banning books essay titles

Who’s Behind the Escalating Push to Ban Books? A New Report Has Answers

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Updated : This article has been updated to reflect MassResistance’s opposition to its characterization by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As book bans in schools across the country escalate, a handful of right-wing activist organizations and Republican lawmakers are behind them, putting pressure on districts to ban books about and by LGBTQ people and people of color.

That’s according to a new report by PEN America , a free speech advocacy organization. The groups pushing for books to be taken off library shelves and removed from the curriculum in school districts range from national advocacy groups with several branches across the country, including Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and MassResistance, to local-level Facebook groups. Together they are responsible for at least half of all bans, PEN America found.

The report identifies at least 50 different groups involved in local and state-level efforts to ban books, some with hundreds of chapters. Most of these groups have sprung up since 2021, when the current wave of objecting to books about LGBTQ people and people of color first started.

During the 2021-22 school year, nearly 140 school districts in 32 states banned more than 2,500 books, PEN America found. The latest report is an update to the one the organization released in April , and not only shows the escalating numbers of bans, but the organized efforts behind them.

The book bans represent an immense increase in the number of books banned compared with any previous years and are part of the larger movement to restrict classroom conversations and lessons about race, racism, gender identity, and sexual orientation that has been led by Republican lawmakers and conservative parent groups since 2021.

Twenty percent of all book bans over the past year were directly linked to the actions of these groups, with many more likely influenced by them, according to PEN America. That percentage is based on an analysis of news and publicly available information, such as statements at school board meetings or lists of books parents want banned.

In many of these cases, the advocacy groups also publicized their role in pushing for book removals. In an additional 30 percent of bans, there is some other evidence of the groups’ likely influence, including the use of common language or tactics, such as circulating a list of books that have been banned in other districts for parents to raise objections against.

“These groups probably do not necessarily represent a range of beliefs from our democracy,” said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America and author of the report. “So they’re having an outsized impact in a lot of places on what it is that everybody gets to read. And that, I think, is what’s most concerning.”

For his part, Brian Camenker, Executive Director of one of those groups, MassResistance, said he thinks free speech groups such as PEN America are “on the wrong side of history.”

He said that most books parents are complaining about and trying to get banned contain inappropriate sexual material, and that no one should be advocating for pornography in school libraries.

The pornography descriptor has been used across the country to describe books with LGBTQ themes and characters, and many librarians have refuted that claim.

“The LGBT issues, this is not necessarily a healthy behavior for libraries to be promoting on kids. And, and all of them, every one that I see involves sexuality,” he said. “The question isn’t really, who would want to ban these books, but the question is, who would want them?”

MassResistance was classified as an anti-LGBTQ+ “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center , but the organization refutes that characterization.

PEN America also estimated that at least 40 percent of the bans are linked to political pressure exerted by state officials or elected lawmakers.

For example, South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster wrote a letter last year asking the state department of education to investigate Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel on queer identity being available at a school’s library, calling it “sexually explicit” and “pornographic.”

“What we started to see was a picture of not just book banning, but a movement behind it,” Friedman said. “In a huge number of cases, these were not individuals who were responding to just a book their own child brought home, but they were people who had lists of books they had gotten online.”

From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America found 2,532 instances of individual books being banned from schools, affecting 1,648 different book titles. Forty-one percent of banned books—or 674 titles—explicitly address LGBTQ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who are LGBTQ, the report says. Forty percent feature protagonists or secondary characters of color, and 21 percent of all banned titles directly address race and racism.

In the 2022-23 school year, book bans don’t seem to be slowing down. PEN America found at least 139 additional book bans that have taken effect since July 2022.

The most frequently banned books are Kobabe’s Gender Queer, which has been banned in 41 districts, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, banned in 29 districts, and Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez, banned in 24 districts.

Once a book is challenged, administrators often don’t ask if the book has been read or support the discretion of their professional librarians, they just remove the book to avoid further controversy, Friedman said his reading of the research showed.

Camenker from MassResistance disagreed, saying it is very hard in his experience for parents to get books removed from libraries if they raise objections to them, even after reading excerpts from these books at public meetings, because of the policies districts have in place.

Districts often have policies in place if a parent wants to challenge a book or keep their child from reading it, but this is not the system most of the advocacy groups or politicians have been following, according to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

“What’s truly needed right now is for individuals to step up and support their libraries, both in schools and in public libraries,” she said.

“We need to counter this vocal minority that seems to have an outsized place on the stage and push back on the idea that having the government tell you what to think or what to read or limit what you think or read to a particular agenda imposed by an advocacy group,” Caldwell-Stone said.

