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.
In Texas, Suzette Bakerwas firedfrom 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 Boysdescended ona Downers Grove, Illinois, school board meeting to demand that school libraries under the district’s control removeGender Queer, Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel that explores non-binary gender identity. In Florida, a member of Moms For Liberty, the group behind many recent book challenges, actuallyreported a school librarian to the policefor distributing a popular young adult novel the Moms for Liberty activist claimed was “child pornography.” Meanwhile, in Virginia, one woman, Jennifer Peterson, hasfiled challenges against some 71 booksheld by her school district’s school libraries on the grounds that they contain “sexually explicit” passages; Peterson has succeeded in getting 36 titles removed, including Toni Morrison’s classicBelovedand Andre Aciman’sCall Me By Your Name. And all over the country, school librarianshave received death threats and school libraries have been shut down by bomb threatsover books deemed objectionable by conservative fanatics.
According to PEN America’sSeptember 2023 report,School Book Bans: The Mounting Pressure to Censor,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 PEN America noted, 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 haverisen to the highest levelsince the organization began tracking them more than twenty years ago.) Books that featured LGBTQ+ characters or themes related to gender identity or queer sexuality—includingFun Home, Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, And Tango Makes Three,andI Am Jazz—were 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 “discussed race and racism.”
The majority of these bans have occurred in Republican-controlled states—like Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas—which 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 Americareports 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.
Read more at: https://www.projectcensored.org/the-attack-against-the-freedom/