US culture war: why book bans are back

Books that touch on race and sexual violence are being banned in Republican-held school districts across the US in the latest battle in the country’s “culture war”.

Literature by authors including Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood is being vetoed in what The Times described as a “right-wing version of cancel culture”.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom, told Axios that never before “had this volume of challenges come in such a short time” during her 20 years with the organisation.

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Book banning

The AMA tracked the targeting of 566 books in 2019 and 273 after the pandemic hit in 2020. US classrooms have quickly “become one of the key battlegrounds in America’s culture wars”, said The Times, as “traditionalists” square up against “those with a left-wing agenda”.

Much of the debate on what should be taught in schools is linked to “critical race theory”, a school of thought that argues “racism is deeply entrenched in society”, the paper continued. But the row has recently “spread to the subject matter of some popular children’s novels”.

The books disputes have made “public schools ground zero in the culture wars”, said Axios.

In November, Virginia’s Spotsylvania County School Board ordered staff to dispose of “sexually explicit” books after a parent “raised concerns about their LGBTQ themes”, the news site reported. During a meeting to discuss the book’s removal, a school board member is said to have argued that “we should throw those books in a fire”.

The same month, the Goddard School District in Kansas reportedly demanded that “staff remove 29 books from the district’s school libraries”, including Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

In December, the Washington County School District in Utah voted to ban The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez. Both novels tackle the issue of racism and were removed after parents complained of “profanity”.

And Texas school districts “are scrambling” to review the contents of their libraries after the state’s Republican Representative Matt Krause demanded that they confirm whether any books on a list of 850 titles that he has deemed to be questionable are on their shelves.

Literary backlash

Book bans are “catching fire” in US schools, said NBC News, but black authors have argued that the “uproar isn’t about students”.

Children’s author and illustrator Jerry Craft told the broadcaster that he was “caught off guard” when schools in Texas decided to ban two of his books that tell the stories of black students who experience racism.

“Apparently I’m teaching critical race theory,” tweeted Craft, author of award-winning graphic novel New Kid, after being informed that his books had been pulled by Katy Independent School District. The ban was later rescinded.

Tiffany D. Jackson’s book Monday’s Not Coming, about missing girls of colour, was removed from schools in Virginia after parents complained about the novel’s “sexual content”, according to the Loudoun-Times Mirror.

Jackson told NBC: “It’s hurtful to go through this, to be considered such a monster, allegedly corrupting children. I had to go back and reread my own book to determine if we’re reading the same story.”

The book “is not about sex”, she said, adding: “Reading is fundamental, but context is everything, thus it’s sad to see these schools and parents caught in a game of telephone.”

According to author Juno Dawson, 62% of the works on Texas Republican’s Krause ban list – which includes Dawson’s works This Book Is Gay and Understanding Gender – deal with LGBTQ+ themes.

In an article for The Guardian, Dawson said that Krause “only wants liberal, or inclusive, books banned”.

“Few sights are more enduring, or chilling, than the photographs of Nazi youth raiding Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology in 1933 and burning the books they found there,” she wrote.

“Book burning remains synonymous with censorship, dictatorship and autocracy. I think it’s up to publishers to decide if they want their name associated with prejudice – even with authors and books I disagree with fundamentally on ideological grounds.”

The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg warned that the growing push to remove books from schools is “just one example of an aggressive new censoriousness tearing through America”.

The argument over critical race theory has expanded “into a broader push to purge school libraries of books that affront conservative sensibilities regarding race and gender”, she continued.

The “sudden mania for book banning is striking” and this “spreading moral panic demonstrates, yet again, why the Left needs the First Amendment, even if the veneration of free speech has fallen out of fashion among some progressives”.

Parental push

Many of the moves to remove books from school libraries have been triggered by complaints from parents. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told Axios that families want teachers to be more receptive to their concerns.

Pointing to books such as George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue, a memoir about a black teen’s experience of rape and incest, she argued: “Providing pornographic materials to children and then turning around and asking us why we want to ban books is insulting.”

Progressive parents have also called for the removal of titles including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, owing to the use of racist language and themes relating to “white saviourism”, Axios reported.

But the American Library Association’s Caldwell-Stone said that these efforts pale in comparison to conservative-backed bids to remove books from school shelves.

“There’s always been a steady hum of censorship, and the reasons have shifted over time,” she told the NYT’s Goldberg. But “what we’re seeing is this idea that marginalised communities, marginalised groups, don’t have a place in public school libraries”.

And the spreading support for this idea risks making school libraries “institutions that only serve the needs of a certain group of people in the community”, she warned.