An ALA report from last week also documents an increase in book bans and the larger role of right-wing advocacy groups in organizing parents to challenge books that contain characters or references to LGBTQ people and people of color.

That organization identified 681 challenges to books through the first eight months of this year, involving 1,651 titles.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Banned Books — Banned Books: Unveiling the Most Banned Titles

Banned Books: Unveiling The Most Banned Titles

• Categories: Banned Books Freedom of Expression

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Words: 923 |

Published: Sep 16, 2023

Words: 923 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Understanding the banned book phenomenon, the most banned books: a closer look, the broader implications of banning books, the paradox of banned books, preserving intellectual freedom, conclusion: the power of literature and the freedom to explore, 1. offensive content:, 2. political or ideological concerns:, 3. religious sensitivities:, 4. social justice and controversial themes:, 5. age appropriateness:, 1. "to kill a mockingbird" by harper lee:, 2. "the catcher in the rye" by j.d. salinger:, 3. "1984" by george orwell:, 4. "the adventures of huckleberry finn" by mark twain:, 5. "the harry potter series" by j.k. rowling:, 6. "brave new world" by aldous huxley:, 7. "beloved" by toni morrison:, 8. "the great gatsby" by f. scott fitzgerald:, 1. suppression of free expression:, 2. preservation of ignorance:, 3. cultural impact:, 4. loss of artistic and literary value:.

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Policy briefs

Social Policy

Banned Books: Are Schools Erasing History?

Starting with movements from religious leaders, the censorship of media has been debated for all of American history. Including discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and obscenity, the banning of books in the U.S. has continued in various school districts and libraries. The First Amendment’s right to free speech has attempted to combat the effects of censorship, specifically with books, but efforts to keep books with various values have prevailed.

Published by ‍

Gracie Adams

Aneesh mazumder, allison fecke, valeria velez, sydney rehm.

January 2, 2023

At YIP, nuanced policy briefs emerge from the collaboration of six diverse, nonpartisan students.

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Control is a comfort. Rules, restrictions, and guidelines escort tasks to be done and retain  order.  It is not uncommon for humans to seek consolation in our blinders, for many believe that what we cannot see will not affect us. Censorship is a term that has various definitions. 

In the broadest sense, censorship is the suppression of information, ideas, or opinions. The effects of censorship are found in all kinds of communication, from digital to print. Arguments over the ethics of censorship have become more frequent over the last century.  Is it a breach of our rights or a safeguard for our well-being? In the United States, book banning has become a very widespread form of censorship.

For the purposes of this brief, book banning is defined as “a form of censorship that occurs when private individuals, government officials, or organizations remove books from libraries, school reading lists or bookstore shelves because they object to their content, ideas, or themes.”

The first book bans were spurred by religious leaders. By the time American colonies were founded, Great Britain had a long history of book censorship. The first known event of such in America is when The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption was published, a pamphlet arguing that anyone obedient to God and Christian teachings on Earth could get into heaven.

The pamphlet was abrasively against Puritan Calvinist beliefs, so much so that there was a widespread book burning. There are only four known copies of the pamphlet that still exist today. Probably the largest spike in the censorship of public books took place in the first half of the 19th century.

At the time, any books about the enslavement of people raised emotions. By the middle of the century, many states passed laws against any materials expressing anti-slavery sentiments. As one example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was publicly burned and banned by slave owners. A free black minister, Sam Green, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for owning the book.

Later, the war against books took an enticing shift and rose to the federal level with the passage of the Comstock Act, a congressional law that made it illegal to possess “obscene” or “immoral” texts or articles or send them through the mail.

Anthony Comstock, the champion of this act, attested that the laws were created to ban content to do with sexuality and birth control. This led to the criminalization of the activities of birth control advocates, forcing popular pamphlets such as Family Limitation by Margaret Sager underground at a time when knowledge of contraception was scarce. 

In Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v Pico (1982), a constitutional appeal to a local school board's decision to remove certain books from the district's school libraries was heard by the Supreme Court. Students sued the school board after finding many books removed from the library, including works by acclaimed authors such as Richard Wright and Kurt Vonnegut.

The committee   described the books as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” The school board faced criticism after students argued for their First Amendment rights violations. In the end, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 and decided that public schools can ban books that are overtly vulgar or inappropriate for the curriculum, but not books simply because they disagree with the literature’s ideas. 

