On February 2, an ultra pastor from Tennessee, Greg Locke, organized a bonfire near the musical city of Nashville to burn copies of the sagas Harry Potter and Twilight in a ceremony that was conveniently broadcast on Facebook and that aimed to combat the “demonic influence” of literature that reaches young people in the community. It can be said that Locke was taking advantage of the tailwind. The week before, his status had made headlines because the McMinn County School Board had unanimously agreed to withdraw Maus (1992), Art Spiegelman’s award-winning Holocaust comic, off the reading list of 13-year-olds for its profanity and depiction of a “naked female body representation,” despite the fact that the characters in the novel is cats (the Nazis) and mice (the Jews).
the war against Maus it rained on wet. A few months earlier, news had already broken of parents in another county protesting against the reading of the memoirs of Ruby Bridges, the first black girl to attend a white school in New Orleans and who starred in the iconic photo in which the six-year-old is surrounded by agents who protect her from the mob of white segregationist protesters.
In Oklahoma, Republicans had introduced a law in the Senate that gives parents the power to ban books from schools that focus on “the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sexual identity” and a long sexual etcetera “that any reasonable parent or legal guardian would prefer to know before exposing their child”. And parents could claim up to $10,000 in “damages” for each day the title in question was held after they applied.
The battle to ban books from public libraries and schools is not new (or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn they were freed in their day), but it has spread across the United States at an unprecedented rate, spurred above all by the radicalization of the right and its reaction to the mobilizations against racism or the progressive normalization of the LGBTI+ community. Sexual and racially themed content, in fact, dominate most of the conflicts. The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association (ALA) was born in 1967 and has not seen an avalanche of complaints like the current one. “We usually get between 300 and 350 reports per year, but in the last one we saw a radical increase, especially last fall, with up to four or five cases per day. Between September 1 and November 30, 330 arrived, compared to 377 in all of 2019, for example. We had never had this amount”, explains Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the entity.
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The list includes everything from protests to requests to withdraw books and materials from libraries or schools. And among those numbers is the war that a conservative mother from Virginia started against loved (1987), a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize winner for literature Toni Morrison, a campaign supported by the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, now governor. Conservatives allege the story contains scenes of crude sex and violence, including the death of a girl by her slave mother in order to spare her a life in captivity.
Also listed is the removal of a Kansas school district from the book. The Handmaid’s Taleby Margaret Atwood, or the complaints in several States for the explicit sexual content of Fun Homethe famous graphic novel by Alison Bechdel in which the author recreates with bittersweet humor the relationship with her father and the discovery of his homosexuality.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, ordered the public agency that manages the educational system in the State to “investigate any criminal activity” related to “the availability of pornography.” And, in case any bookseller or teacher has doubts about what is acceptable or not for a minor, a congressman from the same territory sent a list of 850 books to the school districts among which he appeared, according to the Texas Tribune, a couple of works by the African-American Ta-Neishi Coates or LGBT familiesby Leanne K. Currie-McGhee.
Many of these campaigns are championed by parent organizations such as No Left Turn in Education or Moms for Liberty. Tiffany Justice, a founding member of the latter organization, assures by telephone that her complaints “do not seek to ban books”, but rather to “remove from the reach of children those that are sexually explicit or obscene, in the same way that we do not have magazines of Playboy at school”. Even so, many of the complaints have to do with works that speak of sexual orientation.
Although he avoids commenting on the veto Maus in Tennessee, alleging that it was not an initiative of his entity, Justice points out: “The Holocaust can be taught very differently to a six-year-old than to a 16-year-old.” As for books on racism or the slave-owning past of the United States, this mother from Florida rejects the titles related to the so-called Critical Racial Theory, a term that comes from Law but whose meaning has been distorted in recent years and is used to refer to analyzes that identify racism as a systemic and foundational problem in the United States, not individual or specific. “A book that promotes Critical Racial Theory is not appropriate for children,” she notes. In addition, she adds: “If you are going to put on a play with a certain point of view, you should also offer the opposite to the children.”
self-censorship
Some have had to back down in the face of the stupor caused. Last year the school board of Central York, a county in Pennsylvania, banned its teachers from using hundreds of books, documentaries and articles that had to do, essentially, with racial or diversity issues in a broader sense. The blacklist included titles like I am Rosa Parksabout the heroine against racial segregation, another about a child with autism (A boy called Bat) or a documentary about James Baldwin, among others. The selection had been prepared a year ago, as a guide for teachers and students in full mobilization against racism.
The protests of the children, the authors and parents forced the organization to rectify, but this type of action, despite failing in the specific case, sows the seeds of self-censorship. Jonathan Friedman, Director of Freedom of Expression and Education at PEN America—a century-old organization focused on literature and human rights—highlights the wave of the past six months and the long-term effects on communities where coercion occurs. “One of them is that teachers do not want to continue talking about issues such as the LGBTI+ community because they know that anything they say is going to be put under scrutiny, or recommend books to students, and all of that is going to affect the kids who are in the process of developing their identity in general, especially when LGBTI+ have been historically marginalized groups”, he explains.
No left turn in Education has posted on its website a letter addressed to the United States Attorney General, Merrick Garland, about the presence of pornography available to minors in public libraries and reminds him of the range of “legal remedies” that can use regarding what they define as a crime. how good it feels to be yourself, by Theresa Thorn, is one of the examples that the text cites, alleging, not pornography, but that “it uses inappropriate concepts to deliberately introduce skepticism in minors about their gender. she also cites Two boys kissing (Two boys kissing)”, because it contains three times the word “fuck” and descriptions of the sexual act between the characters.
Not just conservative
The veto of books is an old issue in the United States, not always linked to conservatives. to kill a mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee, and Of mice and men (1937), by John Steinbeck, are some of the most questioned novels year after year for the racist insults they contain and, in the first case, also for focusing on the idea of the “white savior” of blacks.
However, the rise of conservative parent movements in schools, which also act on the way of teaching history and curricular content, has triggered the persecution of books that they consider harmful to students. All Boys Aren’t Blue (All boys ain’t blue) of the Afro-American George M. Johnson, does not miss a single box of the rejection of the right: it talks about sexual orientation, race and contains sex. gender-queerby Maia Kobabe, or The Bluest Eyeby Toni Morrison, have also become books typically unwelcome for the libraries on the right.
Critics often allege sexually explicit content, but And Tango Makes Threean illustrated story of two penguins who fall in love and have a little penguin, was also one of the most denounced books by associations, individuals, politicians or booksellers in recent years.
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