In mid-April, Florida rejected fifty-four math books for classroom use, claiming they made reference to critical race theory and other “prohibited topics.”
“What is novel for people to understand is that this is being organized and perpetrated at a level we’ve not seen before.”
“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” asserted Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. The rejected textbooks were not named and no examples of how they managed to run afoul of state educational standards were given.
The episode, which brought national ridicule to DeSantis and Florida’s increasingly right-wing politics, is just one of a rapidly growing number of censorship actions being taken by local and state officials across the country.
PEN America, a nonprofit that works to defend freedom of expression, reported that during a recent nine-month period there were 1,586 instances of books being banned, involving 1,145 unique titles. According to the report, these bannings took place in eighty-six school districts in twenty-six states, representing 2,899 schools with a combined enrollment of more than two million students.
“What is novel for people to understand is that this is being organized and perpetrated at a level we’ve not seen before,” Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, tells The Progressive. “It’s part of a movement adjacent to politics but very much part of an effort to gin-up outrage over books in schools in an election year.”
Whether the books deal with race, sex, or gender, Friedman notes, “the same lines or images are being used to remove those books, and [they] are being targeted across state lines.”
Right-wing censorship efforts are focusing on classic works such as Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Art Spieglman’s Maus, and Ruby Bridges’s Ruby Bridges Goes to School. Many others deal with LGBTQ+ and gender identity issues, including Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, and Justin Richardson’s And Tango Makes Three. The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project has also come under widespread critical attack because of its alleged reliance on “critical race theory,” as have books by anti-racism writers and activists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi. Even Toni Morrisson’s classic book Beloved has been pulled from the shelves.
Most distressing, according to PEN America, is that “it is not just the number of books removed that is disturbing, but the processes—or lack thereof—through which such removals are being carried out.” Two-fifths of the bans are tied to orders from state officials or elected lawmakers to investigate or remove books in schools, while nearly all (98 percent) of the 1,586 instances of banned books identified by PEN America involved departures of best practice guidelines designed to protect students’ First Amendment rights.
Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who now teaches at New York Law School, tells The Progressive that many of these actions likely violate the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that governs expression in schools and libraries.
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Ted Cruz holds up "The End of Policing" by Alex S. Vitale, which you can buy from The Progressive here: indiepublishers.shop/the-progressive-store/p/the-end-of-policing
“Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas,” the court ruled in that case, Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico. “Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
Texas, with 712 instances of book censorship, is the number-one state in which these bans have occurred, followed by Pennsylvania and Florida with 456 and 204, respectively.
Last December, Representative Matt Krause, Republican of Texas, sent every school district in the state a list of 850 books he believes should be removed from libraries for allegedly containing material that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”
Strossen sees this as evidence of a coordinated campaign: “They are armed with a playbook and say, ‘here’s what you can do to challenge decisions that are being made about the curriculum, about library books,’ ” she says. “And they get people, usually a relatively small number or percentage of the community, who are disproportionately active.”
Strossen notes that Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was one of the groups that played this role in the 1980s. Today’s book censorship campaign is being promoted by groups including Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and Parents Defending Education.
Censorship battles have long been a feature of U.S. political life.
In the late nineteenth century, Anthony Comstock’s anti-obscenity campaign culminated with the U.S. Congress adopting the 1873 Comstock Act, the federal laws that banned illicit materials distributed through the mail. In the 1910s, near the end of his life, Comstock claimed that he had destroyed 3,984,063 photographs and 160 tons of “obscene” literature. These laws would remain in force until the 1950s.
The 1920s were marked not only by the Palmer Raids and the deportation of anarchists, but also by the banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in New York, and of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry in Boston, among other titles. It also saw Catholic leaders promote state censorship bills in an effort to “clean up” Hollywood movies.
In the post-World War II era, the United States faced two perceived enemies: communism and obscenity. The U.S. Congress, both the Senate and House, led the nation’s battle against sin, sex, and subversion. Federal efforts against alleged immorality involved pocket-book pulp fiction as well as comic books, Bettie Page photos, and depictions of homosexuality. It was an era that saw schools host comic book burnings.
In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, which joined the American Family Association and Morality in Media (a.k.a. the National Center on Sexual Exploitation) in a campaign against obscenity in books and other media. Among the books banned during the 1980s were F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. In addition, the FBI initiated a program of library surveillance to check on the identities of people examining potentially controversial materials.
There were also campaigns to block exhibitions of artistic works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano (i.e. his work “Piss Christ”) as well as the theatrical screening of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.
Today’s censorship wars are part of the larger culture wars driven by white evangelical Christians. Members of this group, in large part members of the Republican activist base, are waging an apparently coordinated campaign against reproductive choice, LGBTQ+ rights, and the teaching of what is falsely labeled “critical race theory.”
“What’s key right now is engagement,” PEN America’s Friedman says, when asked what people can do to resist this censorship wave. It comes down to affirming a simple message: “We don’t believe in banning books. We believe in freedom of speech. We believe in freedom of access to information. How this is regulated in schools needs to reflect those principles.”
“This is a very simple, non-partisan message,” he adds. “It’s not a message about left or right or LBGTQ+ or race, but rather a fundamental belief that we shouldn’t be banning books in this country.”