The images show empty library shelves, others with the volumes of the books turned around or covers so that the titles are not visible. They are scenes from Florida schools that have been the subject of complaints from parents who consider that the works are not suitable for students. In one of them They have withdrawn 150 titles at the request of a single person. In another district they are studying a request to censor more than 3,600 in all schools in a county.
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Further
The censorship of books in schools in the United States is a known phenomenon, but it occurred in isolated cases. When a lawsuit in the 1980s reached the Supreme Court, it only affected 11 titles. Today, a spate of initiatives by Republican politicians and by citizen organizations with conservative ties are attempting to remove thousands of books from both classrooms and public libraries.
In two years, book censorship has become the political and electoral debate in one of the countries with the greatest protections for freedom of expression. Experts say the movement has a dose of political opportunism, but it has also caught on with Americans in a way that was hard to predict until recently. Thus, the leadership of the governor of Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis, has found the support of other legislators who have copied his initiative or even aspire to take it further.
This is a school library in Florida. In the United States. Free the books. pic.twitter.com/DyUPnLlLia
— Darren Rosenblum (@DarrenRosenblum) February 11, 2023
States like Kansas have added the premise that a teacher who uses any material that deals with homosexuality in the classroom can be sued. In Arizona, parents can directly sue teachers and schools if they believe the law has been broken. Missouri wants to prevent public funds from being used to buy titles that may contain “lewd” content. And in North Dakota, the Senate has passed a bill to remove titles that contain “sexually explicit” material from public libraries — including adult material — and proposes up to 30 days in prison for librarians who fail to remove them. indicated books.
The mechanism conceived by the Republicans is simple. The law allows parents to report that they find a book inappropriate because of its “obscene” or “pornographic” content. Activists denounce that, sometimes, this supposedly obscene content is a scene of a kiss between two characters of the same sex. But as soon as a title is indicated, it is mandatory to withdraw it until the school board studies whether the text is appropriate or not.
Avalanche of coordinated lawsuits
Several conservative organizations also provide instructions for reporting books, which has allowed a large number of publications to be attacked. One of them is MassResistance, classified as an “anti-LGTBQ+ hate group” by the Southern Policy Law Center, which specializes in counting these organizations. Others are Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. On their web pages they publish from a guide to understand the language ‘woke’ to how to create forms to gather comments in favor of the withdrawal of a book.
“You can create a dedicated social media account for your school and document examples of indoctrination,” the Parents Defending Education guide says. “Getting hard facts out there for your community and the world to see is a very powerful tool.” Another group, No Left Turn on Education, offers sample letters that can be sent to different educational institutions and sample petitions from other groups across the country.
“It’s a lot different when the school principal has to deal with an angry parent than it is when they have to respond to a state law that’s about to go into effect,” explains Jonathan Friedman, director of PEN America, an organization that advocates for freedom of expression. expression through literature. Its latest report has documented all the books removed from school shelves between the summer of 2021 and the spring of 2022: more than 40% had protagonists from racial minorities, another 30% had an LGTBI theme or characters and 7% spoke of transgender people.
Friedman attributes the crackdown, in part, to school libraries over the past decade filling up with titles that reflect the country’s diversity and progress. “There could be a child at school with two parents and find a book that talks about that same reality,” he says. “But when that book ends in a house where they have values based on marriage between one man and one woman, they don’t want their children to know that those people exist.”
The move from the anger of a handful of parents to the legislative offensive in recent months has surprised even the organizations that track the various attempts at censorship. “The scale is immense, it’s a wave of censorship that borders on the absurd,” says Friedman, who attributes this scale to the fact that organizations “are becoming more efficient at getting larger amounts of books removed.”
The surprising success of censorship
The experts are surprised because the Republicans, led by the governor of Florida and possible presidential candidate in 2024, Ron DeSantis, have opted for a trick that did not promise great depth among the citizens. Barely one in eight Americans believes that parents should be the ones who decide what books may be in the classroom, according to CNN data.
