Book bans in the U.S. echo a dangerous past
It is time for all citizens and educators to challenge this assault on education, civic literacy and democracy itself
As part of the ongoing culture wars, various Republican governors in the United States have called for the banning of alleged “unpatriotic” books in public schools. They have also threatened to cut back state funding for colleges and universities that introduce anti-racist issues to students, including a great deal of the founding literature of Black studies and other sources that provoke discussions that offer a remedy to racial injustice. At the core of this is a dangerous attack on critical thinking, informed judgments, truth and the core values that inform a critical notion of citizenship.
Republican Party legislators in many states are now banning books in schools and libraries that contain any reference to slavery or persistent racism, and teachers are being told in many states not to teach anything that makes students uncomfortable. Authoritarianism is now making itself felt once again in American politics. Horrified over the possibility of young people learning about the history of colonization, slavery and the struggles of those who have resisted long-standing forms of oppression, the Republican Party subscribes to a politics of racial whitewashing, denial and disappearance.
How else to explain that Glenn Youngkin before he won the governorship in Virginia, produced an ad in which a white woman calls for the removal from the school curriculum of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved.” Pandering to racist fears and white racial anxiety, he also stated he would ban the teaching of critical race theories in the schools — an oxymoron since there is little evidence it is taught in public schoolsand made the boldface and dangerous assertion “that educators are destroying America.” In addition, Rep. Matt Krause , the chair of the House General Investigating Committee, required that Texas school districts provide a list of over 800 books used in classrooms and libraries. Not surprisingly, all of these books address important social problems dealing with equity, race, racism and social justice issues. Krause also asked schools to report whether his list of books might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Code for labelling any text that deals with social problems as irrational.
It gets worse. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators want to banish certain words such as “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “multiculturalism” and “systemic racism.” For the Republican Party, words are dangerous, especially those that produce critical thinking, enable thoughtful judgments, and produce sentences that open the possibilities for furthering a just society. Words and books that offer students, especially minority groups, the opportunity to gain self-representation and the ability to narrate themselves are now viewed as unpatriotic. Words that speak to the far reaches of human intelligibility, expand the human imagination, and enter into a dialogue with history are now subjected to a discourse of heightened racial hysteria informed by toxic principles of white supremacy and racial cleansing.
The banning of books has historical precedents that speak powerfully to the dangerous authoritarian spirit that now animates Republican Party politics. On the evening of May 10, 1933, over 40,000 people gathered in Berlin. At the urging of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, more than 25,000 books labelled as ungerman were burned. Soon afterwards, book burnings took place across Germany in a variety of university towns. The purpose of the book burnings was to cleanse Germany of the literature of racial impurity and dissent and purify the German spirit. There was more at work here than what the novelist Andrew Motion called a monumental “manifestation of intolerance,” there was also a forecasting of the killings, mass murders, disappearances and genocide that would follow this symbolic act of racial hatred and purification.
The banning of books in the United States, which bears a dangerous resemblance to the Nazi book burning, represents a vision, however distorted, of what a society should stand for. In this case, as the great 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine observed rightly, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.” History teaches us the danger behind banishing books is real and is only the beginning of a more lethal form of terrorism. It is time for all citizens and educators, whether in the U.S., Canada, or elsewhere to challenge this dangerous assault on education, civic literacy and democracy itself. Keep in mind, there is no democracy without informed citizens. Democracy is not under siege; it is close to being erased.