In the years following this case and its aftermath, book bans have taken on a new level. From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 occurrences of individual books being banned, including 1,648 unique titles. These books were the works of 1,261 different authors, 290 illustrators, and 18 translators, culminating to the creative work of 1,569 different people altogether.

Changes in Policy

The legal history of banned books is brief. For many years, the First Amendment served as a blanket argument in opposition of censorship. Yet, in recent decades, many have attempted to poke holes in the blanket, pulling on loose constitutional threads. While the First Amendment seems simple, after decades of judicial interpretation, it has come to mean much more.

Evolving past the basic protection of the right to speak, Free Speech now stands as a protection for the dissemination and reception of information in any form it may take. An evolution that has transpired due to various courts having unanimously agreed that access to information precedes and enables speech, thus protection of speech must also protect what precedes it.

An idea cemented in the case of Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico. Board of Education v. Pico was centered around the Island Trees School District’s decision to remove several controversial books from their school’s library. Books including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which were removed for being “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy .”

Their removal, amongst others, sparked outrage among students, who began to rally and sued the school board for infringing upon their First Amendment rights. The principal and concluding opinion was that “the right to receive ideas is a necessary predicate to the recipient’s meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom ,” and as such information could not be censored based on “narrowly partisan and political grounds .”

Censoring information with the intent to hide an opposing viewpoint and alter students’ perspectives is considered unconstitutional. Yet, there was a loose thread in this conclusion. 

While books could not be removed for partisan and political reasons, no mention was made of books being removed for other reasons. Thus, arose the idea of book removal based on community standards. If community standards deemed a book too obscene it could be subject to censorship .

Community standards as a legal idea were established in Miller v. California , which sought to establish a definition of “obscenity” for legal procedure. The result of Miller v. California as it pertains to the case of banned books is that there is no national standard for “obscenity.” Rather, it is left up to individual communities.

As such, locals could push for the removal of books based on the idea of community standards. While Board of Education v. Pico deals with the removal of books in schools and public institutions, it does not limit an individual from bringing a banned book to those institutions.

Currently, there exists no legislation that outright bans students from reading certain books, but past cases such as Tinker v. Des Moines give institutions greater power to do so. Schools are permitted to ban books from being brought on campus if they believe it will disrupt the learning environment. 

This legal history has positioned the argument of banned books to be one centered around whether it is more important to maintain community standards or the meaningful exercise of free speech. In the past year, there has been an increase in the number of advocacy groups seeking to regulate books .

What were previously small movements enacted by concerned parents have evolved to well-resourced coordinated campaigns — an important transition to note, as it has changed the nature of the movement. Community standards are being redefined, no longer reflecting the community as a whole, but rather the interests of individual groups.

Often these groups are found in conservative towns, and reflect conservative perspectives, meaning their interests match up with community standards. Yet, there is always apprehension when great power is concentrated in the hands of one group.

These groups include organizations such as Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn. Their efforts are concentrated on removing books that cause conflict in the classroom. This means removing books dealing with racism, homosexuality, and politics.

These groups maintain that their focus is not erasing history but lessening divides. Parents Defending Education state that they oppose “idea laundering” where ideas of “oppressor vs oppressed” and “privilege walks” enter the classroom and create distrust and confusion . This is the common thought in book-banning groups spearheaded by parents, not repressing information but regaining parental authority. 

On the opposing side there are organizations such as the American Library Association, #FReadom, and the National Coalition Against Censorship, who oppose book banning in any form and for any reason. These organizations, much like Justice Brennan, believe that freedom of ideas is integral to the meaningful exercise of speech and politics.

These groups argue that by limiting them in the school environment, one limits the very mission of education: individual thinking . Furthermore, they believe that the censorship of books is the censorship of history and marginalized communities, as the books most often targeted by bans are those of oppression, persecution, racism, gender inequality, sexuality, and injustice.

The banning signaling to marginalized students that their school is unwilling to foster inclusivity, rather continuing a cycle of ignorance and isolation. 

Ostracizing minorities from their peers, while they fail to educate their peers beyond a white-washed heteronormative narrative . While these groups may seem at odds in their missions, the reality is that both seek to create the most conducive environment for students’ growth, albeit through different means. 

Policies Regarding Banned Books

There have been several communities with policies for book banning. In regard to the legality of book banning, according to MTSU, censorship of any kind violates the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

But courts have told public officials throughout the country that they may “take community standards into account when deciding whether materials are obscene” and subject to censor. These rules do not, however, apply to publications by generally accepted authors, like Mark Twain, Judy Blume, or R.L. Stine.

