What if the Banned Books Movement Wins?
A Teacher’s Perspective, After the Bans
Back in the day, before the bans, when I was still a teacher, one of my colleagues gave me a copy of Fahrenheit 451. This is when you could still get a copy! Margaret Renkl, who used to write for The New York Times, back when the mainstream media could still print what they wanted, opined, “My parents were Goldwater Republicans who sent their children to Catholic school. And yet for them the very idea of policing my reading was laughable.” We didn’t realize how good we had it. We had no idea how bad it would get…
- Bubbly kindergartener Hannah became withdrawn after a classmate called her “weirdo” when she mentioned she had two dads. Her teacher said nothing; every single book in the classroom library about families featured a mom and a dad.
- Amnesty International championed a global letter-writing campaign to free the New Little Rock Nine, educators imprisoned under Act 372 after copies of Stuart Little were found in their classrooms. Most families disagreed but did nothing after Moms for Liberty representatives condemned the story’s “confusing, unnatural family arrangements” and those who opposed the arrests as likely “groomers.” The letter-writing campaign ultimately failed.
- Enrique, a third-grade teacher, stopped introducing history units with a story about his great-grandfather’s illegal deportation in 1935 when his principal reminded him to stick to the approved curriculum and quit “being political.”
- In a groundbreaking study, Columbia Teachers College reported a five-year, double-digit decline in minority enrollments. Recent high school graduates of color cited their experiences in high school, where they saw their teachers punished for including accurate American history in their lessons.
- Kayla, a seventh-grade transgender honors student, missed 45 days of school because of daily bullying. After a small, politically connected parent group got two teachers fired for leading conversations around gender identity, others remained silent to keep their jobs.
- Five years after the bans began, hiring managers reported a perceptible rise in candidates’ intolerance of people who are different from them. Business leaders openly worried about their ability to maintain productive and professional relationships between work colleagues and clients.
- Lewis, an eighth-grade African American student athlete, fell off the honor roll and decided not to try out for the track team. His parents noted his disengagement started after four popular Black teachers were forced to resign under pressure from a small, vocal group of parents objecting to their use of archival news coverage of the long-defunct Black Lives Matter movement.
- Houston’s Langston Hughes Elementary saw a steady decline in reading performance among Hispanic and Black students. Audits found that after the passage of HB 900, since upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, hundreds of award-winning, diverse children’s books were removed from the school. Fifth graders regularly complained they hadn’t seen books with “kids like them” in them since kindergarten.
- Torn but exhausted, Joan, an elementary school librarian, left her suburban Detroit district after a faction campaigning under the slogan “Just Say No to Woke” took control of the school board. Her inclusive, school-wide book group once brought students and faculty together in discussions celebrating multiple perspectives. It had been popular, but the community’s attempts to organize for its—and her—restoration failed. Around the country, such efforts are extremely rare, and most often fail.
- Fifteen years after the book-banning movement gained momentum, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights added the USA to its watchlist, along with Russia, Iraq, and North Korea among others. The trigger was the wave of legislation in state after state that barred LGBTQ+ teachers from classrooms coupled with the epidemic level of school shootings.
Banning books is un-American, period.
Books can’t defend themselves—they need you to defend them
This is a glimpse into a possible future if we let it.
Don’t let it.
Humans for the Right to Read What You Want