You Don’t Solve Book Bans by Banning More Books: Book Censorship News, April 29, 2022

Want to do more if you’re in those states or are in a state not currently electing officials? Look at what laws are being considered in your state when it comes to education. The last two weeks have brought a wave of censorship related bills, including in Kentucky, Arizona, and Georgia. Write to your legislators and tell them to defend the rights of all readers.

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For more ways to take action against censorship, use this toolkit for how to fight book bans and challenges, as well as this guide to identifying fake news. Then learn how and why you may want to use FOIA to uncover book challenges.

Book Censorship News: April 29, 2022

• Connetquot School District in New York has pulled Gender Queer from shelves for review after parental complaints.
• Parents debate books and censorship in Hall County, Georgia. There’s nothing specific here, other than a complaint about Eleanor and Park, but more shows up in this piece, including complaints about Dear Martin.
• A look at the scope of books being challenged across Florida.
• In Polk County, Florida, two books were approved for the schools, including The Bluest Eye and Tricks. Several more are being reviewed.
• Medford, Oregon, schools pull the graphic novel edition of The Handmaid’s Tale from shelves.
• Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is being reviewed for suitability in Ottumwa, Iowa.
• The emails detailing what happened when a book about unicorns was challenged and removed in Buckeye Valley, Ohio, say a whole lot.
• Janell Ressler, a frequent flier at the Littlestown Area School Board meetings in Pennsylvania has challenged 35 books. Six of the books were already approved and will not be evaluated, including The Kite Runner, Monday’s Not Coming, Beloved, The Hate U Give, Looking for Alaska, and The Glass Castle.
• Here’s what is happening with a host of book challenges in Savannah, Georgia. There are several links worth checking out in this story, particularly where teens speak up for their rights to read.
• The Great Bear and two other contested books are back on shelves in Durham District Schools in Ontario, Canada.
• I’m paywalled so can’t provide more, but Lawn Boy has been challenged in Ramsey, New Jersey, area schools.
• Students in the Williamsburg-James City school district in Virginia will continue using textbooks that are more than ten years old because of parents. This is what is going to keep happening in schools across the country with so much “parental oversight” of textbooks — the real losers are the kids who continue learning from outdated text books.
• ROWVA Illinois continues to be mired in a mess and now, a teacher claims the school board did not allow her to be hired because she did not support banning The Hate U Give earlier this school year.
• A politically charged school board in Wausau, Wisconsin, has made some curriculum choices that are shrouded in both confusion and censorship. In the coming school year, the district plans to begin implementing the Wit and Wisdom curriculum, and at the April school board meeting, the presenters discussed four of the texts within the curriculum that were a source of contention elsewhere in the country. Citing Williamson County, Tennessee — remember them? — the new curriculum preemptively removed four books:

On a Personal Note

Over the last few months, on no discernible timeline, I’ve received a weird array of messages on Instagram. The messages began in February and continued this week. Each is a defense of Ann Burlingame, who I wrote about last December. An FOIA request of emails about the removal of Gender Queer from the Wake County Public Library revealed less-than-flattering (the book has been returned to shelves). messages from Burlingame.

Burlingame’s daughter is the messenger, who believes that my career grows because of stories like this. The fact of the matter is that my job is to share facts and the facts were laid out clearly in the requested emails.

One of the reasons it is impossible to understand the true breadth of quiet or silent self-censorship is because of things like this. Teachers and librarians know by making the decision to speak up about challenges or the decision to purchase potentially “contentious” material they’ll be subject to harassment like this, but in a way that puts their livelihoods on the line. It’s impossible to emphasize this — no matter how passionately anti-censorship educators may be, they feel this pressure in a way that someone like me does not. More, all correspondence of those in public government is able to be accessed via FOIA. This means email, and it means that, like I did with Burlingame’s messages, any person who wishes to access that communication has the legal right to do so. It is far safer for an educator or librarian to keep it quiet than risk their lives over a choice. It’s ethically wrong, but so, too, is the fact the American capitalist system depends upon workplace provided healthcare, among other realities.