The larger purpose of book bans

This is a good, comprehensive reporting about the impact of a book-banning campaign led by reactionary fanatics in Florida.

What it’s like to teach in this kind of jurisdiction:

In January, I was told to clear out my classroom library. I was supposed to box up the nearly 500 books I’d spent 15 years collecting, take them away and look through every single one to figure out if it might be a problem. For some reason.

I’m a fourth-grade teacher. I teach English language arts. I know my subject, I know my books. There’s nothing bad in my books. There’s no spookiness or inappropriateness in my classroom library.

So I said no. I’m not doing that. I’m not going to rifle through 500 books to find the ones someone might have trouble with. These are all books that, as a trained educator, I have chosen. I’m not going to take time away from connecting with students and parents, or writing up my lesson plans, to box up books because of someone’s irrational fear of — what? I’m not sure.

Other teachers said the same thing. So the district went back to the drawing board.

Instead of taking away our books, they’re making media specialists catalogue every single book in every single teacher’s classroom library. Instead of working with children, our media specialists are inside classrooms looking at books for hours and hours and hours. And if they find a book that isn’t in our regular library, it has to go.

They’re also entering the books into an online database. So parents can search the books that are available and challenge them if they don’t like what they find. Actually, it doesn’t have to be a parent. It could be anyone. It could be my next-door neighbor.

And even though I got to keep my books in my classroom, I can’t teach them without permission anymore. I can’t teach any bookthat isn’t in the district curriculum without permission.

And here’s testimony from a student:

My friends and I like to hang out in the library before school. But this year, for a long time they wouldn’t let us into the library. They said it was closed: under construction. Then when it finally opened, we came back in and it wasn’t a library anymore.

All the shelves were covered in black paper.There were no books. There was nobody reading. There was nobody checking things out. It wasn’t a library. It was just a room.

Initially, I was confused. Then I got angry. I found out why the books were covered up. It’s because of all these new laws and school rules that happened because some people were really upset the library had books about LGBTQ people — books about people like me.

I was raised very religious. The kind of Christianity that says you go to hell if you’re gay. I was taught that women belong in the kitchen, wearing dresses. The man works. The man wears a suit.

But I grew out of that. I did my own reading online. I made friends who were gay. I realized gay people aren’t possessed by demons. They’re just people. I’m 17 now, and I’m pansexual, which means I like anybody. I’m also transgender and nonbinary, because I don’t identify with male or female. I’m just somewhere in the middle where it really doesn’t matter. You just kind of do you.

I’m never going to understand the argument that having gay couples in children’s books is not age appropriate. I mean, straight couples are literally everywhere.

It doesn’t make sense to say “And Tango Makes Three” is age inappropriate. It’s penguins. It’s wholesome. It’s a childish way of introducing, you know, that there’s not just women and men that like each other — sometimes there are boys that like each other.

Nobody thinks, when they walk into school, “I really hope I don’t read a book about a gay couple today.” If anything, every now and then I’ll have the worry, “What if today’s the day that somebody shoots up the school?” It’s pitiful that people are deciding to focus on something like books instead of a real problem like guns.

But it’s not just books. It’s more than that. They’re trying to make it seem inappropriate or unnatural just for gay people to exist. It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me. Like I should be different.

It reminds me of the bullying that started in middle school. The name-calling on the bus. They would play a game called “hang the f-slur.” They took the seat belt and threw it around my neck and pulled it. Really hard.

If they keep restricting books about gay people and Black people, then there will only be straight White people everywhere. Anything else will be weird.

And I know what’s going to happen. More kids are going to get bullied. Kids like me.

The fact that the student was able to do reading online might tempt one to say that these campaigns are ultimately futile, but that would be wrong. First of all, sending the message that bullying and cruelty directed at queer kids is justified is the whole point. And second, as Laura Miller points out the whole idea is to discredit public education entirely:

As for the conservative advocacy groups behind the book ban movement, they can’t lose. That’s because their goal isn’t to protect kids but to bring about the (highly profitable) privatization of American education. To that end, they aim to discredit public schools as a tool of liberal “indoctrination” and to encourage the harassment of public servants, driving them out of their jobs so that they can be replaced by compliant conservatives. This they can accomplish even if all their book bans (which the majority of American oppose) are overturned. As disturbing as book bans are, they’re just one step in a larger agenda. If that agenda succeeds, the same people campaigning to keep Gender Queer out of their library will someday wonder why it is they don’t have a library at all.

There are a lot of stories about “brain drains” from all levels of education in states like Florida. It’s a useful phenomenon to document, but I think some of them miss the fact that to the people responsible they’re a feature, not a bug.