Book Riot 
‘Tis the season of reflection. Last year at this time, instead of looking back at 2022 in the rearview and teasing out some of the big stories or themes, I put together a guide to setting anti-censorship resolutions. Given what we know about how the landscape has changed over the last 12 months, it’s important to both sit down and draft your goals for the coming year and to do so with an eye toward what happened this year. Let’s take a look back.
Lawsuits
The first lawsuit over book bans hit Escambia County, Florida, schools in May of 2023. Since then, several others have been filed across the country. The Escambia lawsuits will be heard in 2024 and will play a significant role in the future of book bans.
Legislature
Illinois became the first state to ban book bans. The language around this bill is a little lofty, as the bill does not ban book bans but incentivizes libraries to include the Library Bill of Rights or similar intellectual freedom statements in their policies. Still, it set a powerful standard, and several other states have put forward anti-censorship bills.
At the same time, several other states have introduced bills that would make book bans easier — including in several of the states where anti-censorship bills are being considered (among them are Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania).
Two bills aiming to amplify anti-book ban work have landed in U.S. Congress this year as well and will be under consideration in the new year: the Books Save Lives Act and the Fight Book Bans Act.
The House of Representatives will take up another anti-censorship bill in 2024, the Prison Libraries Act. U.S. Representatives Emanuel Cleaver, II (D-MO), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), and Shontel Brown (D-OH) have introduced a bill that would expand prison libraries and open up opportunities for those experiencing incarceration to better themselves. This bill would authorize $60,000,000 over six years for state prisons to provide library resources and services — indeed, this isn’t just about dropping tons of books into the prisons and moving on. Trained professionals would be there to help people use the educational and entertainment resources. The Act would also help build powerful coalitions between prisons and the local libraries in their community.
Federal Hearings
Two different federal subcommittees heard from stakeholders across the country on the status of book bans in the U.S. A Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Hearing in October of this year that included panelists representing a majority of pro-book banning members.A September 2023 U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing that included a performance by Senator John Kennedy giving a dramatic reading of Gender Queer that became an (unbearable) meme and talking point.
Anti-Censorship Wins at the Polls
There was a lot of celebration in November when the bulk of the candidates Moms For Liberty endorsed in local school board elections were not elected. This isn’t the interesting story — just the most headline-worthy and one which has inaccurately described the outcome as the end of censorship (the fact a founder but former active member of the group has been caught in a sex scandal isn’t it, either, despite the headlines).
The real story is how many people showed up to the polls to ensure that school boards were stacked with people who actually care about the educational needs of the students and who want to make sure educators are able to do their jobs, too.
People also showed up for public libraries. After being defunded multiple times, the Patmos Public Library in Jamestown, Michigan, won their millage in the midterm elections, and Pella Public Library in Pella, Iowa, won a very close election that would have handed control of the library to the city.
Librarians Are Leaving the Field — Or Being Forced Out
Unfortunately, it might have been too late for many librarians, who are leaving the field amid several factors. Three of the biggest? A lack of support for their work, book bans, and the daily barrage of name-calling they encounter from small pockets of their community (and larger pockets of the internet and right-wing instigators). Read Florida librarian Tania Galiñanes’s story here and the stories of Missouri school librarians here. You’ll also want to read Elissa Myers’s story of being queer in a public library where LGBTQ+ content was targeted — and why she is no longer at that job.
Although the above departures are emblematic of a larger trend, in other cases, librarians have been forced out of their jobs for standing up for intellectual freedom. Former library director Patty Hector used her firing from the Saline County Library in Arkansas to launch a campaign for a spot on the very quorum court that allowed her to be fired in the first place. Campbell County, Wyoming, fired their director this year, too — years into the book ban fight plaguing the board and community. It was not met with cheers by those at the meeting.
More Groups Doing More Good Work
This year marked the launch of EveryLibrary’s powerful, free organizing tool, Fight for the First. It has been a resource utilized by dozens of grassroots anti-censorship groups to coordinate how to protect the freedom to read in their own communities while tapping the knowledge and resources of those doing similar work across the country.
Among some of the new groups are the Texas Freedom to Read Project and several student-led anti-censorship groups, including the work that Central York’s PARU group needed to do again to end book bans in their school.
As nice as it is to get good PR for sending books to beleaguered states — and there is a lot of media ink spilled on these efforts for “little banned book buses” and similar — these efforts do not create long-lasting change. They are not enshrining the rights of all to access materials, and many continue to promote the idea only a handful of titles are those that are banned. The reality is we need people on the ground and in meeting rooms demanding better. We need to understand that 86% of the books banned in schools in the last year were “only” banned in 1 or 2 schools. That is a lot of books, and most never get a lick of attention. Often, the authors don’t even know the books they wrote for children or teenagers are banned from them.
Groups like these do the hard work and are eager to have you join them in their efforts.
More public libraries offered digital access to banned books this year, too. Though not a solution to the bigger systemic issues — something they’d agree with! — it is a more far-reaching avenue for access.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
This list but scratches the surface. It doesn’t touch on the ways that publishers like Brave Books have perpetrated several campaigns to directly attack public libraries, either via “conservative story times” coordinated across the country or lies about school book fairs that conveniently led to them creating their own “alternate” book fairs via SkyTree.
It doesn’t touch upon the lies perpetrated by groups like Moms For Liberty lie about the provenance of BookLook/BookLooks, the lies they’ve spread via a chapter-created “playbook” for banning books that omits crucial parental rights granted to them via a public school teacher, the clever framing of a political cartoon that criticizes them to make them look like protectors of children and not victimizers of them, and Groups that aren’t Moms For Liberty — remember, they’re big not doing this alone, and they may not even be the biggest — have taken to lying by omission, too. It’s the book banner way since our laws about obscenity do not meet their agenda. The Miller Test uses “as a whole” twice in its 60-some words. It doesn’t matter, though, when the manufactured outrage can own the entire news cycle.
Also not mentioned are the ways that folks are cashing in big from book bans. Nothing says America quite like revoking foundational rights and “developing” a solution for folks to navigate them.
We haven’t touched on the wave of bomb threats to public libraries, either, nor the incredible increases in book bans in schools over the last year and the trends that show book bans beget more book bans.
And while the responses to the trio of surveys on parental perceptions of libraries run by Book Riot and the EveryLibrary Institute show that the lies being perpetrated are having an impact, these surveys showed something else: the vast majority of people trust librarians, disagree with book bans, and feel safe in libraries.
Equally important is the tension in the results of those surveys where we find opportunity. What can we do to counter those lies and combat mis-, dis-, and mal- information?
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