However, the rise of a barely-known Republican candidate in 2020 to become governor of Virginia gave conservatives several clues. The victor, Glenn Youngkin, had promised that he would ban lessons on racism in the school curriculum if he won the election, and the gamble paid off.
In just two years, other Republicans like DeSantis have banned Florida schools from teaching gender identity and sexual orientation lessons until age 11, limited lessons on racism and slavery, and institutes can no longer teach a specialized history course. African American in the US for students under 18 years of age.
“Politicians have exaggerated citizens’ fears about how schools deal with issues of race or sexuality,” explains Christopher Finan, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. But it has worked. Thanks in part to a spate of laws with deliberately confusing language that makes teachers wonder what they can and cannot say in the classroom and what books they can recommend. “They have created a problem of self-censorship, [los profesores] they avoid debates of ideas that could cause them problems”, adds Finan.
Nearly half the country follows DeSantis’ lead
According to the count of the organization PEN America, about twenty states have approved similar measures. In total there are 270 laws since last year. The attack affects classes in which minors learn to detect cases of discrimination and bullying, subjects about race, gender or any philosophy that has sparked public debates about racism, gender identity or sexuality.
It also affects the subjects where they learn the history of their own country. “Florida’s struggles to teach African-American history have turned into a battle over who controls the past,” the Miami Herald headlined last week. Millions of students run the risk, for example, of not being able to read the works of Toni Morrison, the only African-American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1993.
Yesterday we logged almost 200 challenges- about 150 of those resulted in immediate removals.
This is a picture of all the books removed from one HS library, in one day, in one District, due to the objections of one man.
This is not freedom. #FreeTheBooks pic.twitter.com/umwwY9tzh2
— Florida Freedom to Read Project (@FLFreedomRead) January 31, 2023
Nearly century-old companies like Essential Voices, which serve school libraries with titles for different age groups, have seen their collections on African-American, Asian or Hispanic children the target of new demands. Conservative America does not want these stories to enter the classroom. One of them is that of Roberto Clemente, the Puerto Rican legend of the national baseball league whose story can no longer be read in a Florida county. Meanwhile, ‘My Struggle’, by Adolf Hitler, continues to circulate freely because no one has asked that it be withdrawn.
‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, children’s comics and the work of Toni Morrison
Friedman uses the example of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, the title by Margaret Attwood that is present in numerous censorship petitions because its content mentions violations. “It has become a contemporary classic and current legislation would consider that sexual content is essential for the narrative,” says the expert.
However, the lack of precision in the language of the new laws makes it possible to accuse a title of being pornographic and get it out of schools, even temporarily. Other victims have been children’s texts such as the graphic novel ‘Gender Queer: A Memoir’ or the work ‘Maus’ by Art Spiegelman.
“It is a movement based on extreme prudishness”, explains Friedman, who assures that the movement is led by “a group that wants to impose its rules on public institutions”.
Censorship reaches the courts
The number of title restrictions passed in the past two years exceeds all previous records, according to the American Library Association’s tally. There are more than 681 title withdrawal requests that affect more than 1,650 books. Given the offensive, different organizations have reacted with lawsuits, such as that of the American Union for Civil Liberties (ACLU) against the Texas legislation and which has led to an investigation by the US Department of Education.
It would be the first time that the Government investigates the conservative offensive to ban books in schools that deal with issues of sexuality and gender identity. The lawsuit against Texas alleges that the legislation violates the prohibition of discriminating on the basis of sex, sexual orientation or gender in schools.
However, the fear of anti-censorship activists is that while politicians are talking about schools and public libraries, they are aiming to go further. Several Republican senators have requested, for example, that television programs show ads if they broadcast LGTBI content.
“We are talking about laws that want to impose new age restrictions on books and parental warnings like the ones that used to be on cigarette boxes,” laments Friedman, who fears that books will become “another regulated consumer object.” The idea of regulating the circulation of information, they lament from PEN America, can be applied in schools and children’s libraries, but also in adults, public libraries, book stores and universities. For Friedman, “once this idea has caught on, it can go in any direction.”