BY STEVE NUZUM
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
-1984 (George Orwell)
“We’re not banning books, we’re just keeping kids from being indoctrinated.”
“We’re not banning books, we’re making sure they’re age appropriate.”
“We’re not banning books, you can still buy them on Amazon.”
“We’re not banning books, we’re just removing them from every public school in the state.”
South Carolina’s system for selecting and banning books has changed swiftly over the past several years, with a greater and greater emphasis on fewer and fewer people deciding which books can and cannot be accessed freely by the over 800,000 students in the state’s public school system.
Three years ago, most parents in the state had a fairly direct recourse if they had a book they found problematic, whether that book was provided optionally in a school or classroom library, or was assigned by a teacher: they could call an adult at the school, and work with that adult, whether a teacher, librarian, or administrator, to restrict access to the book for their own child. (Or, in some cases, they likely had a conversation with that other adult that gave them an opportunity to change their mind. I sometimes wonder if that’s what some of our neighbors who have become fixated on removing books from schools are actually afraid will happen.)
Two years ago, most districts began to respond to the growing politicization of books and content (under the general umbrella of anti- “woke” politics). These policies varied slightly from district to district, but generally speaking a resident of a district could challenge a book or books (or, in some cases, huge numbers of books). The district would then use some process-- often a committee review process that included district parents and librarians-- to make a determination about whether the book fit in with the district’s educational mission.
And this year, the South Carolina Board of Education, under the direction of Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, passed a sweeping book challenge regulation that essentially allows any parent of a public school student in the state to flag any book for potential removal from every public school in the state. (That the regulation doesn’t apply to private schools, even those which have received government subsidies from the since-ruled-unconstitutional voucher law, may not be a coincidence.)
The regulation also, to the apparent surprise of many State Board members at the last Full Board meeting, allows the Board, and specifically a five-person committee headed by Moms for Liberty-supported former school board candidate Christian Hanley, to preemptively challenge books without a complaint from anyone. (The process has been met with pushback even from other members of the full Board, and from members of the public. Among other complaints, opponents have pointed out that Board members are not required to have read any of the books, and that a single unelected and unnamed department employee has made recommendations that the committee and Board essentially rubber-stamped.)
This has already resulted in seven books becoming, functionally, illegal materials in South Carolina public schools. Three additional books have been challenged by a single Fort Mill parent with the vague accusation that they contain “sexual content” and “encourage [children] to follow the darkness”. If the Board determines that these books do contain “sexual content”-- a criterion the Board applied in a highly selective way during the first round of challenges-- they will also be removed from every school in the state. (Two of the books are the Coretta Scott King Award-winning Bronx Masquerade and the American Book Award- winning The House on Mango Street. A third book has already gone through a public review process to become a state adopted text. It’s an eighth grade literature textbook.)
Understandably, some South Carolinians have focused on the content of the books. After all, there may be a valid argument about whether specific Sarah J. Maas books, for example, are appropriate for different age groups, although I would argue, as I have in the past, that politicized concerns about “sexual content” are at best just a form of security theater. Most school-aged students, according to multiple studies, are already accessing explicit pornography online, and it would seem that anyone truly concerned with the amount of “sexual content” students are accessing might focus on that before banning a book with a racy scene or two from optional use at the library.
I would also argue that many proponents of bans don’t really care about “sexual content” in books: instead, at worst, book bans are a cynical attempt to smear public schools and drive some parents toward private schools without such sweeping book restrictions.
But what should concern us is perhaps not so much the fate of a specific book, as the vast expansion of the power of a very small number of individuals to decide what all public school students can read. For example, Chair Hanley openly mused about preemptively challenging every single Sarah J. Maas book based on the four that were “considered”-- without reading them-- and banned by the committee during its first meeting.
The process, then, allows an individual member of a largely unknown committee to pick and choose which books it finds appropriate for all students, whether or not anyone in the state has filed a formal challenge. Then, without reading the books, the committee can take its preferences to the State Board which-- again, without reading them-- can make them illegal in public schools.
That many of the proponents of the regulation have often argued for “limited government” and “local control” is fairly mind-boggling.
Instead, book-banners have “successfully” weaponized the State Board to engage in viewpoint discrimination. (I put “successfully” in scare quotes because I think many of these would-be censors will find that relying on, essentially, a single person to make decisions about which books do or do not get banned is probably not going to be preferable to the traditional process of working things out at the school level.)
Ironically, one of the three books the committee did not ban is 1984, a book they don’t appear to have read because they missed a lot of fairly graphic sexual content (or ignored it). If they had read it carefully, they might have realized that Winston Smith, the protagonist, shares a lot in common with the nameless Department employee tasked with deciding which ideas are acceptable to the government, and which go down the memory hole (at least as far as our students are concerned). They might have seen the irony in proudly proclaiming to have read the book-- as Chair Hanley did-- while misunderstanding that it is fundamentally a warning about the dangers of handing control over which ideas are acceptable or unacceptable to a powerful state agency (in the book, the Ministry of Truth) utilizing unelected bureaucrats to reshape known reality for the benefit of the few in power.
The books which have been banned in all South Carolina public schools are:
Damsel (Elana Arnold)
Ugly Love (Colleen Hoover)
A Court of Frost and Starlight (Sarah J. Maas)
A Court of Mist and Fury (Sarah J. Maas)
A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J. Maas)
A Court of Wings and Ruin (Sarah J. Maas)
Normal People (Sally Rooney)
The books which are currently being considered by the committee are:
HHM Into Literature Grade Eight (English language arts textbook)
The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)
Bronx Masquerade (Nikki Grimes)
CRANK (Ellen Hopkins)
The committee meets virtually on November 21, 2024 at 1PM. If you would like to speak, please email sclreg@ed.sc.gov by November 18th at 1:00 p.m. (As with the last meeting, the committee has chosen to allot only three minutes “collectively” for and against each book, meaning that, for example, if two people speak on behalf of Bronx Masquerade, each will have 90 seconds to make their case.)