I'm with the Banned
Banned books are only the beginning.
This latest era of book banning in the United States began in 2021. Though there have always been books that were challenged or banned in libraries, they were on a small scale, a few at a time. In 2021—as the furor was mounting in school districts around wearing masks in schools, in the middle of the backlash to the Black Lives Matter protests—books in classrooms and libraries became the center of unprecedented controversies around the country.
We’re facing a crisis in the US unlike anything we’ve seen in history. What “makes this moment so unprecedented,” Jonathan Friedman, the Sy Sims managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America told The Guardian earlier this month, is that what “we’re seeing right now mirrors elements of different historical periods, but this has never all happened at once.”
Someday, perhaps, I won’t use the word “unprecedented” in every article that I write.
PEN America’s latest figures show 10,046 individual titles were challenged or banned during the 2023-2024 school year. That’s a significant increase from the year before: in 2022-2023, it was 3,362 books. And in 2021-2022, it was 2,532 books.
This latest round of censorship in the United States was a result of the backlash to The 1619 Project, a tour-de-force first in the New York Times magazine in 2019 marking four hundred years of slavery on US soil, and later a book (among many other projects). That book became a lightning rod for this movement, which uses the language of parental rights to limit the freedom of all children to read.
(I absolutely think parents should have the right to choose what their children read; that’s why I take my kids to the library and we talk about what they’re going to choose. As in every other freedom in the US, our freedom to read ends where someone else’s freedom begins.)
People ask all the time, why is book banning on the rise like this? The answer is: there is power in outraged parents who vote to protect their kids. The GOP learned in 2021, when Glenn Youngkin first employed this language to become governor of Virginia, that educational legislation that limits what is taught in schools and what books children have access to mobilizes is a great way to mobilize the base. So far, it has been very, very effective.
It turns out, we’re only at the beginning.
In September 2022, I called my friend, Christine Renee Miller, and asked her if she wanted to do something fun with me.
Christine (a playwright, actor, and the one time face of Lubriderm) and I both teach in a fantastic low-residency MFA program at Wilkes University; she said yes before I even finished explaining what I had in mind. We launched our podcast, “The Beautiful and Banned” a year ago this week, and in the first two seasons of the show, we got a firsthand look at censorship in the US. Our goal is to dive into banned books, plays, and films now and throughout history—and we have learned all kinds of things about how this moment is similar to, and also very different from, other ban-happy ages.
Over the last year, the thing that has stood out to me the most is the exploding scope of these challenges, and the power of a few individuals to attack one of the most precious fundamental rights in US history. A few generations ago, it was not a given that every child in this country would learn to read. Access to education was limited by gender and race and class—rich white boys had access to educations that rich white girls did not, much less poor white children or poor Black children. The fact that everyone in this country has the right to an education and the freedom to read is a relatively new phenomenon.
This current moment in book banning is turning quickly away from challenges to individual titles. What we’re looking at now is legislation at the state and even federal level that could change the face of education in the US.
EveryLibrary, “America’s Library PAC,” is charting what it calls “legislation of concern” across all fifty states. They have a really nifty map that show where these legislative initiatives are happening; obviously, Texas is winning with 15 bills so far this year. We’re always so extra in Texas.
The ten categories of bills that EveryLibrary is tracking are critical for you to pay attention to (this list is quoted directly from their website):
In 2025, we are paying the most attention to state legislative initiatives in ten categories:
bills that would criminalize libraries, education, and museums (and/or the employees therein) by removing long-standing defense from prosecution exemptions under obscenity laws and/or expose librarians to civil penalties;
bills that change obscenity and "harmful to minors" definitions that preempt established First Amendment rights;
bills that would establish book rating systems, leading to segregation or expulsion of materials by topic or viewpoint;
bills that mandate restrictive library policies, esp. prescribing collection development or materials challenge policies;
bills that would limit access to school library databases;
bills that create onerous parental control/notification requirements that lead to segregated materials or limit free speech;
bills that limit or outlaw the teaching of "divisive concepts";
bills that lead to defunding or closure of libraries or politicization of library boards.
bills that limit funding or participation in professional library associations or drop accreditation requirements for professional librarians
bills that seek to de-professionalize librarianship through loosening or elimination of licensing/certification requirements
Check out your state, and then call your local representatives to talk about what’s happening specifically there. This is, above all, a local fight, and your voice in your community matters more than you know.
Because, just to reiterate—there are multiple state bills across the country aiming to criminalize librarians and educators for teaching students or providing them with access to reading material, multiple viewpoints of history, or ideas that might be counter to whichever party is in power.
At the federal level, the Department of Education released a statement on January 24, 2025 entitled “U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax.”
I loved the American Library Association’s terse response: “Book Bans Are Real.”
On January 29, 2025, the Trump administration released one of their dozens of executive orders; this one is about “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”The first line reads: “Parents trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.”
Actually, as a parent, I hope my children learn to think critically. I want them to hear multiple viewpoints, and to learn the skills they need to discern the truth based on evidence and claims and sound reasoning. I certainly don’t expect the school to only tell them about our “incredible Nation”—especially not in a presidential decree that capitalizes nouns in weird ways.
If you’ve never looked up the definition of the word fascism, it literally means an ideology that “exalts nation and often race above the individual” and is characterized by “forcible suppression of opposition.” I’m not trying to be alarmist when I say, the legislation at the state and federal mandating patriotic education is, by definition, fascist.
That’s part of why I’m working overtime right now to get word out about what’s happening, and what the implications are for all of us—especially our kids.
We wish we had less to talk about, frankly. But we’re not backing down now: “The Beautiful and Banned” Season 3 launched this morning.
You can download it wherever you get your podcasts. We called this first episode “WTF, USA?” because that’s the question we keep asking about this particular moment. As we do in every episode, we end with what’s giving us hope right now—community, joy, and hope are the only things that are going to get us through these times.
We’re also going to be bringing “The Beautiful and Banned” here as part of the “Injustice Report.” There’s now a separate newsletter you can sign up for where we’ll share show notes and podcast-specific news (this week, that’ll go out later in the week to give people a chance to sign up). We’ve uploaded some of the episodes to Substack if you want to catch up, and we’re hoping to have more of a book club feel as well.
You can join with us in reading our next two books: All Boys Aren’t Blue (which we’ll discuss for the episode on March 11) and The Satanic Verses (for March 25).
Finally, after we’ve gotten several requests, we’re going to be opening “The Injustice Report” up for you to support our work. For now, it will be just pledges and not subscription only. We’re finagling a few things on our end to be able to split any pledges four ways (between Alejandra Oliva, Lauren Pinkston, Christine Renee Miller, and me), so if you want to pledge your support now, we absolutely appreciate it and we’ll have that up and running soon.
As always, we can’t thank you enough for jumping in with us during this unprecedented time in our country. We hope the conversations we’re having and community we’re building will be life-giving to all of us as we keep our eyes on the truth through reporting that bends the arc of justice.