Rising book bans: Grounds for moral panic?
Whether it’s the depiction in “Maus” of the Holocaust, the discussion about puberty in “It’s Perfectly Normal,” the LGBTQ perspective presented in “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” or the presence of “The Bluest Eye” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in the high school canon, books in schools and libraries nationwide increasingly have targets on their spines.
Experts say the challenges – fanned by the heated online “outrage ecosystem” – are growing exponentially. Last year, reports the American Library Association, brought the highest number of reported book challenges it has tallied in a decade.
Though the full year has not been finalized, there were roughly 476 challenges between September and the end of 2021, compared with 377 total in 2019, the last year schools and libraries were fully open before the pandemic, says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
However, caution library scholars, clashes over books, not deliberative conversations make the news. But that doesn’t mean those conversations aren’t taking place in communities across the nation, with challenges resolved or compromises forged before they erupt in acrimonious headlines.
Ten years ago, challenges “were very local,” says Ms. Caldwell-Stone. What happened in one school district did not significantly affect what happened elsewhere.
