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One of the great American values is the freedom of speech. This is quite possibly the most well known and most important aspect of American democracy. To stifle a voice in this country is to impede the owner’s nationally inherited human rights, such is the importance of free speech. However, on the other side of the coin, writing is the ultimate form of the voice, giving ideas not only power and form but a greater comprehensibility to them as well. It lets one share a slice of their soul, transmit ideas from one mind to another without the use of direct communication; thus language can be considered near telepathy. Therefore, a restriction of that ability in this country is constitutionally blasphemous.
All Boys Aren't Blue was the second most banned book in 2022 and quickly rose to third most banned book in the US overall only 2 years after its release. Aside from containing LGBTQ+ themes, it was also banned in many states for its "anti-police views".
After several librarians refused to remove Gender Queer from their shelves in Jamestown MI, 62% of the town voted to defund the libraries. It is considered to be the most banned book in the country but reports on book bans are semi-unreliable since it is estimated that most bans go unreported.
After a librarian shared this book for pride month, Del Shelstad call it "exactly the type of thing that is harmful in our community". The library caused a significant amount of controversy in its community and ultimately the book was banned.
Lawn Boy was an extremely controversial book when it was first challenged by bans, largely due to a scene which has been debated over to be considered as pedophilic. In the scene, a man recalls a sexual encounter he had as a child with another child. Several Virginia Board members have been threatened over their support for the book.
The Bluest Eye quickly became banned in many places around country around the early 2000s but was published back in 1970. It has gained a solid spot as the fourth most banned books in America, largely due to the main characters abusive and explicit relationship with her father.
Despite winning a plethora of awards, The Hate U Give was banned across the US due to its race-based themes and and "anti-police messages". It received 17 bans in the 2021-2022 school year alone.
Melissa (previously published as George) is a book about a transgender girl applying for a female role in the school play. The author changed the name of the book to Melissa after several years because the main character didn't identify with the name George. This sparked a trend where people would take a marker and cross out the original title to write the new one on their previously purchased copies.
Beyond Magenta is a unique book containing interviews with transgender and gender neutral young adults. It became the second most banned LGBTQ+ book and was banned because of the "effects it might have on young people".
Yet despite that, the censorship of media, specifically in schools, has become less of an underlying threat and more of a sudden and rude uprising in recent years. The state of Pennsylvania alone has banned 457 titles in just the past year. None of the topics discussed in these books could be deemed inappropriate to the audience who read them and yet when brilliant authors such as George M. Johnson or Maia Kobabe reached out a hand holding their stories to school libraries, that hand was cleaved off by school districts and city governments. In a country that prides itself in its freedom, it is more than odd to see the freedoms of those authors as well as the freedoms of students be denied so harshly.
After the 2021-2022 school year, PEN America compiled a comprehensive report detailing the year’s statistics on book bans and censorships. The report, “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools”, revealed an alarming total of around 1,648 individual titles banned in US schools. And out of the 1,648 titles silenced across the country, a staggering 41% contained LGBTQ+ themes and characters. This is a number too disturbing to be considered a coincidence by anyone. Whether a direct attack or the resulting number of a clear bias, this is undeniably unconstitutional. What could possibly drive such a devoted society to commit acts against the beliefs that very society was founded upon?
The top 3 states for book bans are Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania, with Tennessee coming in as a very close runner up for third.
The process was very American in a way, squabblings of pure simple logic cascading into ethical and moral debates. National Geographic recalls the evolution of American censorship in their article, “A History of Book Bans - and their Changing Targets - in the U.S.” What started out as burnings of books that didn’t line up with the Christian Ideology or contained antislavery messages slowly became an attack on the human rights that the founding fathers labored and fought over. This gave birth to the thought “What should and shouldn’t children be able to read?” Present day, books are leaving school and library shelves faster than reports can accurately count. The main target of the bans have shifted to LGBTQ+ books and in a modern age where more LGBTQ+ content is being written than ever before, the statistics paint a clear picture.
