Silencing the Written Word: The Battle Against Book Bannings in the USA
Ada Lambert | March 23, 2023
In the past two years, roughly 2600 books have been banned and challenged in the U.S. Conservative advocacy groups have sparked an anti-book movement across the country that has caused many children to lose access to literature that discusses sexuality, identity and race.
Formed in 1922, PEN America is an organization that advocates and defends the right to free expression in literature. Tasslyn Magnusson, a Program Consultant with Freedom to Read at PEN America, researches censorship attempts in the K-12 libraries and works with authors whose work is targeted to support them in the process.
Magnusson has experienced first-hand the massive influx of challenges across the country. Her work includes maintaining an accurate and up-to-date list of the details within book bannings such as the school districts requesting the ban, the reasoning behind it and the outcome of the challenge.
“It happened quite by accident; this is not at all what I planned to be doing,” Magnusson said. “I went to school to be a writer and children's author. After I graduated, I started to make friends with children’s authors and I followed them on Twitter and one of them was Laurie Halse Anderson. She kept posting about how something was going in October of 2021. She was like 'Works have been banned in various places, but it's feeling worse. Someone should keep track.' So I put together a Google spreadsheet and I started researching.”
Before Magnusson’s database, there were no official tracking systems in place for book bannings due to significantly fewer challenges taking place. The American Library Association (ALA) was one of the few resources to find information but was susceptible to missing cases due to its reporting system.
“It's so weird because it seems logical to me like someone should keep track of every book ban that happens in the public,” Magnusson said. “The ALA tracks book bans but they do self-reporting. So if you're a librarian, and you call them, they'll help you through, but it's a different kind of tracking.”
Rather than self-reporting, many bans and challenges go through Magnusson and another member of PEN America. With the increasing amount of content being sent their way, they have had to figure out a way to best organize and conduct their research.
“We get sent hundreds of Google links every week,” Magnusson said. “We have to walk through articles and figure out what this is, then maybe look at the school board and the district sites to see if there is evidence or is there something else that's happening? Like what are we seeing? To understand each case, I have to be able to decide ‘Is this a challenge? Is this just a parent yelling? Is this a book that's been pulled?’”
Magnusson first noticed a shift in the amount of book bannings during the early stages of the pandemic. Being a mother, she frequently attended school meetings and understood that there was a change in the atmosphere.
“During the pandemic, there were groups of parents who became angry about screens, masks and online schooling, and they began to get really activated,” Magnusson said. “Then we saw the 1619 project and people lost their minds. So then they began to go to school boards and yell, so you saw these book protests kind of rise up. It’s small, it is actually the minority groups of parents, but they are very loud, they are very well organized, and they are persistent.”
This side-effect of the pandemic has taken a toll on lawmaking as well, which has made censorship more prevalent in certain states.
“What gets tried and is successful in one state, often Florida and Texas, is then replicated across the country,” Magnusson said. “Last spring, there was the Don't Say Gay [bill] in Florida for K-3 — Florida's expanding it to K-12 this year, and then there's probably 10 separate bills across the country that mimic that bill.”
Florida has had an increasing number of book bannings since the bill was introduced in Mar. 2022. There have been multiple counties who have taken initiatives to investigate public school libraries. WWC professor, Jamie Ridenhour, has been keeping up-to-date with the book bannings but has noticed how the law has affected Florida’s ease in taking away access to certain literature.
“What's happening in Florida isn't just book banning,” Ridenhour said. “It's a lot of things, but the idea that they're making it a law so people comply with the law. There are different ways it's being interpreted in Florida, and [Duval County] is interpreting it by taking all the books off the library shelves and out of classrooms so that they can each be approved and verified by a council or a group that they've put together to clear whether these are good for kids to read or not.”
In some instances, educators are losing their jobs for not complying with the mandated investigation of all books.
“There's one teacher who decided that she would cover the bookshelves with a sheet or curtain, so that students would have to request books and so they would not just be sitting out,” Ridenhour said. “They fired her for defying the law.”
Magnusson refers to another situation happening in Florida that puts librarians in stressful positions and nearly impossible circumstances.
“There's this one county, Clay County, where the librarian was told by her district assistant superintendent, ‘Listen, we have 300 challenges coming from this parent and you just need to pick the books that you want to fight for. The rest of them need to go, we will never finish,’” Magnusson said. “So she did it for a little while. And then she talked to people, and they were like ‘you really can't, we need you to hold the line for this.’ So she refused, and her job is probably in jeopardy now.”
There are similar issues arising in North Dakota, only they are passing laws that can criminalize librarians of public libraries that display or keep sexually explicit content on their shelves.
