Cheers to the BookTokers, book worms, book lovers, and even actual books–this newsletter is for you.

The subject of book banning is everywhere right now—but for school librarians, it’s more than just a talking point. So in today’s issue, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd spoke to the president of the American Association of School Librarians, Jennisen Lucas, about what it’s like to be on the front lines of this “life-or-death” issue.

We’ve also got Suzan Skaar, a rad librarian from Wyoming, with a personal account of what happened after members of the organization Moms for Liberty challenged books in her Cheyenne school district. “The whole country is divided,” she says, “and Wyoming is no exception.”

Before we dive into all that, a small favor. We’re new here, and we’d love it if you sent this email to a friend, or three! Or pop it in the group chat. Consider it your good deed of the day.

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—Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Former police officer Kim Potter has been sentenced to two years in prison for the 2021 shooting death of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis. Potter was convicted of first and second-degree manslaughter in December after claiming that she had meant to reach for her Taser during her interaction with Wright, whom she’d pulled over for having expired tags and an air freshener dangling from his rearview mirror. Potter “never once said his name,” said Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, before the sentencing. “And for that, I’ll never be able to forgive you. And I’ll never be able to forgive you for what you’ve stolen from us.”

• On Thursday, the Center on Poverty and Social Policy reported that 3.7 million children are now living below the poverty line as a result of the Child Tax Credit Payments expiring in January of this year. The Biden administration implemented the tax credit to help parents during the pandemic (which hasn’t ended, Joseph!). Unsurprisingly, Black and Latinx children and their parents are the most impacted by the loss of the tax credit program.

AND:

• Two transgender swimmers, Lia Thomas and Iszac Henig, won their respective races at the Ivy championships. May their DMs be filled with nothing but gold medal emojis.

• Millennials will be remembered for buying too much avocado toast. But Gen Z’s legacy will be claiming their LGBTQIA identity without fear. They probably still won’t be able to buy a house, though.

• LeVar Burton wants us to read banned books, so guess what we’re doing.

• Kim and Kanye have been unavoidable this last week, and while there are a lot of layers to that particular bean dip, one thing must be said: abuse takes many forms. Using social media to target, harass, and belittle the mother of one’s children is one of them.

—SM

LIBRARIANS AT WORK

What Are Book Bans Doing to Kids? 

“It leads to ‘I’m all alone’ kind of thinking”

BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

SOME CLASSIC READS ARE BEING CHALLENGED BY MOMS FOR LIBERTY, A GROUP BENT ON LIMITING THE LIBERTIES OF KIDS WHO JUST WANT TO READ. (PHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

The image above depicts just a few of the books that have been banned or challenged over the last few years, though today, some are considered cornerstones of American literature. And now in  2022, the censors are back at it, with legislators, school officials, and parents across the country engaged in a new, frenzied effort to ban certain book titles from school libraries.

These ban attempts often cite “pornographic material” as their concern, but in reality, work to suppress certain points of view: The book Gender Queer, for instance, an illustrated memoir by nonbinary author Maia Kobabe, has been especially targeted in the last year, as have books like Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, which deals with police brutality, and George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, about growing up queer and Black. And last month, a Tennessee school board banned Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a canonical graphic novel about the Holocaust, citing cursing and the apparently objectionable nudity of cartoon mice.

Many of these challenges have been spearheaded by members of Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization championing “parental rights.” (There is, hearteningly, a counterinsurgency of suburban moms called Book Ban Busters.) And while bans have been most successful in conservative states like Florida and Texas, books have also been challenged in nearly every state in the country, turning typically sleepy school board meetings into hotbeds of right-wing grievance.

I spoke with Jennisen Lucas, president of the American Association of School Librarians, an organization on the front lines.

Book bans and challenges are happening across the country. What are your broad, bird’s-eye-view thoughts about what’s been going on? 

Jennisen Lucas: This is, to me, extremely concerning [because] it’s so widespread and so large. At the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of School Librarians, we’re trying to figure out, “How do we work with this at this huge large scale?” We definitely stand against censorship; we stand for intellectual freedom and the idea that students have the right to decide what they’re reading. [But conservatives] have branded ALA as being a very liberal organization and not somebody that you want to listen to. So how do we motivate people to say that there are definitely a lot of people out there who don’t think that we should be banning books?

We tend to go with the idea that parents should be talking to their children about what they’re reading and not whole-scale trying to remove things from them. And then the fact that [the bans are] very specifically targeted: they’re targeting LGBTQ, they are targeting race. So it’s a challenge to erase those voices. And that’s not something that is really good for our constitutional republic.

Most of this seems to come from Moms for Liberty, which consists of parents and seems extremely well-funded.

It’s definitely a very well-funded and well-organized movement. But they are approaching this as, let’s get people riled up so that they go and talk to their school boards themselves. [The ALA says], Well, you do have rights for your kid, and when a parent comes to a librarian and says, “Hey, I’m concerned that my child should not be reading this,” we back the parent up. That’s their prerogative as a parent.

The issue gets much bigger when it’s like, “No. I need that removed because I don’t think any kids should have access to that.” And we’re also being hit with a lot of varying definitions because people are coming in with, “Oh, that’s pornographic.” For most of them, this is normal teenage activity and has been for generations.

