NEWS TAKING LIBERTIES
Banning Books on Race and Sexuality Are Crippling State Education BY JOEL MCNALLY
A
n unprecedented tidal wave of book banning has removed more books from school libraries than in any previous year in recent American history in just the last nine months. Republicans are trying to stop educational institutions from providing factual information to students about either America’s racial history or human sexuality.
today’s world. Republicans are futilely attempting to halt America’s rapidly increasing racial diversity to restore fading white supremacy. Their only sexual concern is to inflame more bigotry toward gay, lesbian and transgender Americans. They’re losing on all counts despite all the books they’ve thrown on their roaring bonfires in recent months.
PEN America, the nonprofit organization of American writers advocating for free expression, documented removal of 1,586 books by more than 800 authors. In 98% of the cases, the group said, cowardly school administrators wary of public controversy covertly removed books without following established procedures to determine educational or literary value.
One of the most challenged books of the past year was the children’s book Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story by Ruby Bridges telling her experiences in 1960 as a 6-year-old Black child integrating an all-white school in New Orleans. It’s promoted as an inspirational story “celebrating the courage of a young girl who stayed strong in the face of racism.”
In this election year, rightwing Republicans are doing their best to keep their white supporters as riled up as they were under President Trump. Republican donors funded screaming parent groups disrupting school board meetings throughout the nation. They combined their party’s latest attacks on schools for accurately teaching U.S. history with their decades-old opposition to sex education.
Bridges, now 67, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on the historic wave of book banning. “My books are written to bring people together,” Bridges said. “Why would they be banned? When I share my experiences and my story in these books, I share our shared history, good, bad and ugly.”
RACISM? SEXISM? Many parents may wish to prevent their children from learning about the existence of either racism or sex for as long as possible, but their kids are already learning about both all the time in 14 | SHEPHERD EXPRESS
The Bluest Eye, the first novel by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison, was the fifth most banned book. The novel is about an 11-year-old Black girl who prays for her eyes to turn blue so she’ll be considered beautiful in America. It belongs in any school teaching children not to feel inferior for being different.
Illustration by Michael Burmesch.
