{"id":356,"date":"2023-12-12T14:51:59","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T09:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/onlinepeoplesnews.com\/?p=356"},"modified":"2024-01-07T14:40:21","modified_gmt":"2024-01-07T08:55:21","slug":"the-attack-against-the-freedom-to-read-and-what-to-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onlinepeoplesnews.com\/?p=356","title":{"rendered":"The attack against the freedom to read and what to do about it"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Originally published:\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Project Censored\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0November 30, 2023<\/span> by Steve Macek|\u00a0<\/i>\u00a0(Posted\u00a0Dec 09, 2023<\/abbr>)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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During the past three years, the country has seen a dramatic increase in book bans at public and K-12 school libraries and in rightwing pro-censorship activism, usually targeting books that address race, gender identity, or sexuality.<\/p>\n

In Texas, Suzette Baker\u00a0was fired<\/span><\/a>\u00a0from her job as director of a rural public library for refusing to withdraw books about racial justice and the lives of LGBTQ people from circulation. A mob of neo-fascist Proud Boys\u00a0descended on<\/span><\/a>\u00a0a Downers Grove, Illinois, school board meeting to demand that school libraries under the district\u2019s control remove\u00a0Gender Queer<\/i>, Maia Kobabe\u2019s graphic novel that explores non-binary gender identity. In Florida, a member of Moms For Liberty, the group behind many recent book challenges, actually\u00a0reported a school librarian to the police<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for distributing a popular young adult novel the Moms for Liberty activist claimed was \u201cchild pornography.\u201d Meanwhile, in Virginia, one woman, Jennifer Peterson, has\u00a0filed challenges against some 71 books<\/span><\/a>\u00a0held by her school district\u2019s school libraries on the grounds that they contain \u201csexually explicit\u201d passages; Peterson has succeeded in getting 36 titles removed, including Toni Morrison\u2019s classic\u00a0Beloved\u00a0<\/i>and Andre Aciman\u2019s\u00a0Call Me By Your Name<\/i>. And all over the country, school librarians\u00a0have received death threats and school libraries have been shut down by bomb threats<\/span><\/a>\u00a0over books deemed objectionable by conservative fanatics.<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0PEN America\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>September 2023\u00a0report,\u00a0School Book Bans: The Mounting Pressure to Censor<\/i><\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>during the 2022-23 school year there were 3,362 reported instances of book censorship in K-12 schools impacting 1,557 different titles. As\u00a0PEN America\u00a0noted, this represents a 33 percent increase over the 2021-22 school year and a dramatic increase from the last time the organization issued a comprehensive report on school book bans in 2016. (The American Library Association, which also tracks challenges to books at public and school libraries, says that library book challenges this year have\u00a0risen to the highest level<\/span><\/a>\u00a0since the organization began tracking them more than twenty years ago.) Books that featured LGBTQ+ characters or themes related to gender identity or queer sexuality\u2014including\u00a0Fun Home, Gender Queer, All Boys Aren\u2019t Blue, And Tango Makes Three,\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0I Am Jazz<\/i>\u2014were singled out as the target of some 36 percent of the book bans from 2021-2023 investigated by PEN America. Roughly 37 percent of the challenges targeted books that \u201cdiscussed race and racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The majority of these bans have occurred in Republican-controlled states\u2014like Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas\u2014which have passed laws that restrict teaching about race, gender, and sexuality or that empower parents to challenge school library books about such topics. This, in turn, has encouraged school districts to often preemptively purge their libraries of books and other materials that might be seen as controversial. Indeed, PEN America\u00a0<\/i>reports that more than 40 percent of all book bans last year occurred in GOP-dominated Florida, with 1406 bans, followed by Texas with 625 and Missouri with 333.<\/p>\n

Florida: A Gulag for Young Minds<\/h2>\n

Because Florida is by far the worst offender against K-12 students\u2019 freedom to read, it is worth examining the legislation the state has adopted that facilitates this censorship. Although Florida governor Ron DeSantis dismisses news about book bans in his state as\u00a0\u201ca nasty hoax,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0he has signed several pieces of legislation that directly contribute to censorship in his state.<\/p>\n

In March 2022, DeSantis famously\u00a0signed HB 1557<\/span><\/a>, the Parental Rights in Education Act, popularly known as the \u201cDon\u2019t Say Gay\u201d bill, that bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender from kindergarten through third grade. The Act requires that any teaching about these topics in older grades be \u201cage appropriate\u201d and in accordance with state standards. It also specifies that any teacher found to have violated the Act will have their teaching license revoked. Confusion about whether this legislation applied to school libraries led districts across the state to\u00a0purge books<\/span><\/a>\u00a0addressing sexual orientation or gender from their collections simply as a precaution.<\/p>\n

