A TERRIFYING TREND
Hena Khan was raised in the Washington suburbs, the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan, and she describes the experience this way: “When I was growing up, it was really more about feeling invisible and not thinking my culture mattered. Nobody at school knew anything about being a Muslim, being a Pakistani American. My teachers often couldn’t identify Pakistan on a map.”
An avid reader, she’d trek weekly to the local library, but could never find books with characters who looked — or believed — like her. So, after becoming the mother of two sons, she started writing them herself: a variety of picture books and young adult novels spotlighting Muslims and mosques, hijabs and holidays. “I want to write stories where my kids and others like them could finally see themselves,” she tells me.
Today, a nationwide movement is gathering steam to ban books like hers, which feature characters who don’t conform to a conservative, Christian, straight, white view of America. PEN America, a 100-year-old organization devoted to free expression, has documented “2,532 instances of individual books being banned” during the school year that ended last June. More than 1,600 titles were censored, written by 1,261 authors. Hena Khan was one of them.
She calls this a “terrifying trend.” “It frightens me,” she notes, “that books like mine and others that celebrate people, traditions and cultures outside of the mainstream are seen as a threat by a very vocal and powerful minority leading the charge to ban books, often through misinformation and fearmongering.”
Parents have a right to say they don’t want their own children reading certain books that violate their religious or cultural beliefs. But here’s the problem: That “powerful minority” of well-organized vigilantes are imposing their views on everyone else. They are depriving other families of precisely the rights they claim for themselves — deciding what their children read and learn.
“I don’t know if folks really realize what they’re doing when they’re doing book bans, and the effect that it has,” Varian Johnson, a Black author of young adult novels, said. “Any time a book that features someone who looks like you is banned, it says that you’re not worthy. You don’t deserve to exist. Your life is not important. That’s wrong, and it’s dangerous.”
Dangerous and undemocratic. A recent CBS poll reports that more than eight of 10 Americans “don’t think books should be banned from schools for discussing race and criticizing U.S. history.” However, intensity matters in politics, and the vigilantes are winning.
As PEN America reports: “The large majority of book bans underway today are not spontaneous, organic expressions of citizen concern. Rather, they reflect the work of a growing number of advocacy organizations that have made demanding censorship of certain books and ideas in schools part of their mission.”
Some of these groups started by protesting COVID-19-era restrictions that mandated masks and closed down schools. Others reacted against new approaches to teaching about race that focused on Black oppression and white privilege. Ambitious and demagogic politicians like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — one of the most active bookbanning states — seized the rallying cry of “wokeness” to galvanize like-minded culture warriors. State legislators are now passing bills that would reinforce the legality of book banning and even impose criminal penalties on violators.
The purpose of education is to open minds, not close them; to broaden horizons, not narrow them. Every time a book is banned, every time a voice like Hena Khan’s is silenced, a light flickers out and a cloud of ignorance descends.