We definitely stand against censorship; we stand for intellectual freedom and the idea that students have the right to decide what they’re reading.

When you think about the books that have been banned—books like Gender Queer or The Hate U Give—it seems like they’re not just targeting whatever they think might be salacious material. They’re targeting specific identities in children. 

What we’re seeing as a national trend is a conflation between “pornography” and LGBTQIA+. Even if there is not any sex at all in the book, [book banners are] still claiming pornography because that’s not what they approve of as a society. Part of [our] concern is that the conversation itself is harmful to our students that identify in any of those categories; that when they’re hearing people say, “Hey, this is pornographic, and this is not acceptable, and this is just disgusting”—and these are some of the words that are coming from parents—that is not good for the mental health of our students.

Each of our students needs to be able to see themselves in books and have that representation. It’s extremely important, and personally, to me, this is a life-or-death situation for some of our kids. If they are completely turned off from and denied access to materials like that, it leads to “I’m all alone” kind of thinking, which is a precursor to severe depression and suicidal thoughts.

I wanted to ask you about that—I feel like we’re having this national conversation about politics, but the actual students and how they feel are getting lost. 

I have talked to my students about this, and it’s interesting to watch them get heated up about it. Especially our high school kids, who are preparing for adulthood and are in that situation where today I’m 17 and a minor and tomorrow’s my birthday. You’re at that cusp of legally being able to do all of this stuff on your own. They almost feel micromanaged.

But the number of students around the country who are forming banned book clubs who are standing up and speaking at school board meetings—it’s all [types of students, even if they don’t identify as LGBTQ or BIPOC]. Books with LGBTQ content, books talking about race, and the history of race are for all kids. Everybody needs to be able to see that perspective.

CHEYENNE, WYOMING

Report from a Red State Librarian

A CONVERSATION WITH SUZAN SKAAR, BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

LET THE TEENS READ! (PHOTO BY JOHN KEEBLE VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

So how does it feel to be a librarian in one of the schools Jennisen Lucas describes? Suzan Skaar, a librarian at South High School in Cheyenne, Wyoming, knows. 

Last December, books by two authors—Tiffany D. Jackson and Ellen Hopkins—were challenged in Cheyenne by local members of Moms for Liberty. Though the upset seems to have died down now, it alarmed members of the school district, including teachers and librarians. Skaar talked to us about what it was like to be a school librarian at the center of one of these challenges. 

The whole country is divided, and Wyoming is no exception.

Right now, there are seven certified secondary librarians in Cheyenne—we’re a pretty tight group. [Before the local book challenges], we worked with our new superintendent, and we prepared some information to put on the district homepage about book selection and how you can challenge books, that kind of thing. We’re lucky enough to have a really good board policy around selection and collection development. So we kind of met it head-on, in a very subtle way.

What they were specifically challenging was Ellen Hopkins; she writes about issues kids are influenced by or have to deal with in their lives. [Hopkins’ YA novel Traffick focuses on the lives of five teens who escaped sex trafficking.] And, and so for some reason, they picked on her—well, she’s always picked on, she’s probably one of the most likely authors to be challenged. Then they picked up on Tiffany D. Jackson, and I spent Christmas break reading all of her novels. She’s a Black American author who writes about social issues that are really close to more urban-area Black teens, but they’re things that my kids identify with. [They’re so popular that] I can’t keep them on the shelf; I had to actually go read the books from the state app because all of my books were checked out over Christmas.

My [own] kids are gonna read what I want them to read, but you can’t influence what my kids read—we all get to do that for ourselves.

[After the initial objections at the December board meeting], our superintendent asked us, “So how many of you have had a request for the form to start a challenge process?” And not one of us had received an official challenge from the community. That just makes you wonder: it’s a national trend, but is it just a lot of yelling, or is it really a concern?

I don’t believe that in a democracy, this should even be an issue. In Wyoming, we’re a little bit of “live and let live,” you know. “My kids are gonna read what I want them to read, but you can’t influence what my kids read—we all get to do that for ourselves.”

I want to tell you something that happened this morning. We had a pep assembly, and we had a bunch of kids that didn’t want to go, so I let them come in here. And one little girl was looking around, and I said, “Can I help you find something?” and she said she wanted to look for a specific mental health disorder. So we went to the catalog, and I showed her how to look for it… and took her to the section. And her eyes strayed from the Mental Health section and went straight to LGBTQ Nonfiction. She said, “Oh my god, do you have this book? Can you have this book in this state?” And I said, “Well, so far, we do. I purchased [it] for our students because there’s a high interest in that topic and a lot of questions.” And she grabbed it—I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book, This Book Is Gay—and she goes, “Forget about the mental health. I’m checking out this one.”

I have trust and hope in the generation coming up. They’re more savvy about how to deal with all the information that’s thrown at them.

WE’VE GOT A QUESTION FOR YOU

Did you read in school? Of course you did! What’s a book you remember reading that might be banned now and what did you get out of reading it? Tell us at [email protected], and we’ll feature a few of your responses in a future newsletter.

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