Book banning has become a key plank of GOP politicians. The epicenter of this effort is Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ state of Florida, where the former presidential candidate has overseen the banning of hundreds of books from school and public libraries, including those by towering authors like Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut. DeSantis and his fellow Republicans, who previously decried “cancel culture,” now embrace it in a new type of McCarthyism that threatens teachers with being sued or losing their teaching certification, and librarians with possible imprisonment for the crime of expanding young minds through the beauty of the written word. How any of this is Constitutional remains a mystery to me.
In Duval County, Florida, the country’s twentieth largest school district, book banning is acutely pervasive. Along with classic novels and any text that mentions the word “gay,” three children’s books about baseball were also banned: Thank You, Jackie Robinson by Barbara Cohen and Richard Cuffari; Henry Aaron’s Dream by Matt Tavares; and Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates by Jonah Winter and Raúl Colón. When criticized for this, county officials responded by stating that “the Florida Department of Education has trained all Florida school districts to ‘err on the side of caution’ in determining if a book is developmentally appropriate for student use.”
Let’s be clear: This is a racist project. Two of the books are about baseball players who were born in the Jim Crow South, and the other is about a player born into poverty in Puerto Rico. The stories are different: One of them smashed baseball’s color line; one rose from the Negro Leagues to becoming a home run king; the other is the most iconic Latin American ballplayer in history.
The common thread is their life experiences and the obstacles they faced as Black men in the United States. Jackie Robinson challenged repeated violence on the playing field and received enough death threats to wallpaper a cottage. Because he had the temerity to challenge Babe Ruth’s home run record, Henry Aaron needed around-the-clock protection for his entire family. Roberto Clemente said he didn’t know what racism was until he visited the South. He spoke Spanish with pride while gaining the acceptance of blue-collar Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The odysseys of these men are terrific stories for young people, because the message is that you can achieve great things in life in spite of racism and white supremacy if these evils are openly challenged. This is clearly the message that Duval County officials—and Ron DeSantis—want to keep out of the hands and minds of Florida’s incredibly diverse student body. This is both a shame and a sin.
Maybe we’re lucky that DeSantis isn’t a better politician or presidential candidate. The lack of pushback from within his party against the book bans shows us they all agree that books like these, with their positive messages of ending racist discrimination, constitute a threat to the kind of country they’re trying to revive and build.
But Republicans have made a grievous error in their thinking: They can’t account for the reality that with every book they ban, they inspire more people to seek those ideas out through other means. With every effort to silence discussion about racism and other forms of oppression, Republicans are teaching students that they currently live in a society defined by the same bigotries these heroes spent their lives fighting.
Despite the efforts of these anti-democratic actors, the legacies of Jackie Robinson, Henry Aaron, and Roberto Clemente will never be forgotten. I don’t think we’ll be saying the same thing about Ron DeSantis.