reflect that myth that there is no racism in America. Luckily a resistance to this white- and straight-washing of America is building and the students themselves often push back the hardest. But it is sad to see this movement gain so much steam again.
