BY JOE LOCKARD
Book bans and censorship in middle and high schools also affect higher education. They shape the reading knowledge of students who graduate and enter colleges and universities. An absence of knowledge about racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity and histories among incoming students creates learning gaps and campus culture problems.
Crucially, censorship in K–12 schools or of young adult literature does not stay there but flows into university curricula. Moving up grade levels into college, rationales for censorship change. The current trend of narrowing university degree programs by eliminating diversity requirements and departments of African American, ethnic, and women’s studies translates this K–12 censorship ethos into the vocabulary of administrative efficiency in higher education.
K–12 censorship and book bans set the ideological stage for the far-right political assaults we witness today in US universities and colleges. These assaults, notably occurring in but not limited to the Florida and Texas university systems, flow out of a long, foundational history of restrictions on public knowledge and learning in the United States through a variety of censorship practices. Educational culture is a continuum—not a set of discrete permissions to access knowledge.
In Arizona, the Peoria school board recently decided to remove three books by authors of color, including the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, from its middle school curriculum. It left the Narrative in school libraries and in selected excerpts in high school AP course materials. Letting the book remain on library shelves trusts to educational serendipity; letting it remain in excerpts loses the power and context of the full narrative.
Their decision continued a tradition of educational censorship that stretches back nearly to the early days of the Republic. The tradition has sought to prevent readers, from schoolchildren to adult readers, from learning about the lives of African Americans and other groups underrepresented in literature. Educators from Noah Webster and William Holmes McGuffey in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to school and university board members in the present day have too often left out or removed stories of these lives from books and curricula.
Along with middle school modules on well-recognized works by Lorraine Hansberry and Guadalupe Garcia McCall, the board decided to eliminate a module on the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave because it contains “repeated racial slurs; graphic descriptions of physical abuse and exploitation; [and] references to the sexual exploitation of enslaved individuals.” The works of William Shakespeare are filled with scenes of violence, blood-letting, and sexual exploitation, but the Peoria school board has yet to ban Shakespeare. A selective, racist application of such an announced standard is clear.
There is no realistic depiction of women, queer people, or African American, Mexican American, Native American, and other ethnic histories without engaging topics of abuse and violence. It is precisely such violent scenes that make the Douglass narrative so powerful. When teaching this text, I ask students to imagine the traumatization of a small boy hiding away and still hearing the screams of his aunt being hung up and flogged. Or to imagine and share the pride that a young, strong Frederick Douglass feels when he finally stands up to slave-breaker Covey and fights him to a standstill. In opposition to censors, the Narrative can be taught as a text emphasizing the struggle for literacy and reading choice as instrumental to struggles for human freedom.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is a masterwork of nineteenth-century American literature, one that teaches how millions of Americans suffered and struggled to gain freedom. It is an inalienable part of US historical and literary heritage, to be taught as a whole—not in bite-size excerpts. Middle school students are not innocents, and they can learn very well from the Narrative. Rationalizations about age-appropriateness provide a psychological cover story for a racially selective book ban. Learning to empathize with the sufferings and harms to other people is one of the most important lessons K–16 schools can teach.
School administrators in Arizona, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, and other locales have banned the Narrative. These administrators—we rarely hear reports from classroom teachers—do not want to grapple with the racial implications of the book’s scenes. Such curricular change occurs in a period when African American, Mexican American, and ethnic studies are under attack or being pushed out of curricula at all educational levels. Despite such regressive efforts, one of the most significant developments in US humanities education over the last fifty years, embodied in such formative teaching anthologies as the Heath Anthology of American Literature edited by Paul Lauter, has been the new attention paid to the experiences of women, people of color, and working class people.
In a recent literature class at Arizona State University, I was pleased to see how many students raised their hands when I asked who had read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in high school. Gilman’s story might be described as a tradwife’s nightmare. When the parents of these students were in school, few if any of them would have raised their hands in response to the same question.
US society and education have changed rapidly: Some cannot accept that change. Censorship and book bans manifest a refusal to acknowledge and respond to a common humanity in a constantly transforming society. Humanities education cannot become a sterile field reduced to an innocuous whites-only, male-dominated canon. The fight for a diverse, inclusive humanities curriculum is a shared fight against censorship at all educational levels.
Joe Lockard is associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