Just one month later, DeSantis\u00a0signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act<\/span><\/a>, HB 7, which among other things bans teaching in schools about what it calls \u201cdivisive concepts\u201d\u2014principally related to race and the history of race relations in the United States\u2014that might make a student feel \u201cguilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress\u201d because of their race, gender, sex, or national origin. The law specifically bans the teaching of so-called \u201ccritical race theory.\u201d Tellingly, since HB 7 became law, one Florida school district\u00a0banned a graphic novel<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0The Little Rock Nine,<\/i>\u00a0which details a well-known episode in the civil rights movement\u2019s struggle against segregation, on the grounds that \u201cits subject matter is \u2018difficult for elementary school students to comprehend.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In July 2022, DeSantis\u00a0signed HB 1467<\/span><\/a>\u00a0into law. This legislation\u00a0requires<\/span><\/a>\u00a0every elementary school in the state to \u201cpublish on its website, in a searchable format\u2026 a list of all materials maintained in the school library media center or required as part of a school or grade-level reading list.\u201d\u00a0It orders school librarians to\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>certify that books in their collections do not \u201ccontain pornography or material deemed harmful to minors\u201d without spelling out clear standards for what exactly counts as \u201charmful to minors.\u201d It orders districts to develop a policy and a process for resolving any \u201cobjection by a parent or a resident of the county\u201d to any library material and mandates that schools report all objections to the Department of Education. The law\u00a0mandates<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that all meetings \u201c<\/span>convened for the purpose of ranking, eliminating, or selecting instructional materials for recommendation to the district school board must be noticed and open to the public,\u201d and that \u201cany committees convened for such purpose must include parents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, just this past May, DeSantis\u00a0ratified HB 1069,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0a law that makes it even easier to ban books in Florida schools. The law extends the prohibition on instruction about sexuality and gender established by HB 1557 to eighth grade. It would prevent students below the ninth grade from accessing any books through school libraries that contain \u201csexual conduct.\u201d It also modifies HB 1467\u00a0by specifying<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that \u201cparents shall have the right to read [out loud] passages from any material that is subject to an objection\u201d at a school board meeting and requires that if a school board denies someone the right to read a passage due to its indecent or inappropriate content, \u201cthe school district shall discontinue the use of the material.\u201d<\/p>\n

This recent law has many librarians, educators, and opponents of censorship particularly concerned. It could, conceivably, be used to ban from K-8 school libraries the works of William Shakespeare or Toni Morrison. The notion of \u201csexual conduct\u201d as articulated in the law is so extremely vague and broad that commonly assigned middle school books like\u00a0The Diary of Anne Frank<\/i>\u00a0could be prohibited under its auspices. HB 1069 certainly has had an oppressive impact on the Sunshine State\u2019s school librarians, forcing them to meticulously\u00a0screen<\/span><\/a>\u00a0as many as a million books for any material that might be objectionable to a parent or resident.<\/p>\n

Moms For Liberty<\/h2>\n

In Florida and elsewhere, ultraconservative \u201cparent groups,\u201d such as Moms for Liberty, have exploited these laws to force school boards and individual school administrators to remove hundreds of books that conservative censors frame as divisive or obscene. Founded in Florida in 2021 by a former school board member, Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice, and Bridget Ziegler, wife of the Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler, the organization was\u00a0originally formed to protest<\/span><\/a>\u00a0school and library mask mandates and other public health regulations affecting K-12 education during the COVID crisis. Since then, the group has turned its focus to fighting inclusive curriculum and allegedly \u201cinappropriate\u201d library materials. They\u00a0claim<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to have 285 chapters in 45 states and over 100,000 members. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Moms for Liberty an\u00a0extremist hate group<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and noted its many ties with fascist and white supremacist groups,\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>including the Proud Boys.<\/p>\n

Moms for Liberty has been training its members to bombard school boards and administrations with complaints about lengthy lists of books. Unlike in the past, when most complaints fielded by schools concerned individual titles or series (such as the\u00a0Harry Potter\u00a0<\/i>or\u00a0Twilight\u00a0<\/i>series), today conservative activists turn up at meetings and demand that lists of a hundred or more titles be expunged. In fact, according to the ALA, last year eleven states\u00a0recorded complaints<\/span><\/a>\u00a0about a hundred or more titles, up from six in 2022 and zero in 2021. The explosion of mass challenges to school library books is best understood as a direct result of the rise of Moms for Liberty and other such groups.<\/p>\n

