In 2020, then president Donald Trump banned federal employees from training that discusses critical race theory or “white privilege”, calling it propaganda.īy last year, many other states were following his lead. “The problem is, the people making these objections almost never actually read the book or put it in any kind of context.”Įx-president Donald Trump speaking at a rally in Texas. “In the minds of objectors, if they didn’t learn it 30 years ago, or 20 years ago, then it’s not real and it must therefore be an attempt to indoctrinate children,” says Price. This time, says Price, censorship is often centred on narratives of race and racism in America and the representation of LGBTQI people, with social media being used to fuel and amplify complaints against certain titles. It fascinated teenagers but angered many of their parents. In the 1970s, the Christian Right tried to ban books by Judy Blume, the American author who wrote about taboo subjects like periods and sex. “That is the underlying tension for most book challengers – it just depends on what makes them afraid at any given time,” he says. Credit: APĪsked by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald what’s behind the trend, Price, who runs the blog Adventures in Censorship, says it’s fear. Ridgeland, Mississippi’s mayor has withheld funds from his city’s library because LGBTQI-genre books similar to these are on the shelves of the city’s library.
“Is book censorship increasing? The answer sure seems to be yes,” says Richard Price, an associate professor of political science at Weber State University. Sometimes it draws on the anger over broader issues such as critical race theory, which seeks to study how race and racism have impacted social structures in America. The rise of book banning isn’t just in schools – it’s also pushing out into state legislatures and political battlegrounds. That compares to 156 unique cases reported to the office in 2020, when schools and libraries were largely closed due to the pandemic, and 377 unique cases for the entire year of 2019. Its Office for Intellectual Freedom received 330 unique reports of book challenges alone between September 1 and November 30 last year. While book censorship is not a new phenomenon, figures from the American Libraries Association provide a telling snapshot of the growing trend. Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison has drawn fire from a parent in Texas. The clip was posted to social media and within days parents in other states also began objecting to the book, attending school board hearings and producing social media videos reading the same excerpts.
Standing at the lectern and using placards with excerpts from the book, the woman read several graphic passages in which a young adult reflects on the sexual encounters he had with another boy when they were in fourth grade. In Oklahoma, a state senator recently proposed legislation that would enable parents to challenge books in public schools and allow them to collect a $10,000 bounty for each day a challenged book remains on library shelves.Īnd in Leander, Texas, an angry mother attended a hearing in September to challenge the book Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, which her son had found at the Leander High School Library. In Tennessee, the conservative advocacy group Moms for Liberty is trying to remove the children’s book Seahorse, the Shyest Fish in the Sea because it has images of seahorses hugging, which the group finds too sexually suggestive. All around America, parents, politicians and school officials are challenging books at a rate that experts and librarians say is unprecedented. I think we should throw those books in the fire.” “I guess we live in a world now that our public schools would rather have kids read about gay pornography than Christ. “It’s sickening,” Abuismail said, demanding that the books in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County be audited, removed and in some cases, burnt. Spotsylvania County School Board member Rabih Abuismail is calling for books to be banned.
One of the central characters is an orphan, fleeing from his abusive “owner”, who is a producer of pornographic films. Then there was the main subject of disdain: 33 Snowfish, a book about homeless teens trying to escape from the sexual abuse, drugs and prostitution of their pasts. One told the story of a gay private school student trying to keep his sexuality hidden from his conservative Nigerian parents another featured a blossoming attraction involving a 17-year-old adolescent and the older male guest at his parent’s summer guest house. For most of the evening, board members had been listening intently as Virginia parents Christina and Robert Burris informed their meeting about the “shocking” books they’d found at their daughter’s high school library. School board official Rabih Abuismail was livid. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size
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