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--:-- Host (John Bickley): Book banning and who is guilty of it has become a hot topic in recent months. Both the right and left have been accusing the other side of leading efforts to keep certain books out of the classroom and off school library shelves for unjustifiable reasons. For this episode of Morning Wire, we talked to Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham about just what is meant by book banning, what kinds of books are being removed from school curriculum and libraries, and how politics is driving this debate.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Thanks for waking up with us. It's July 10th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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--:-- Host (Colton): So Megan, I was a public school teacher about a decade ago, but at that time you didn't hear so much discussion about book banning or politics in general in schools. I remember kids were reading The Outsiders, and that was seen as kind of edgy because it talks about gangs and underage drinking. When did this become such a major issue?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, according to a recent report from the American Library Association, these calls to ban books have really ramped up in the last couple of years. So the ALA said it tracked 729 requests to move a total of 1,597 titles from libraries and classrooms in 2021. Now, those requests are called challenges, and they saw 273 challenges to books in 2020 and 377 in 2019. So you'll notice that 2021 was a record high, and that's a record high since the ALA began tracking 20 years ago.
--:-- Megan Basham: So I spoke to Will Creeley, the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. That's FIRE for short. And here's what he told me his organization is seeing. Book bans and book burning is very old phenomenon. But right now we are in the grips of a book banning war. We are seeing a volume of requests to pull books off school library shelves that seem unprecedented and are pretty shocking.
--:-- Host (Colton): So part of the debate going on is whether the removals ALA and FIRE are tracking constitute banning books. Conservatives will often argue that they're removing books that contain sexual material that's just not appropriate for young readers. On the other hand, progressives often say they want to shield students from racist words or offensive characters that perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now both sides argue that they're not banning books or censoring speech. They simply limiting how public resources are being used to provide kids access to certain material. And they argue that these books are still widely available in the marketplace.
--:-- Host (Colton): Okay, so let's talk about the political divide, and we can start with the right. What kinds of books are conservatives being accused of banning?
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, so on that side, a lot of it comes down to sexuality, gender identity, and critical race theory. So this was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaking in March, promoting moves his state has made to provide parents what he calls curriculum transparency. We've seen some books in some of these libraries. I mean, you're talking about kids in middle school. Some of the stuff that has ended up there, incredibly, incredibly disturbing stuff.
--:-- Megan Basham: You have some groups that want to take away classic books like To Kill a Mockingbird, but they want things like Gender Queer, a memoir, which is a cartoon-style book with graphic images of children performing sexual acts. That is wrong. That has no place in the schools.
--:-- Megan Basham: So that soundbite does a good job encapsulating the position that a lot of conservatives have. Political leaders like DeSantis are giving his argument teeth by introducing legislation that prohibits curriculum, so that would include books, that discusses sexuality or gender identity.
--:-- Megan Basham: Florida's State Board of Education also rejected textbooks it claimed contain critical race theory, that is, books that teach kids with a certain skin color that they benefit from more privilege in our society, or that the United States is fundamentally racist.
--:-- Megan Basham: For example, one textbook that was rejected by a state committee on these grounds included an algebra problem with the heading, what, me racist? It then asked students to solve a problem related to a racial prejudice test. And the premise of the problem was that older people and people who identify as politically conservative will score higher on racial bias.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, according to Penn America, and that's a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting free expression, 19 states now have similar laws or policies on the books. And Penn has been very open about opposing these policies. It characterizes them as, quote, educational gag orders.
--:-- Megan Basham: That said, I think it's important to note that the ALA report found that most often it was parents who initiated challenges. So I asked Jonathan Friedman, Penn's director of education, whether he thinks these book challenges are coming more from parents or politicians.
--:-- Jonathan Friedman: It's a mix, actually. There is a tremendous amount of grassroots energy behind this, but it also is clear that groups are connecting with one another across state lines and that we have seen proposals to remove books or make it easier for parents to challenge books in schools that have been promoted and advanced by lawmakers as well.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, Friedman argued that books like Genderqueer, which Governor DeSantis cited there, and which was the number one most challenged book of 2021, aren't necessarily inappropriate for, say, middle schoolers just because they show drawings of minors masturbating and performing oral sex on one another.
--:-- Megan Basham: And when you read the book as a whole, it's this really deep, soul-searching narrative about how this person, how the author found themselves as a person. And whether the artistic choices about what to illustrate, whether those artistic choices are ones that everyone agrees on or supports.
--:-- Megan Basham: Nonetheless, there are a great many people who've read the book and found inspiration in it and found that it speaks to them in some way or another. So Friedman feels that a lot of young readers find books like Genderqueer valuable to understanding themselves and he doesn't think it should be kept out of school libraries.
--:-- Megan Basham: But it sounds like a lot of parents feel differently. Yes, they absolutely do. And one mom I talked to, Rachel Reeves, got very deeply involved in this issue, and she ended up launching a popular social media account called Write Books for Kids. And what it does is document the content of some of these controversial books, and then provides parents alternative recommendations.
--:-- Rachel Reeves: Remote learning during the pandemic really raised parents' awareness about how explicit some of the material in these books is. But she also believes that there's a lot more controversial material being introduced to classrooms and school libraries than we saw 10 or 20 years ago.
