REASON #10,000 WHY I WILL NEVER LEAVE CALIFORNIA
2023 Banned Books Update: Banned in the USA
From PEN America:
During the first half of the 2022-23 school year PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles. This represents an increase from the prior six months, from January to June 2022, in which 1,149 instances of book banning were recorded. Over 4,000 instances of banned books have been recorded since PEN America started tracking book bans in July 2021, affecting 2,253 unique titles. Overall, the bans impact 182 school districts in 37 states and millions of students.
This school year, instances of book bans are most prevalent in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina. These bans are driven by a confluence of local actors and state-level policy. The implications of bans in these five states are far-reaching, as policies and practices are modeled and replicated across the country.
Overwhelmingly, book banners continue to target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. In this six-month period, 30% of the unique titles banned are books about race, racism, or feature characters of color. Meanwhile, 26% of unique titles banned have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.
Due to cases where long lists of books are removed for further investigation, bans this school year are increasingly affecting a wider swath of titles, including those that portray violence and abuse (44%), discuss topics of health and wellbeing (38%), and cover death and grief (30%). This illuminates how censorship impacts a wide array of books, particularly as school districts respond to vague legislation by removing large numbers of books prior to any formal review.
The process behind book challenges and bans is evolving. During the 2021-22 school year, parent-led groups coordinated to advance book censorship. These groups pressured districts to remove books without following their own policies, even in some cases, removing books without reading them. That trend has continued in the 2022-23 school year, but it has also been supercharged by a new source of pressure: state legislation. School districts in many states are reacting to new laws that dictate the types of books that can even be in schools, or what kinds of policies they have to follow to add new books and review their collections.
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“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower
"What I tell kids is, Don't get mad, get even. Don't spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don't walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know.” ―Stephen King
"He who destroys a good book kills reason itself." ― Milton
“All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!” ― Kurt Vonnegut
“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” ―Henry Louis Gates Jr.
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." ― Oscar Wilde
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” ― Ray Bradbury
“The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, cancelled films — that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.” – Toni Morrison
This sends chills down my spine. It should scare the hell out of everyone. What twisted thinking. Protect kids from books but not guns. Of course the fascists who are doing this aren’t really banning books to protect kids, it’s to prevent them from actual learning and to indoctrinate them.