Why Book Bans Matter

BY STEVE NUZUM

Recently, the South Carolina State Board of Education saw a sudden shift in its approach to banning books. (Both Superintendent Ellen Weaver and Board member Cheryl Collier-- echoing national talking points from Moms for Liberty-- have publicly claimed removing a book from every school in the state is not actually book banning, because, they argue, copies of the books still exist even if many SC students can’t access them). For the first time, several members of the Board spoke out against the process, created by State Board Regulation 43-170, of challenging and removing books. 

Current Laurens 56 Superintendent Dr. David O’Shields and associate pastor Rev. Tony Vincent, in particular, struck a tone of alarm at how much control the State Board had (intentionally or not) given over the state’s library and classroom book collections to one person from Beaufort County.

But why do book bans matter, anyway? 

As someone who spends a great deal of time in State Board meetings and Instructional Materials Review Committee meetings (where committee members generally hear and act on advice from department attorney Robert Cathcart on whether or not to remove books-- usually voting without any discussion) listening to folks argue back and forth about which books children should be able to access, I have asked myself this question a lot. There are, after all, arguably much bigger problems facing the world, America, South Carolina, and public schools. 

I think Rev. Vincent most powerfully addressed one of the main reasons book bans matter when he said, during that most recent State Board of Education meeting, “We’ve heard, time and again, personal stories of how those books spoke to the lived experiences of young people. How they helped them better understand their lives… Having easy access-- in school libraries, not through Amazon or harder measures-- having access to these books, I think, could possibly save lives…”

And while I can understand that the idea of books saving lives seems hopelessly hyperbolic to many people, the research-- along with, as Vincent pointed out, hours of testimony from students, parents, and experts in abuse and child psychology who have attended the Board meetings since this regulation was first introduced-- bears out the impact of giving all student representation in instructional materials. 

For example, research from organizations like the Trevor Project has supported the idea that making students feel included saves lives: “LGBTQ+ young people who reported living in very accepting communities attempted suicide at less than half the rate of those who reported living in very unaccepting communities.”

Flamer, one of the books already banned by the Board, arguably doesn’t even violate the regulation-- it contains no “depictions of sexual conduct” as defined by the regulation-- but what it does do is provide representation and a message of hope to students, regardless of their gender identity or sexuality, who might be struggling with fitting in, or with suicidal ideation. Author Mike Curato, speaking at the recent Read Freely event at the Richland Library in Columbia, SC, said giving students who felt hopeless or lost representation was one of his explicit goals in writing the book.

And as students have testified, and as many teachers know from experience, when we choose which books to include in and exclude from our schools, we send powerful messages about whether there is a place for all students in those schools. 

It’s no coincidence that Weaver, the clear force behind the regulation, made headlines the day after that Board meeting, when the Post and Courier reported on a memo she released on March 14 banning the very concept that transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming students exist. (The same memo bans words like “social emotional learning,” “antiracism,” and “culturally relevant teaching” from use by state education staff.) 

Sidelining LGBTQ+ students and other marginalized groups is the point, not a mere side effect, of book bans.

Weaver, after all, attended last year’s Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warriors” conference, where she gleefully asked, “Hey, Moms for Liberty, do you know what a woman is?” to mocking laughter from the crowd. 

The list of 97 books the Board has been working through-- all challenged by the same Beaufort resident who challenged them in her home district, resulting in the district’s careful consideration of every book by a teams of teachers, parents, and librarians who actually read all of them-- takes its “evidence” directly from BookLooks, the now-shuttered Moms for Liberty-affiliated website created to help book banners ban books without having to read them. It is heavily skewed towards high-interest Young Adult novels featuring characters of color and LGBTQ+ characters. 

And as multiple members of the public pointed out during that last State Board meeting, the Board process has not resulted in the banning of classics like 1984 (which features no LGBTQ+ themes or people of color, but which does, unambiguously, feature “descriptions of sexual conduct” as described in the language of the regulation).

Proponents of the regulation, and of book bans generally, will often conflate the appropriate processes of boards, districts, librarians, parents, and teachers, in selecting texts which are appropriate for the needs of students, with the kind of broad book banning process adopted under Regulation 43-170-- processes that empower special interest groups like Moms for Liberty, or individuals with an axe to grind, to take up the time, attention, resources, and funding of state agencies and school districts in order to push their personal, ideologically-motivated preferences about which books are allowed. 

That, of course, constitutes a government book ban, whether officials like that word or not. 

That is why America has a long history of legal challenges against school boards and other entities for doing just this. 

For example, the reason our state law contains language requiring the state to consider the “artistic and literary merit” of a text as well as local “community standards” is that these requirements were set out by a US Supreme Court justice in Miller v California. While much of the testimony leading up to the passage of the book ban regulation centered on the need to include this kind of “Miller test,” the regulation’s authors and the State Board didn’t seem to take this seriously at the time. During the most recent State Board meeting, multiple Board members expressed alarm that they were not actually considering literary or artistic merit, that they were not considering what Vincent called “the arc of their full stories” when they used a list of passages directly from BookLooks (often including typos and formatting errors from the original lists) without reading the books. 

The State Board of Education has a mandate and a responsibility set out in state law to help select high-quality textbooks and other instructional materials. But it has a Constitutional and moral requirement to make sure that its personal political or ideological preferences aren’t driving those decisions. 

Book bans are dangerous because they are an early step in restricting freedom of speech and using government entities to control information.

Ultimately, the central reason book bans are dangerous is they are the tip of the spear for undermining democratic processes, for allowing people who don’t represent the will or best interest of the people to use the power of government to subvert that will and interest. It is not a coincidence that state and federal actions have moved swiftly from targeting specific books (like Gender Queer) to targeting long lists of books (like those on BookLooks) to targeting and harassing librarians and other educators, to defunding local libraries, and now to defunding federal library programs (as when the White House cut 80% of the budget from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the largest federal funding source for libraries).

It is extremely ironic that the Board ultimately declined to remove 1984, despite its “depictions of sexual content,” because that book is most directly a warning against just this kind of government control of information, even explicitly using censorship of sex as an example of intentional totalitarian control: 

“Unlike Winston, she [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.”

If they had read the book before making a decision, Board members might have thought more deeply about this process at an earlier date.