Nearly 200 Percent Surge in School Book Bans (2023-2024 School Year)

November 2, 2024 5:39 AM

"PEN America today released new documentation of public school book bans for the full 2023-2024 school year, recording 10,046 instances of books banned nationwide, a dramatic 200 percent rise over the previous school year. Since 2021, the free expression organization has counted close to 16,000 instances of book bans in public schools."

"Nineteen Minutes by bestselling author Jodi Picoult was the most commonly banned book during the last school year. It is among 19 titles banned in 50 or more school districts. The next most frequently banned titles were: Looking for Alaska by John Green; The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky; Sold by Patricia McCormick, and Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher.

“Having the most banned book in the country is not a badge of honor – it’s a call for alarm,” Picoult said. “Nineteen Minutes is banned not because it’s about a school shooting, but because of a single page that depicts a date rape and uses anatomically correct words for the human body. It is not gratuitous or salacious, and it is not – as the book banners claim – porn. In fact, hundreds of kids have told me that reading Nineteen Minutes stopped them from committing a school shooting, or showed them they were not alone in feeling isolated. My book, and the ten thousand others that have been pulled off school library shelves this year, give kids a tool to deal with an increasingly divided and difficult world. These book banners aren’t helping children. They are harming them.”"

posted by cupcakeninja (12 comments total)

The sign of a healthy society!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:14 AM on November 2 [4 favorites]

And in Utah some people are talking about trying to sue, or even criminally charge, people with Little Free Libraries that contain "pornography". Scare quotes because their definition of pornography includes more or less anything with any mention of LGBT people at all.

I live in San Antonio and the craven cowardice of the local school administrators is truly enraging to behold. The district my partner used to teach at, just outside SA proper, shut down all its libraries until every single book could be evaluated by the local stick up the ass puritans to see which needed to be discarded. And all over the supposedly "liberal" city schools have just folded without a fight when Moms for Liberty or whoever rolls in and starts demanding book bans.

Or, worse, even BEFORE anyone demands anything.

State Rep Matt Krause (R-Ft Worth) assembled a list of 850 books he wanted to be banned and the Northeast ISD, the one I live in, ordered its librarians to get rid of all of them. Just preemptively, no actual challenge was made, Moms for Liberty didn't even have to show up and make threats. All it took was one Republican with a list and NEISD decided to get ahead of the curve by cowering in abject submission and dumping all of them.

When you've got schools, in an ostensibly "liberal" place, run by people who are such eager lapdogs for totalitarianism that they volunteer to pre-emptively ban a list of books made up by a single state rep the rot is set in so deep I don't know if it can be fixed in any timeframe short of a decade or three.
posted by sotonohito at 8:38 AM on November 2 [21 favorites]

It's not enough to not ban books.

You have to fight book bans.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:15 AM on November 2 [8 favorites]

Got DAMN I hate these book-bannners.

Don't like a book? Don't read it. DONE
posted by wenestvedt at 12:02 PM on November 2 [4 favorites]

Don't like a book? Don't read it. DONE

This is a problematic position from two directions, which is why it fails to understand the goals of said book banners, as well as why there can be no neutral position on hate.

To start with, the reason why these individuals are banning books is not because they "don't like it"*, but because they fear what these books represent - the normalization of positions that run counter to their worldview. For example, if you allow things like sex, sexual assault, and rape to be discussed matter of factly, this diminishes their stigma, and in turn the ability to use shame and fear over sex - which in turn weakens the mechanisms of control they rely on. Thus the ban - to retain their power, wrapped up in "think of the children" rhetoric. Saying "don't like it, don't read it" is meaningless, because it fails to address the actual issue.

Which leads to the second way that the sentiment is problematic - it's another argument for "words are fundamentally meaningless", which as we continue to see is very much not true. In prior threads on social media, I've referred to this as "pulling the blinds on the toxic waste leak" - things like bigotry and hate don't stop causing harm because we personally avert our eyes, and pretending that we can stop those harms by aversion just serves to enable them.

* I've come to the belief that when one finds themselves reaching for "X you don't like/don't agree with/find offensive" (or some other variant of the sentiment), it's a sign to pause and ask oneself "Am I saying this because the actual issues don't matter, or am I looking to elide over the issue because if I get into the actual reason for the conflict, I might not like what side I'm actually defending?"
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:10 PM on November 2 [11 favorites]

The book bannings are not because of books being counter to a worldview but because the goal of the conservative think tanks is to waste public resources and time. Anything that degrades confidence in public institutions is a win for them. The creeping fascism is just a means to an end.
posted by kzin602 at 2:44 PM on November 2 [3 favorites]

kzin602: the fascism is the point for many of them but it’s also not a single binary answer. They’re motivated by fascism AND to defame public institutions AND to scare low-information voters into voting for Republicans who act against their interests AND to boost sales for various grifts (e.g. all of the “Christian” media which would otherwise fail in the marketplace, spyware, ads/subscriptions/affiliate sales for the people talking about this constantly, etc.).

You can find individuals for whom any of those things is the top priority so trying to pick a top one is like trying to identify the snowflake which caused an avalanche, or saying whether people are MeFites for the eclecticism, the pedantry, or the humor.
posted by adamsc at 3:00 PM on November 2 [3 favorites]

Don't like a book? Don't read it. DONE

One thing you must always remember: Conservatives have NEVER actually read the books they ban.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:51 PM on November 2 [7 favorites]

Thanks, everyone. I am on the board of trustees of a library, and well aware of the subtleties. But my frustration often boils over, as above.

We have't had the assholes from Texas attending Zoom meetings, as some libraries just over the border in Mass. did in 2023, but every single month we're bracing for self-righteous bluestockings to crash our Public Comment period.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:28 PM on November 2 [3 favorites]

Don't like a book? Don't read it. DONE

It's not about whether they individually like a book. It's about them being afraid that kids (their kids, or other kids) will read it and discover they DO like it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:43 AM on November 3

Is it just me or is the link going to a domain that no longer exists? I wonder if there was some sort of blowback after this, or if it's just a coincidence that that's when their domain expired.

Here's a full-text copy of the press release hosted at the School Library Journal.
posted by Ann Telope at 5:56 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting that. The entire PEN America website is gone, and it's the start of the month, so... most likely there was a billing or communication issue, and PEN America's going to have a new URL soon.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:06 AM on November 3