July 31st, 2023

For many, reading and writing is inherently a defiant act, even – especially – from a young age. Poet and playwright PJ Gross described a childhood stealing moments of clandestine stories.

“When I was very little, still just practicing the alphabet, my mother would read me a story every night at bedtime. Usually something along the lines of “Big Dog Little Dog,” Gross said.

“My older sister, who got to stay up a half hour later, also got a story. When I would hear my mother go into her room, I would get out of bed and crawl into my closet, sit on the floor with my ear pressed against the wall, and listen to The Chronicles of Narnia in the dark. For me, reading has always been a solitary and secret and potentially dangerous occupation,” she said.

Book bans are nothing new in the United States. In fact, the practice dates to the days of the Puritans, who banned books critical of their policies.

While the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, would-be censors have found territory to remove books they deem unfit: the public school system.

In the twentieth century, school libraries routinely removed titles such as 1984 and the Handmaid’s Tale. At the start of the twenty-first century, religious conservatives rushed to ban J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series over claims it promoted witchcraft; the series remains the most banned of the modern era, according to the American Library Association.

Given this history, a new wave of bans, borne of recent culture wars, should not surprise. Yet, recent activity on this front has been intense and has sparked modern conversations about race, human sexuality, gender identity, and what is appropriate for young learners.

To understand what is happening, I took a deep dive into a data set provided by the free-expression group PEN America, who has been maintaining a list of book removals over the last few years. My transformed data, along with an acknowledgement of its limitations, is here.

Where are bans happening?

Given the proliferation of media coverage, it seems as though book bans are happening everywhere. This is, according to the data of the indexed period, false. Bans have cropped up in 27 states, but the plurality of districts (44%) have removed a single book, while 74% have removed fewer than 5 books. Districts with 25 bans or more are extreme outliers, and research has shown that most challenged books are returned to the shelf after review.

This is not to dismiss the seriousness of book bans, nor the willingness of censors to push their efforts into new territory.

Florida and Texas are leading the charge on this front, where recent state laws have deputized parents and activist groups to challenge the contents of school libraries. Even within these states, bans are localized: a single district makes up 39% of Florida bans while one in Texas accounts for 48% of bans.

In Florida, Moms for Liberty is a Republican affiliated activist group originally formed to challenge covid-era mask and vaccine mandates in public schools. They successfully lobbied Indian River School District, which removed 77 books in November of 2021.

In Texas, state Rep. Jared Patterson (R-Frisco), challenged at least 23 books in Frisco Independent School District. The district reviewed its entire library collection, and removed 107 titles.

Who is being censored?

A clear pattern emerges when reviewing which authors are censored: the majority (65%) are women.

The most banned author in our data set is Ellen Hopkins, who writes young-adult fiction that doesn’t shy away from topics such as drug use and prostitution. Hopkins says some of her books are based on her experiences after her daughter developed a drug problem.

“I’m not there to hurt kids. I’m there to help them,” Hopkins told The Daily Beast in 2022. “I’m there to help them make better choices, better decisions. And that’s my whole point to writing.”

Black writers and those who identify as LGBT are also disproportionately censored.

Statistics indicate that 6.3% of authors in the U.S. are Black, but they constitute 11% of our data set. 22% of writers in the data set publicly identify as LGBT.

Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison, who is Black, has seen her books censored in schools for decades.

“The same sensibilities that informed those people to make it a criminal act for black people to read are the ancestors of the same people who are making it a criminal act for their own children to read,” Morrison said in 1982.

“There is some hysteria associated with the idea of reading that is all out of proportion, to what is in fact happening when one reads,” she said.

What content is being removed?

Reasons for removal remain somewhat murky. Parents or activists may object to a single passage in otherwise uncontroversial books.

Censors claim they are removing pornography; others say they are targeting books that explore racial politics and LGBT themes.

In most districts, where few books are banned, the latter charge rings true. Removing the extreme outliers of Florida and Texas, books exploring those topics comprise 40% of removals.

After Oklahoma passed a law banning Critical Race Theory in schools, one district removed the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

The most banned book is Gender Queer: A Memoir by non-binary author Maia Kobabe. The graphic novel’s audience is listed as 18+ on Amazon, and it contains one illustration that challengers consider obscene. 25 districts have removed the title.

Deciding what teens are mature enough to read, watch, or listen to has always divided the public. While some parents want to shield their children, others see books as a vehicle to guide people into adulthood.

Gross described how reading mature literature as a teen improved her own life.

“By the time I’m taking Driver’s Ed, I’m reading In Cold Blood and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” she said. “I’m writing poetry in marble composition books, and I’m dreaming of a house with its own library. I’m also learning to be brave, learning about other perspectives, learning the subtleties and nuances of language, history, politics.”

Whisker plot showing bans by district. The overwhelming majority of districts have banned 5 or fewer books.

Book bans summarized by theme (left) and by identity of the author (right)