Let students think — or ban books?
Recently, Gov. Greg Abbott wrote a letter to the Texas Association of School Boards asking them“to ensure that no child in Texas is exposed to pornography or other inappropriate content while inside a Texas public school.”
Abbott has instigated investigations of school library books with the potential intent of weeding out texts deemed “inappropriate” to those who wish to eradicate discussions of race, class, gender, colonization and LGBTQ topics.
Specifically, books like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” have been targeted for removal because they deal with racism, infanticide, and gender and sexuality, respectively.
As an instructor of English literature and language at St. Mary’s University, with a specialization in Latinx literature, the focus in my classes centers on issues of systemic racism, identity conflict, colorism, discrimination and other controversial issues. These conversations can, and should, begin at the K-12 level. Yet, we are experiencing a wave of protests of books that, if read, may entice our younger students to understand difficult and controversial issues. By engaging in censorship, we run the risk of repeating history.
Censorship is not a new tactic. The destruction of texts goes all the way back to the Spaniards’ obliteration of Aztec pictorial codices, hieroglyphic books and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521.
The Nazi regime also banned and burned books not written in German or viewed as going “against German ideals.”
In the 1980s, parents and others brought lawsuits against entities trying to ban books, resulting in the case Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision yielded several important results, including that our Constitution does not allow for the suppression of ideas and opinions through the censorship of books.
The main difference in censorship now is the focus on books addressing racism, anti-racism, ethnic studies and LGBTQ issues.
Prior to Abbott’s letter, a wave of mass book banning began in 2010 in Arizona with the emergence of House Bill 2281, which eliminated ethnic studies and resources by claiming they “promote resentment toward a race or class of people.”
The focus on eradicating discussions of race in the classroom continues with Abbott’s calls to eliminate such texts from the classroom, which raises two questions. For whom are these books dangerous? And what kind of harm is suggested?
Perhaps the answer lies in the idea of providing knowledge that can be accessed by students on their own time, encourages them to think for themselves, and to think critically and deeply about who they are and their place in our world.
If this kind of thinking is dangerous, then we are too late because the internet provides access to the very ideas that politicians are trying to control. Such censorship seems to imply students cannot think for themselves. If true, the inability to think for oneself seems more dangerous than any book.
Rather than worrying about the danger of books, we should encourage all people, especially young people, to ask questions and seek out answers in literature and beyond, so future generations can think critically about our world and resolve the issues some would rather avoid discussing.