What is your reaction to the growing fight over what young people can read?
Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers are challenging books about race, gender and sexuality at a pace not seen in decades. What is your opinion of this? Have you read any of the books pictured above? Would you like to? Are they on the shelves in your classroom or in your local or school library?
If you’ve been reading the news, it might not surprise you to learn that these titles are the Top 10 Banned Books of 2021. As you can see, most of the targeted books were by or about Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people. What is your reaction to that?
According to the American Library Association, attempts to ban books in the United States surged last year to the highest level since the organization began tracking book challenges 20 years ago. And those fights only seem to be escalating in 2022: so far this year, there have been attempts to ban or restrict access to 1,651 different titles.
In an article from July, “The Spread of Book Banning,” Claire Moses explains the increasing politicization of the book banning debate via a Q. and A. with two reporters, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris, who cover the publishing industry. In the short piece, she speaks to them about what is behind this trend:
Claire: How did book-banning efforts become so widespread?
Alexandra: We’ve seen this going from a school or community issue to a really polarizing political issue. Before, parents might hear about a book because their child brought a copy home; now, complaints on social media about inappropriate material go viral, and that leads to more complaints in schools and libraries across the country.
Elected officials are also turning book banning into another wedge issue in the culture wars. Last fall, a Republican representative in Texas put together a list of 850 books that he argued were inappropriate material in schools and included books about sexuality, racism and American history. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned on the issue by arguing that parents, not schools, should control what their children read. Democrats have also seized on the issue through congressional hearings about rising book bans.
And, sometimes, the disputes have spilled into something more menacing. The Proud Boys, the far-right group with a history of street fighting, showed up at a drag-queen-hosted story hour for families in a library in San Lorenzo, Calif.
Why do parents and conservatives want these bans?
Alexandra: For some parents, it’s about preventing kids from reading certain things. Others want to introduce certain topics — like L.G.B.T. rights or race — to their children themselves.
A lot of the people I’ve spoken to say they don’t consider the bans they want to be racist or bigoted. They say the books contain specific content that they feel isn’t appropriate for children, and they’ll sometimes point to explicit passages. But librarians we speak to say that the most challenged books around the country are basically all about Black or brown or L.G.B.T. characters. In Texas, residents sued a library after a library official took books off the shelves based on a list from an elected official. They weren’t all children’s books; the list included Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi.
It’s hard to disentangle the banning surge from other conservative efforts to use the government to limit expression, including what critics call Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Those are all movements that have overlapped and spurred book-banning debates.
Elizabeth: Book banning is part of a wider political context right now, of extreme polarization, of heightened political tensions and the amplification of certain messages by the kinds of media — social or otherwise — that people consume.
Has any banning effort stood out to you?
Elizabeth: In Virginia Beach, a local politician sued Barnes & Noble over two books, “Gender Queer,” a memoir by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” a fantasy novel. This lawmaker wants Barnes & Noble to stop selling these titles to minors. The suit probably won’t succeed. But it’s an escalation: The issue went from people thinking their children shouldn’t read certain books to trying to stop other people’s children from reading certain books.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
What is your reaction to this article? How much of it was news to you?
What do you think about efforts across the nation to remove books — especially ones that address race, gender and sexuality — from classrooms and school libraries?
According to the article, many believe that parents, not schools, should control what children read. But, as one of the reporters commented, “When people are trying to push a book out of the library, they’re making a decision for everyone, that nobody has access to a particular book.” Where do you stand on this question? Who should decide what young people read in school?
In your opinion, what makes a book “appropriate” or “inappropriate” for inclusion in a school or classroom library?
How do you think book bans like these affect students? Teachers and librarians?
Are there efforts to ban books where you live? Do you think the books in your school library represent a diverse range of perspectives and experiences? What subjects are adequately covered? What kinds of books would you like to see more of? How, in your opinion, should schools handle a parent’s concern that a book taught in class or on school library shelves is inappropriate for their child? Why?
If you’ve been reading the news, it might not surprise you to learn that these titles are the Top 10 Banned Books of 2021. As you can see, most of the targeted books were by or about Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people. What is your reaction to that?
According to the American Library Association, attempts to ban books in the United States surged last year to the highest level since the organization began tracking book challenges 20 years ago. And those fights only seem to be escalating in 2022: so far this year, there have been attempts to ban or restrict access to 1,651 different titles.
In an article from July, “The Spread of Book Banning,” Claire Moses explains the increasing politicization of the book banning debate via a Q. and A. with two reporters, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris, who cover the publishing industry. In the short piece, she speaks to them about what is behind this trend:
Claire: How did book-banning efforts become so widespread?
Alexandra: We’ve seen this going from a school or community issue to a really polarizing political issue. Before, parents might hear about a book because their child brought a copy home; now, complaints on social media about inappropriate material go viral, and that leads to more complaints in schools and libraries across the country.
Elected officials are also turning book banning into another wedge issue in the culture wars. Last fall, a Republican representative in Texas put together a list of 850 books that he argued were inappropriate material in schools and included books about sexuality, racism and American history. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned on the issue by arguing that parents, not schools, should control what their children read. Democrats have also seized on the issue through congressional hearings about rising book bans.
And, sometimes, the disputes have spilled into something more menacing. The Proud Boys, the far-right group with a history of street fighting, showed up at a drag-queen-hosted story hour for families in a library in San Lorenzo, Calif.
Why do parents and conservatives want these bans?
Alexandra: For some parents, it’s about preventing kids from reading certain things. Others want to introduce certain topics — like L.G.B.T. rights or race — to their children themselves.
A lot of the people I’ve spoken to say they don’t consider the bans they want to be racist or bigoted. They say the books contain specific content that they feel isn’t appropriate for children, and they’ll sometimes point to explicit passages. But librarians we speak to say that the most challenged books around the country are basically all about Black or brown or L.G.B.T. characters. In Texas, residents sued a library after a library official took books off the shelves based on a list from an elected official. They weren’t all children’s books; the list included Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi.
It’s hard to disentangle the banning surge from other conservative efforts to use the government to limit expression, including what critics call Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Those are all movements that have overlapped and spurred book-banning debates.
Elizabeth: Book banning is part of a wider political context right now, of extreme polarization, of heightened political tensions and the amplification of certain messages by the kinds of media — social or otherwise — that people consume.
Has any banning effort stood out to you?
Elizabeth: In Virginia Beach, a local politician sued Barnes & Noble over two books, “Gender Queer,” a memoir by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” a fantasy novel. This lawmaker wants Barnes & Noble to stop selling these titles to minors. The suit probably won’t succeed. But it’s an escalation: The issue went from people thinking their children shouldn’t read certain books to trying to stop other people’s children from reading certain books.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
What is your reaction to this article? How much of it was news to you?
What do you think about efforts across the nation to remove books — especially ones that address race, gender and sexuality — from classrooms and school libraries?
According to the article, many believe that parents, not schools, should control what children read. But, as one of the reporters commented, “When people are trying to push a book out of the library, they’re making a decision for everyone, that nobody has access to a particular book.” Where do you stand on this question? Who should decide what young people read in school?
In your opinion, what makes a book “appropriate” or “inappropriate” for inclusion in a school or classroom library?
How do you think book bans like these affect students? Teachers and librarians?
Are there efforts to ban books where you live? Do you think the books in your school library represent a diverse range of perspectives and experiences? What subjects are adequately covered? What kinds of books would you like to see more of? How, in your opinion, should schools handle a parent’s concern that a book taught in class or on school library shelves is inappropriate for their child? Why?