There are two main reasons or, more adequately described, excuses that are usually given when a book is plucked from schools. The first is that the book contains themes that are not age appropriate. Indeed, many of the banned books do contain heavy themes of violence, death, sex, and other similar topics. But this cannot be considered valid grounds when the audience of such books are high school students and young adults. A human cannot be functional if they do not possess an understanding of the workings of the world around them. Shielding them from it can only create a backlash for when they are forced to. The second primary excuse given is the more infuriating of the two however. “Something else would be better”. One of the largest problems in America since its dawn, as well as the problem that brought us into this age of censorship and silencing, is the single perspective, the Danger of a Single Story. If you ask what would be better than this book, you are often pointed to a book with a generic story, plain white character, and a childish vision of the world. What unique perspectives could something like this possibly offer in comparison to its more colorful and complex counterpart which no longer exists on these shelves?
Something that should be made clear is that book bans do not originate from outraged parents, schools or individuals. Rather, it can be traced to movements and groups such as Moms for Liberty, who push the city governments to take actions against diversity in schools. Perhaps the disturbing aspect of these groups are their sheer numbers. Moms for Liberty alone has a membership of 70,000 to 100,000 people across the country. But even more disturbing is that the city governments and school boards oblige without hesitation, sometimes taking actions into their own hands without needing so much as a nudge.
Moms For Liberty, the conservative group that leads the assault on LGBTQ+ books. They have also fought against COVID-19 regulations, such as mask mandates, and critical race theory.
The job of a politician is to maintain or build upon the status quo of their appointed jurisdiction. But censorship in America is seemingly needless, and creates nothing for the country nor her people, therefore this is an attempt to maintain the status quo. And what they are trying to maintain is an age of democracy that no longer exists using undemocratic means. There is no leadership behind it, just selfishness. America has a habit of being overly nostalgic. It loves clinging to the past, refusing to progress, rejecting both the present and the future. The problem with American politicians, or politicians in general, is their age, their mindset hails from another time. In a way, it is ironic their ability to alienate people, when they themselves are the aliens, products of a bygone era.
The United States of America legally supports the LGBTQ+ movement and is one of the 30 countries around the world that allow same-sex marriage among other rights. Freedom of speech, freedom of identity, freedom of culture, etc; that is what America is known for. So why are these bans and policies being laid one after another down like a winning hand? The most basic component of expressing one’s self is the voice, something protected by democracy. The more refined and powerful version, writing, is also supposedly protected as well. And so writing becomes a major outlet for self expression, especially for the LGBTQ+ community, many books ending up in school libraries because of their significance in this modern age. What politicians are trying to do is to cut LGBTQ+ out of democracy. With a scalpel in one hand and the burned remains of the first amendment in the other, these books are taken out of schools with the belief that they are “corrupting the children” and that this will remove these concepts from America by attacking them at the roots. Diversity is bleached. Rather than sculpting the next generation of perfect citizens, we are setting them up for failure and crippling our future democracy. In a nation founded on ideals of free speech, censorship is a declaration of war on the future of America.
What makes humans so successful? What in our minds sets us apart from the rest of nature. It is undoubtedly our ability to communicate that makes us so intelligent, so prosperous, so unique, and so, so dangerous. We are the last species in our family standing. And not a single one of our sisters could have even imagined what we have achieved today. Every little thing we take for granted is the product of our advantage over all of nature; our power to not only understand abstract concepts outside of survival and minimalistic logic, but to transfer these understandings from one individual to another. And yet despite being the only species to demonstrate these miraculous traits effectively, we are the only species capable of true idiocy. America would rather cripple this ability and revert to that primal state of computing. Why? Because the other thing that makes humans a successful species is our innate facility to recognize patterns. It is the second greatest survival skill we possess. But it is also one of the only ones that hinders our ability to progress as a society. It can make us afraid of change because a fear of change is a fear of losing the patterns we have grown attuned to. Why else would America be eating its own tail as viciously as it is now? Why else would we be wedged in such an unfathomable position? With social crises so close to being solved, technology advancing as rapidly as it is now, and the closing threshold of what our planet has to offer us, this decade can only be considered the crossroads of history, the ultimatum of our species. We are on the verge of both greatness and collapse, the point where any amount of self interest is unacceptable. The older generation must step down for the new, and withhold their fear of change because change isn’t coming, it’s already here.
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