Republicans are attempting to ban a variety of books in schools across the country, ranging from the red scare to the read scare.
All of the books appear on a list of 850 titles compiled by the Texan Republican and state politician Matt Krause, who is examining which schools own them. Following is the list of these books:
- Ta-Nahisi Coates, Between the World and Me
- Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race
- Ibram X Kendi, How to be an Antiracist
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US for Young People
- Joyce A Ladner, Launching Our Black Children for Success
- Henry Louis Gates Jr and Kevin M Burke, And Still I Rise: Black America since MLK
- Dan Savage and Terry Miller, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Over Coming Bully, and Creating a Life Worth Living
- Anna Kingston, Respecting the Contributions of LGBT Americans
- Sarah Prager and Sarah Papworph, Rainbow Revolutionaries: 50 LGBTQ+ People Who Made History
- Skylar Kergil, Before I had the Words: On Being a Transgender Young Adult
- Duchess Harris, Protesting Police Violence in Modern America
- Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta
- Alex Alvarez, Native America and the Question of Genocide
- Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan
- Margaret Atwood and Renee Nault, The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel
- Johannah Haney, The Abortion Debate: Understanding the Issues
- Louise Spilsbury, Avoiding Bullies? Skills to Outsmart and Stop Them
- Shifra Diamond, Everything You Need to Know About Going to the Gynecologist
His campaign follows the state’s new anti-Critical Race Theory bill, which bans teaching any materials that could give pupils “discomfort, guilt, agony, or any other type of psychological suffering on account of the individual’s race or sex.”
Although his list is only available in Texas, many of the books on it have already been challenged or banned in various school districts across the country.
A school board in Pennsylvania has banned a huge list of books, almost all of them are by or about people of colour. This includes Ijeoma Oluo’s “So You Want to Talk about Race” and Ibram X Kendi’s “How to be Antiracist”.
Meanwhile, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me has been the subject of multiple legal challenges across the United States, and an Ohio school board is apparently planning to prohibit it in 2020.
Often, so-called “grassroots” organisations have spearheaded the charge, petitioning school boards or political officials to have certain books removed. Though some of these organisations describe themselves as a local initiative that sprouted up around groups of parents united around a cause, many of the organisations active in banning books are in fact linked, and backed by major conservative benefactors.
The number of attempts to ban books had increased until 2021, according to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, head of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
“What makes it special is that it looks to be a coordinated campaign by a variety of advocacy organisations to mobilise members in local chapters to challenge books in school and public libraries across the United States,” she added.