Lawsuits, Anti-Book-Banning Laws, Book Sanctuaries, and Other Signs of Resistance<\/h2>\n

The good news is that defenders of intellectual freedom are fighting back.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year PEN America, Penguin Random House, five authors of banned books, and two parents with children affected by school book bans in Florida\u2019s Escambia County\u00a0brought a federal lawsuit<\/span><\/a>\u00a0claiming that by removing several books from school libraries\u2014including young adult books with LGBTQ characters, such as\u00a0The Perks of Being a Wallflower\u2014<\/i>the country\u2019s schools were attempting to\u00a0<\/i>\u201dprescribe an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendments.\u201d In Lake County, Florida, the authors of\u00a0And Tango Makes Three<\/i>, a children\u2019s book about two male penguins who adopt and raise a chick,\u00a0brought a suit<\/span><\/a>\u00a0contesting the county school board\u2019s ban on the book for kindergarten through third-grade students, charging that the board\u2019s actions were unconstitutional viewpoint and content discrimination.<\/p>\n

Beyond these isolated legal actions, state legislatures across the country have begun passing laws designed to make the sort of mass book challenges promoted by Moms for Liberty impossible. Illinois has\u00a0led the way<\/span><\/a>\u00a0with a law signed in June by Governor J. B. Pritzker that withholds funding for any public library that restricts or bans materials for \u201cpartisan or doctrinal\u201d reasons. It also mandates that Illinois public libraries adhere to the American Library Association\u2019s\u00a0Library Bill of Rights<\/span><\/a>, which requires that they \u201cchallenge censorship\u201d and resist the exclusion of materials because of the \u201corigin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.\u201d In September, California\u00a0followed suit<\/span><\/a>, with a law that imposes fines on schools that \u201cblock textbooks and school library books for discriminatory reasons.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Libraries and librarians are resisting the right\u2019s current clampdown on the right to read. In September 2022, the Chicago Public Library system\u00a0declared itself<\/span><\/a>\u00a0a \u201cbook sanctuary\u201d to make heavily censored books available to the public at all 81 of their branch libraries. There are now\u00a0similar sanctuary libraries<\/span><\/a>\u00a0across the country, including in \u201cred\u201d states such as Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Ohio.<\/p>\n

Educators and teachers unions have\u00a0staged mass rallies<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to protest book bans in states like Florida. Civic groups have also battled book bans in often creative ways. For instance, in the summer of 2023, progressive activist group MoveOn\u00a0launched a \u201cbanned bookmobile\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that visited states across the South and the Midwest where bans have been enacted or attempted, distributing copies of some of the most frequently challenged books. In July 2023, the Digital Public Library of America\u00a0launched<\/span><\/a>\u00a0the Banned Book Club, an app that allows users to freely access books that have been banned in their area. In November 2023, the popular singer Pink\u00a0distributed<\/span><\/a>\u00a0thousands of banned or challenged books at concerts she performed in Miami and Sunrise, Florida.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the most inspiring sign of resistance to the assault on young people\u2019s right to read has been the activism of young people themselves. Students are taking the lead in organizing against restrictions on books about race, the LGBTQ+ community, and other subjects abhorred by conservatives. In Texas, for example,\u00a0Da\u2019Taeveyon Daniels<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and other high school students led the battle against censorship of school books as part of a new organization\u00a0Students Engaged in Advancing Texas<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(SEAT). (For more on teens\u2019 role in the battle against censorship, see Da\u2019Taeveyon Daniels\u2019s Project Censored Dispatch,\u00a0The Rising Political Battle over Censorship<\/span><\/a>). Across the country, students have\u00a0formed \u201cbanned book\u201d reading groups<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in one high school after another.<\/p>\n

The efforts of groups like SEAT, the ALA, PEN America, and other champions of intellectual freedom like the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Civil Liberties Union deserve our support. The culture warriors of the right know that their toxic strain of hate-filled politics thrives on ignorance, bigotry, and cultural chauvinism. To defeat them, we should do all we can to promote critical thinking, deep cross-cultural knowledge, and tolerance that is best cultivated through the reading of exactly the sorts of books they seek to suppress.<\/p>\n

Steve Macek<\/b>\u00a0is a Professor of Communication at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and co-coordinator of Project Censored\u2019s Campus Affiliates Program.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>He is also a contributor to Project Censored\u2019s\u00a0State of the Free Press 2024<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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