--:-- Rachel Reeves: The effort is to change conventional reality, to change systems from the ground up. And one way you do that is by inserting these ideologies into the schools, into the text. And it's subliminal at first, and then all of a sudden it's not. And that's what we're seeing within the past couple of years is people just going, wait a second, this isn't just one book being in a library. These are embedded texts within curriculum.
--:-- Rachel Reeves: They are taxpayer-funded institutions pushing narratives. We need to ask why. Who's picking these books? Why. And the next question would be, what is it replacing? And Reeves' last question there about what books are being replaced in the classroom is really significant because schools don't have unlimited time in the class or unlimited shelf space in the library.
--:-- Host (Colton): So that brings us to the flip side of the issue, where conservatives say the classics are being pulled from shelves. So what books is the political left being accused of banning?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, to a large degree, the left is focused on removing older titles due to racial sensitivity. So sort of the mirror image to what we're seeing in Florida, blue states and school districts in, for example, California, have banned teachers from including To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, and several other classic books in their curriculum.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, in these cases, parents and educators have challenged the books over the potential harm they might do to Black students. Huckleberry Finn, for example, includes use of the N-word that administrators say could be traumatizing to Black students.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, the left side of the aisle also has its own influential grassroots movement, though it's largely driven by educators, not parents. And one of those movements is something called disrupt texts. And you may see it often out there with a hashtag, hashtag disrupt texts. And its aim is to do something called decolonize the curriculum.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, what they mean by that is the books that are traditionally taught as classics, think Homer, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Dickens, well, they're all typically white Western men. So men who came from nations that colonized other nations. That's where that name comes from.
--:-- Megan Basham: And they argue that prioritizing those books leaves out minority students. Instead, they've argued that these texts should be replaced with newer, more inclusive books by female authors, LGBTQ authors, and authors of color.
--:-- Megan Basham: So again, They say they're not banning books, but they're curating books for kids, so to speak. This was Tricia Abarvia, co-founder of both Disrupt Texts and the Institute for Racial Equity and Literacy, talking about this in a seminar put on by Penguin Random House.
--:-- Tricia Abarvia: I think what people fail to understand or they try to ignore is the fact that teachers and school districts and departments have always curated, have always made choices based on their professional knowledge about which books to teach, right? These things, these curriculars are not set in stone. Otherwise we would only still be reading white men and we have no women in our curriculum right Like that has to I mean I don't think anyone would agree with that right If you pose that to people you wouldn't, they'd be like, oh, that would be horrible. Of course. So why, but when it comes to race, right? Oh, wait, wait. And that's deep-seated because of the intellectual bias against people of color. And that's a result of imperialism and colonization, right? That's deep-seated.
--:-- Host (Colton): Now, a lot of the media coverage of this has suggested that this issue is pitting educators against parents. How accurate is that?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, it's not completely black and white because a lot of parents have also supported books like Genderqueer, but it's a fairly accurate representation overall, I'd say. So Ibarvia's Disrupt Text co-founder, Lorena Hermann, actually addressed that in this seminar as well.
--:-- Lorena Hermann: And I'll say that after watching a lot of videos of teachers talking about this topic, I think the offense that she takes here at what she sees as the interference of parents in the classroom is representative of a lot of their views.
--:-- Lorena Hermann: The problem is when you've got these vocal parents who without degrees and without experience, and even if they did have it, want to come in and dictate what we're supposed to be doing and teaching as if I'm not a professional, right? As if I'm not equipped to make some of these decisions.
--:-- Lorena Hermann: Because the idea is that because we're including these books, we're somehow bringing down quality of writing. As if to teach Min Jin Lee's novel means now that we're not going to get, right, quality art in writing.
--:-- Lorena Hermann: So there is this bias that exists there in that critique as well that I'm quite frankly just exhausted of hearing.
--:-- Host (Colton): So parents like Reeves pushed back on the notion that it's necessary to replace classic texts. They say that while it's fine to make room for new minority author books, removing Shakespeare and Homer removes not just quality writing, but fundamental foundations to understanding and valuing Western civilization.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, where do groups like FIRE and PEN America think that this book banning war is going to go from here?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, you know, it was interesting talking to both of them because I think PEN tends to be viewed more as a left-wing organization, whereas FIRE is more associated with conservatives. And yet both of them are concerned that these book bans are going to escalate, especially now that political parties have leveraged the issue more than they have in the past with some explicit legislation and policies.
--:-- Megan Basham: So both groups think that that's a problem and they expect a lot of legal challenges to these new state laws. What they're telling me is that it may be years before we see this issue make its way through the courts.
--:-- Megan Basham: In the meantime, McCreeley actually thinks the bans could have the opposite effect. Banning books and burning books since the Roman Empire, all through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. The one thing history showed is that book bans and book burning, it just doesn't work. If anything, it makes the books more interesting to people.
--:-- Megan Basham: And we have to say that there is evidence that that is exactly what's happening. The American Library Association, for instance, publishes this list of top banned books each year. And that has actually paradoxically raised the profile of a lot of these books.
--:-- Megan Basham: So really a lot of competing priorities to weigh and also perhaps some unintended consequences. Right. It's a really thorny issue, but it really gets to the heart of the culture war in a lot of ways.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: My pleasure.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): That was Daily Wire culture reporter, Megan Basham. Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and you stand with our mission, consider subscribing, leaving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.
