Steven Harris
Campaigns to ban books in school and public libraries are on the rise across the country, along with efforts to censor what can be discussed in classrooms. In 2022, thirty-six state legislatures considered 137 bills to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities in public schools and in higher education institutions, according to a recent report by PEN America. Seven of these bills have so far become law in six states.
One example is the recent Florida law known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” championed by Governor Ron DeSantis. It prohibits public schools, colleges, and universities from providing any student or employee with “instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels [them]” to believe a list of concepts related to race, color, national origin, or sex.
The concepts are not explicitly listed in the bill, but the law is aimed at diluting or eliminating classroom conversation about topics such as “white privilege” and other related ideas that may make students “feel discomfort, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.” Such attempts at restricting speech and banning books are reminiscent of the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, led a campaign to ban books by people he considered to be communists.
In those years, my father, William S. Dix, taught English at Rice Institute (now Rice University) and became the college’s librarian. When he became chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee in 1951, he was the principal author of a statement adopted by the organization in 1953. The Freedom to Read Statement—revised slightly since then—still merits reading today. Here is a selection:
The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label “controversial” views, to distribute lists of “objectionable” books or authors, and to purge libraries.
Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad.
Totalitarian systems attempt to maintain themselves in power by the ruthless suppression of any concept that challenges the established orthodoxy. The power of a democratic system to adapt to change is vastly strengthened by the freedom of its citizens to choose widely from among conflicting opinions offered freely to them.
The United States has changed enormously since my father co-wrote those words. In our polarized society, it is an open question whether “the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad.” And today, as during the height of McCarthyism, there are new calls for censorship, book bans, and thought control.
The goal of the Stop WOKE Act, ostensibly, is to prevent indoctrination by banning texts and teaching practices some consider dogmatic. But in achieving this supposed aim, these censorship laws create their own kind of indoctrination by hiding history from students and keeping materials with opposing points of view like, for example, The New York Times’ 1619 Project out of high school and public libraries.
The 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine series and book on American history developed by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, places the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the national narrative of the United States. In a review of The 1619 Project, Adam Hochschild, who criticizes a few of the project’s original assertions, praised Matthew Desmond’s article in the book. Desmond highlights how the cotton plantation “was America’s first big business” with a monetary value of enslaved people greater than all the railroads and factories in the nation. “That fact alone, should silence anyone who claims that slavery is not central to American history,” wrote Hochschild.
The project’s writers also explain why the wide gap between Black and white household income barely changed in the last half a century. One reason: White Southern legislators insisted that New Deal programs exclude Black people from most benefits. That led to the systematic “redlining” of Black neighborhoods in the North and South, which, Hochschild noted, “meant that from 1934 to 1962, 98 percent of Federal Housing Administration-backed loans went to white households.”
A 2021 Lancet Regional Health-Americas study of redlining in Boston in the 1930s found a connection between historical redlining and present-day gun violence. In redlined areas, rates of shootings were more than eleven times greater than in areas designated green or “best” for loans. The authors explain that firearm homicide prevention often focuses on individual factors, but structural ones, such as redlining, contribute as well: “Preclusion of quality education, job ceilings, and low income wages resulting from redlining has led to significant intergenerational poverty and limited social mobility.”
If DeSantis and the Florida legislature prevent students from discussing difficult topics, they are dangerously misleading them. Learning about subjects like slavery and redlining may make people feel uncomfortable, but no one can understand American history, or the United States of today, without learning about them.
As my father wrote long ago, “[T]he suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.” This statement is more important now than ever.