2021 swept in an 'unprecedented campaign to remove books' from libraries

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It’s not your imagination. In 2021, attempts to ban books reached their highest level since the American Library Association started tracking the issue 20 years ago, with 729 challenges to 1,597 books. The books under attack were overwhelmingly ones by or about Black or LGBTQ people, which matters.

“What we’re seeing right now is an unprecedented campaign to remove books from school libraries but also public libraries that deal with the lives and experiences of people from marginalized communities,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s office for intellectual freedom, told The New York Times. “We’re seeing organized groups go to school boards and library boards and demand actual censorship of these books in order to conform to their moral or political views.”

Along with the efforts to get books removed from classrooms and school libraries and, increasingly, public libraries come direct attacks on librarians, in the form of bills that would open them up to criminal charges for having books on the shelves—and in particular available to minors—that some prosecutor somewhere decided were obscene.

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Caldwell-Stone told CNN’s Ronald Brownstein that the library association is “deeply concerned that one of these bills will eventually pass and will be used as a means of both intimidating librarians or actually charging them with crimes—based on this falsehood that mainstream materials, published by mainstream publishers, are somehow ‘illegal speech’ unprotected by the First Amendment.”

While the efforts to take books out of libraries are cloaked in the language of the parental right to decide what their own children will read, Caldwell-Stone explained the distinction between a parent preventing their child from reading a specific book and the demand to remove the book from the library. Libraries, she said, “don’t disagree with parents who want to guide their children’s readings … but they stand firmly opposed to one family dictating what is available to everyone else in a school library or a public library.”

The attacks on books by and about Black and LGBTQ people are part of a Republican culture war effort to whip up their base for November’s elections. But they also have real effects on the kids who are being told they don’t matter, or that their lives are so unacceptable that books reflecting them should be banned as obscene. And that’s a lot of kids being targeted by privileged white people whose voices are heard and taken as legitimate in school board meetings and in the media and when they complain to the authorities. Brownstein offers a lineup of statistics underlying the full-scale freakout:

Children of color have constituted a majority of the public school K-12 student body since 2014, according to federal statistics, and now make up nearly 55% of the total. Gallup recently reported that 1 in 5 members of Generation Z, as well as 1 in 10 millennials, identify as LGBTQ, far more than in older generations. And the Public Religion Research Institute has found that more than a third of young adults identify as secular, without affiliation with any organized religion.

In the short term, Republicans are trying to get their base angry and scared enough to turn out in droves in November. In the long term, they’re engaged in a pitched battle to claim themselves as the only legitimate judgment about education or parenting or who matters in this country. And they don’t care how many kids or librarians or teachers they have to trample on to do it.

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