Book Bans: Why We Need to Care

Hello Everyone,

Did you know that in 2022, there were over 2000 individual book bans implemented in the United States, covering over 1500 titles?

Today, I am hopping on the soapbox a bit to talk about the alarming level of book banning that is currently happening right now in the United States. We should all be angered by this, and even if we don’t live in areas where this is an issue, it is still something we can help fight.

Before I share some articles which do a much more comprehensive and well-researched job of talking about this than I can, I wanted to share a personal story about this, and share a bit about why I feel this is so important. I also want to mention that this is happening in Washington. I know many of my readers live in Washington, where there are no less than 6 organizations actively seeking to ban books throughout the state.

Story time! As the director of a daycare, one of my tasks was to purchase books for the center. In such a non-diverse area of the country (Montana and Wyoming), I felt it was important to make sure our books gave kids the sense of the larger world. I spent a lot of time researching and selecting books that were high quality, and showed a variety of gender and racial identities, and one of the books I selected was called Jacob’s New Dress, which was selected in part as a response to an issue we were seeing with the dress up corner, where some boys really wanted to wear the dresses, and were being told that it wasn’t OK.

This quickly became an issue with parents (and some teachers), and I actually had a parent (who hadn’t read the book) tell me they were not comfortable with this story being read because they didn’t want their child to be told it “was OK for boys to wear dresses” because “what if someone bullied him later in life?”. I listened, went home and vented, and took some time to think about what I wanted to do.

I ultimately reached out to families saying that we had purchased books we recognized not all families were comfortable with, and that those books were available to parents to read if they wished. I invited parents to share their concerns with me and said that if they explicitly wanted to opt out, they could contact us to discuss what that looked like. I never promised to stop reading the books, nor did I apologize for sharing that content with their children. Crickets. No one came to read the book, and a few families reached out in appreciation, but it was never brought up again.

For me, this experience was frustrating and illuminating, and I came to realize that the biggest fear for a lot of these parents is that they simply could not control their child’s environments. This isn’t necessarily an irrational fear, although it lead to irrational behavior. For me, in my small community, there was enough trust in the center that simply acknowledging that fear and giving parents a line of control was enough to keep diverse books without further conflict, but it also made me realize how easily books get omitted, even if they are not banned outright.

Even in my small school and with the trust that I had, after this experience, I had teachers who were uncomfortable with the books (or scared of parent response) and simply didn’t read them. Even I second-guessed future purchases and had to work hard to fight the urge to avoid conflict by not buying books that could be controversial. In a bigger school, without a relationship with parents, I don’t know what I would have done.

On a larger scale, I think some of the problem is that this level of trust just isn’t there with schools. Especially in an era of Covid and school shootings, parents don’t trust schools to keep their kids safe (physically and intellectually) and schools don’t trust parents to be reasonable. This eroding trust has led to a whole host of horrifying patterns, from the inability of schools to teach accurate history to a veritable wave of book bans in schools and libraries.

The sad thing is that these book bans are the tip of the iceberg. Public fights over book bans are what happen when schools and libraries take a stand and keep books in the classrooms or on the shelves, but for every school or library that refuses to remove a book despite the threat of a public fight or losing funding, there is another school or library that has quietly stopped assigning these books, stopped highlighting them on displays, or removed them completely.

This is why this matters. Right now, the diverse YA market is booming. Diverse titles are often the bestsellers, which is great for kids who can afford full price books. However, when these books are highlighted as controversial, displaying them becomes an act of defiance, which means they become less available to kids who get their books from libraries or schools. If fewer libraries and schools are buying diverse books, publishers will begin to low-ball authors and decrease marketing budgets on diverse stories because they anticipate fewer sales or stop publishing them completely. Book costs are already rising, and the pay level in the industry is laughably low, which means publishing as an industry simply cannot take financial risks. Massive book bans will have long term effects for everyone, no matter where they live.

Kelly Jensen, whose work I highlighted last week, is one of the few journalists reporting on this, and some of her pieces are linked below, along with a few others I found interesting. Some key takeaways for me are that, much like I discovered at the daycare, the level of interest in actual book bans is low when you ask individual parents or give them a chance to opt out individually. However, these book banning groups are using coded language and rhetoric to advance these, and counting on the rest of us to stay quiet. Additionally, the common misconception that kids can “just go to the library” is becoming increasingly endangered, as libraries face threats to public funding. The graphic below is a great example of what the systemic banning of books means for kids.