BY HARVEY J. GRAFF
Today’s campaigns to ban books in schools—nationally organized and well-funded by right-wing donors and interest groups—are unprecedented, unconstitutional, and inhumane. Their instigators, unlike predecessors who led past campaigns, are ignorant of the texts they seek to erase, and sometimes burn. They have no understanding of “the people” or “public interest”; children’s development, paths of maturation, and the developmental roles of reading; US and state constitutions; or the formal guidelines of school and local libraries.
Organized and provided with scripts, the book banners are a small, undemocratic, and vocal minority. They dishonestly manipulate racist, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, and white supremacist fears and grievances. One of them speaks more loudly than twenty better-informed voices.
Those who challenge books do not always have children attending the schools where they want to ransack libraries. One of Texas’s loudest banners proclaims that she “protects her children,” but her two children graduated from high school before she began her campaign against books on school library shelves. Among the banners’ dishonest tactics: whether before library committees, in school board meetings, on media or social media, or in letters to editors, they often begin by referring to the slippery slope of particular texts’ “age appropriateness.” Within moments, they shift to unqualified “appropriateness.” They even demand removal of books not on shelves.
Banners assault human dignity, human rights, and legal rights—especially those of the young. Their reactionary campaigns are based on lies, manipulation, intimidation, and emotions. They fuel resentment against and undermine movements toward racial equality and integration of the last century.
As an historian of literacy and of children, youth, and families, I was inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies at Ohio State University, where I founded the university-wide interdisciplinary initiative LiteracyStudies@OSU. I write from the perspective of fifty years of classroom teaching and close relationships with young people and their intellectual, social, cultural, and emotional development. Unlike many of the banners, I have professional and personal knowledge of most of the works that they seek to remove, hide, and even destroy.
Book Banning Is about Power—Not Protecting Children
What takes places across the United States is not spontaneous parental concern. These actions are promoted by right-wing (not merely conservative) organizations like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education and funded by dark-money groups. Their antiliteracy and antichild fearmongering ricochet through social media. Attacking books that school professionals carefully evaluate is deeply hypocritical. The same people who assert that teens can handle guns and have babies also claim that teens must be protected from award-winning books carefully written and approved for young people.
These books are proxies in a “culture war” with the real objective of seizing political power and asserting the supremacy of an extreme worldview. Banning books is inseparably related to other antidemocratic and unconstitutional bans that right-wing ideologues support: attacks on abortion rights and women’s rights to control their own bodies; obstruction of LGBTQ and same-sex couples’ rights; abridgment of First Amendment rights to free speech; refusal of transgender athletes’ rights to participate in school sports and access gender-affirming medical care; and egregious restriction of voting rights.
Book Banning Past and Present
Efforts to restrict, remove, ban, and destroy written materials are not new. There have been destructive, but ultimately failing, efforts before and since the advent of modern printing. In the most infamous campaigns, including the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation against emerging Protestants and radical Catholics, papal authorities and their allies read the offending texts before attempting to ban or occasionally burn them.
Late-nineteenth-century book banners, led by US postmaster general Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, read the printed material they sought to restrict. Their primary targets were texts related to birth control, which they called pornography.
Limited historical attempts to designate books as “banned in Boston” pale in comparison with today’s campaigns. Those aspirational banners also read the books, deploying their literacy. They did not obsess over the reading audience—especially about children—and challenged white male authors and characters far more often than women, Black, and LGBTQ authors or characters. Their targets included the now classic novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Call of the Wild, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, and Catch-22, as well as The Color Purple, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, and Beloved, authored by Black women.
Bans Assault the Rights of Marginalized People
In the United States, periodic efforts broke out to ban books and access to them, including access to reading itself. Sometimes centered on gender, more often on race, the attacks unfolded in the context of politics, religion, society, culture, and economics. White girls and women gained almost equal access to elementary schooling by the mid-nineteenth century and to secondary education more slowly. Women’s education was long justified in terms of their roles as future mothers and educators of their children.
Restricted access to literacy and the right to read by minority populations—including Black, brown, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and differently abled students—is a threat again today. Because basic literacy was long withheld, by law and force, from enslaved people, free Blacks, and Native peoples, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass is among the most powerful and triumphant testimonies in American literary history. It is on many lists of targeted titles.
Removing stories that reveal painful aspects of human experience does not, and cannot, protect the young. Book bans impoverish learners by depriving them of safe ways to examine, learn, and mature. Reading and learning are gateways for engaging young minds and supporting understanding of diverse and conflicting experiences. The potential losses resulting from book bans are immeasurable yet enormous.
Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Literacy Myth; The Legacies of Literacy; The Labyrinths of Literacy; Literacy Myths, Legacies, and Lessons; Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America, and Searching for Literacy: The Social and Intellectual Origins of Literacy Studies (in press), among other works.
