Book Bans Are Hitting Closer to Home
Here's what you can do about it
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Claire Woodcock, a Boulder-based journalist and graduate student, was up late one night when she discovered something online that shocked her.
Moms For Liberty, a conservative group of self-proclaimed “parents rights” activists, had made their way into what she called her “liberal Boulder bubble.”
“I was online in the middle of the night, just not sleeping,” she said. “And I went to the Moms For Liberty website. I've seen it grow and grow and grow over the past year.”
Founded in Florida in January 2021, Moms For Liberty has spread out in local chapters across the country. In the wake of the pandemic, they protested COVID-precautions and mask mandates.
Today, they are working to get elected to school boards, and pressing for book bans at local and school libraries on books that address issues of race, gender and sexuality.
The Boulder branch of Moms For Liberty issued a press release in January 2023.
Their plan, according to the release, is to hold elected leaders “accountable,” “while also focusing on preserving crucial, founding principles of our nation: limited government, personal responsibility, and individual liberty.”
“They've also been very adamant on attending public school board meetings, seeking to get elected to public schools across the country,” Woodcock told me.
In an opinion piece for the Boulder Weekly, Woodcock described how Moms For Liberty has effectively lobbied state governments “to adopt policies that criminalize information access, particularly as it relates to LGBTQ and racially diverse histories and identities.”
“As a community that is mostly white and affluent, it’s critical for Boulder to stay vigilant,” Woodcock wrote.
Woodcock isn’t worked up about the encroachment of Moms For Liberty because she is a parent with kids in the local schools. It’s because she is a former librarian and, as a graduate student, she studies the way information is politicized.
“When you go to libraries, you have choices,” she said.
Among Moms For Liberty, “there’s a desire to eliminate choice.”
Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books “at a pace not seen in decades,” the New York Times reported recently.
“It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free-speech organization PEN America told the Times.
PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, tallied between July 2021 and June 2022, shows 2,535 instances where children’s access to books in classrooms or libraries have been restricted. The bans include books by Maya Angelou, Alison Bechdel, and Malala Yousafzai, to name only a few.
In April 2022, PEN documented the profound increase “in both the number of books banned and the intense focus on books that relate to communities of color and LGBTQ+ subjects,” since 2016.
“It’s being driven by legislation, it’s being driven by politicians aligning with one side or the other. And in the end, the librarian, teacher or educator is getting caught in the middle,” Britten Follett, the chief executive of content at Follett School Solutions, one of the country’s largest providers of books to K-12 schools, told the Times.
The strategy many conservative activists use is fairly simple. It’s a combination of poorly written policies and support from a local administrator.
Activists often pull out sections of books to make their case that the book is inappropriate for a school or local library. But there are best practices to review books that are available at libraries – it’s not like they arrive on the shelves at random.
But the PEN America report found that 98 percent of book bans tracked from July 2021 to March 2022 “had something about them that did not meet best practices.”
“One, the school district follows their policy but the policy is not really a best practice policy, or the school district has a best practice policy but they don’t follow it,” Jonathan Friedman, director of Free Expression and Education at PEN America told Vice.
Woodcock said that she’s reported on situations where “you are able to fill out a reconsideration form” – a form that anyone can fill out if they think a book is questionable for a library – “and the book just gets taken down.”
I’m on the mailing list for the “Friends of the Clinton Hill Library,” where I stop in a couple of times a month to pick up books for my 7-year-old. The minutes for a recent community meeting include discussion of the maintenance of their small pollinator garden, celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, and ongoing advocacy to restore library budget cuts. There’s an upcoming book swap and the annual artisan fair.
Libraries build communities. They are trusted sources, historically seen as largely apolitical community spaces.
One of our librarians is a tiny gray-haired woman with a short bob and big glasses, she’s typecast for the role. Another librarian is her hipster inverse, a tall, skinny man with tattoos up both arms and well-worn t-shirts. He looks generally exhausted, but comes alive when he’s reading Elephant and Piggie books to a group of preschoolers at 11 a.m. Storytime.
Moms for Liberty and other groups can succeed because libraries are vulnerable, Woodcock said. The pressure on libraries in the wake of floods of online misinformation has only continued to increase.
“These groups like to wear people down, wear librarians down,” she said.
As simple as it sounds, showing up and just using your local library makes a big difference in the power activist groups have to shape what books are available, Woodcock told me.
“Keeping an eye on things is really important,” she said. “Literally using your public library, making sure that your library card is active.”
Conservative groups like Moms For Liberty have developed their own biased online review databases, “put together by parent volunteers who have little or no professional background in education, librarianship, literacy, or child development,” writes Kelly Jensen, editor at BookRiot, wrote in a piece about comic book bans.
“They’re simply reading the book to highlight things they don’t like, slapping those passages together,” and then uploading them to the databases, which help other groups challenge the same books.
“If you’re not showing up to talk on behalf of the books and the people these books represent at your local schools and libraries, then someone from one of these groups is doing that work for you,” Jensen said.
Here’s a partial list of some of my favorite books, pulled from PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans. Tell us some of your faves, in the comments:
Young Gifted and Black: Meet 52 Black Heroes from Past and Present
Wait, What?: A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU, who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues (and not so many awards for her general feminist angst). She was raised in Utah and is based in New York City with her partner and daughter.
Allison Lichter is a journalism professor at The New School and worked for many years at New York Public Radio and at the Wall Street Journal as a producer and editor. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
Hmm so many bans seem to be anti-black, anti-gay, and anti-sex ed. It's almost like they are being organized by White Christian Nationalists who want to impose their world view on our children and schools...
Great article. The list of banned books is tremendously long, but doesn’t include “Mein Kampf”. It does include a book by Malala.