“They are trying to expand it to public libraries and they are saying that any books that are lewd or obscene should not be on the shelves, by whatever their definition is,” Ridenhour said. “Very often, that definition means the existence of a gay character, whether or not there's any sexual content in it. To the extent if they don't remove these from public library shelves, librarians themselves can be imprisoned. Your job and your liberty is at stake if you don't do it.”
A consistent pattern in the explosion of book bans correlates to radical ideas on what children should and should not be reading. Politics has been the center stage of many arguments involving inappropriate content.
“This has always been a part of the relationship that families have with schools, you’ve always had a right to question what your kids are learning and what they're reading and to ask for alternatives — but what's changed is that now they're presenting hundreds of challenges to all books and asking them to not just be taken away for your kid, but for all the kids,” Magnusson said. “It's a political movement.”
Magnusson believes that more access to communities of like-minded people has increased the amount of public uproar and has aided the expansion of disdain towards certain novels in the curriculum.
“What has happened is the Internet has allowed, especially Facebook, these people to find each other, and to compare notes and to build lists, and to say ‘is this book on your site?” Magnusson said. “Look for this in your school, my kid found this.’ And so they can build things rapidly. Whereas before we might have had people with a more extreme viewpoint that they could not communicate outside of their smaller world, so it was handled on a one-to-one basis.”
Due to more access, there have been multiple groups formed on a local, state, and national level — some who are newer, and others who have been acting against progressive legislation for years.
“There are a couple of national groups: Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, there's a couple that have been around for many years out of the East Coast, Mass Resistance,” Magnusson said. “That's about explicitly getting rid of LGBTQ marriage and rights. And then there's another one, Utah Parents United and anti-porn movements that come out of Utah.”
Many people have been affected by this movement, including school librarians. Despite librarians striving to bring educational and fulfilling works to their shelves, parents and other community members are giving frequent demands, sometimes even lists, for the removal of content deemed inappropriate.
“It's no wonder that they sometimes just pull the books because of the pressure and the fear, because there's lots of bigoted people in this world, and many of them are in schools,” Magnusson said. “If you are talking to a person who would like to remove books from schools, they will tell you that it's pornography, it's indoctrination, it's Marxism — and all of these things are incorrect. It's more about how those books represent people.”
Most prevalently, the rise in book bans will directly impact children in the US who are struggling with feeling alienated or isolated due to the resistance against literature that explores identity, sexuality, culture and other important topics.
“We're finally reaching a good place where there actually is a fair amount of LGBTQ+ representation, there is a fair amount of diverse representation in YA novels and in middle-grade novels — and it wasn't there 10 years ago, so we've got LGBTQ+ kids who actually see themselves in a book, and that's so important,” Ridenhour said. “The direct correlation between that and the lowering of suicide rates is huge and well-documented.”
Many parents involved in anti-book speech are worried about their children being exposed to ideas that do not align with their own, as well as any content that seems too mature for a younger audience. On the other hand, many parents understand that their children are bound to stumble across new concepts and ideas.
“Your kids are going to run into things,” Magnusson said. “It's part of your job as a parent, to help them know how to experience that and what to do and that you are a safe resource to talk to if they have questions. It's not my job to tell my kids what to think, or what to do, but apparently that's really unusual.”
Despite the increasing amount of legislation around book bans, some organizations and companies are taking an active stance against censorship.
One of Asheville’s local bookstores, Malaprops Bookstore and Cafe, has been advocating for free expression for years. The center point of the store holds a banned book section that is updated as national bans occur. Justin Souther, bookstore manager, has been working with the store for four years but was told that the section has been around for nearly ten years.
We've had [a banned book section] for a long time. The founder, Emoke B'Racz, was born in Hungary when it was still under Soviet rule and her father was a poet,” Souther said. “He was actually arrested for it. Eventually, they left Hungary and came over. And then years later, as she got older, she opened the store here. And so I know censorship and the dangers of censorship was always something that was important to her.”
The banned book section is a big hit amongst customers, who are often surprised by the books they see. Many books are still taught in high schools and universities, so it comes as a shock that some states and counties have banned them.
“We want to share books with people, we want to sell books — but there's also an amount of education that we want to do as a community space,” Souther said. “It is a simple way for us to help people understand the reality of what's going on with the book bans and challenges.”
Many people are unaware of the extent to which books are being threatened in the US.
“We need to bring it to light. I think a lot of people don’t respond because there has always been a small contingent of people who challenge books,” Ridenhour said. “There's always been a banned books week and I think a lot of people on this side of the issue are complacent about it, and they hear vaguely about it and they think, ‘well, those crazy people have always been there.’ But this is different. It’s new and bigger.”
To build resistance against the banning of books, it is important to promote dialogue about it, and to take advantage of any platforms that allow for expression.
“I don't think that the majority of people understand how much this is growing,” Ridenhour said. “I feel like until the people who are pro-book are as loud as the people who are anti-book, then I think they might win by default because we're all just sleeping and not paying attention.”