The Supreme Court in the 1982 case Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico ruled 5-4 that public schools can ban books that are vulgar, but cannot ban books “simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” This decision only applies to the removal of books from the shelves of school libraries.

In terms of specific cases, in July, the Central Bucks School Board in Pennsylvania voted 6-3 to put a policy in place to keep books deemed “inappropriate” out of school libraries. The policy allows community members to challenge books they find inappropriate to then remove from shelves.

The move was seen as unprecedented for Pennsylvania according to the American Library Association, and approximately 100 community members protested the policy. The policy is vague and has left many librarians and teachers wondering which books they can ask to be approved. Additionally, the Nixa School Board in Missouri voted in May to restrict access to three books from their district, citing sexual content.

All three books, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto, and Homegoing are queer memoirs. “Homegoing” was restricted, and the other two were banned. Six other books were also banned more recently, including Looking for Alaska by John Green and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Throughout history, books with topics such as racism, homosexuality, and politics have been removed from school libraries, introducing the question of censorship.

Varying in moral reasoning and obscenity, books such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Richard Wright’s Black Boy have been regarded as not valuable for children to read, the reasoning from supporters being the idea that parents should be allowed to choose what topics their children are learning about.

Lately, the debate about inappropriate books has been revitalized, as shown by organizations such as Moms for Liberty, a group that advocates for removing books that lead to conflict in the classroom.

On the opposing side, those who disagree with the banning of books argue that the censorship of difficult topics in schools violates the First Amendment and erases vital history. The debate over censorship of controversial topics is ongoing, all centering around what will most benefit the environment for students to learn effectively. 

Acknowledgment

The Institute for Youth in Policy wishes to acknowledge Lucas Yang, Elizabeth Miller, Nolan Ezzet, Carlos Bindert, and other contributors for developing and maintaining the Policy Department within the Institute.

Works Cited

• Webb, Susan L. “Book Banning | The First Amendment Encyclopedia.” Middle Tennessee State University, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/986/book-banning. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Crown, Daniel. “The Price of Suffering: William Pynchon and The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.” The Public Domain Review, 11 November 2015, https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-price-of-suffering-william-pynchon-and-the-meritorious-price-of-our-redemption. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Roberta, G. “Ohio State journal (Columbus, Ohio : 1849 : Weekly), 1857-06-17 - Ohio State Journal -.” Ohio Memory -, https://www.ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p16007coll22/id/6991. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Burnette, Brandon R. “Comstock Act of 1873 | The First Amendment Encyclopedia.” Middle Tennessee State University, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1038/comstock-act-of-1873. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• “BOARD OF EDUCATION, ISLAND TREES UNION FREE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 26 et al., Petitioners, v. Steven A. PICO, by his next friend Frances Pico et al.” Law.Cornell.Edu, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/457/853. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Desai, Anuj C. “Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico.” Middle Tennessee State University, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/103/board-of-education-island-trees-union-free-school-district-v-pico. Accessed 27 November 2022
• PEN America. Index of School Book Bans. Google Sheets. 2021.
• Brennan, William J. “Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico by Pico.” Oyez, 2 March 1982, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1981/80-2043. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Hudson, David L. “First Amendment Right to Receive Information and Ideas Justifies Citizens' Videotaping of the Police.” University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016, p. 4, https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/First-Amendment-Right-to-Receive-Information-and-Ideas-Justifies.pdf
• Dahl, Richard. “Book Banning Efforts Are on the Rise. What Does the Law Say?” FindLaw, 6 January 2022, https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/book-banning-efforts-are-on-the-rise-what-does-the-law-say/. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Stewart, Potter. “Miller v. California :: 413 U.S. 15 (1973).” Justia US Supreme Court, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/413/15/. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• “Facts and Case Summary - Tinker v. Des Moines.” U.S. Courts, https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/facts-and-case-summary-tinker-v-des-moines. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Chavez, Nicole. “At Least 50 Groups in the U.S. Advocated Banning Books This Year.” The Advocate, 20 September 2022, https://www.advocate.com/news/2022/9/20/least-50-groups-us-advocated-banning-books-year. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• “About.” Parents Defending Education, https://defendinged.org/about/. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Willhoite, Michael. “Counterpoint: Book Censorship can be Justified in Some Cases.” Anderson School District One, https://www.anderson1.org/cms/lib04/SC01000609/Centricity/Domain/1318/Book%20Censorship%20Counterpoint.pdf. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Quinones, Erica. “Banning books in schools is a harmful, exclusionary practice – The Elm.” Description, 11 February 2022, https://blog.washcoll.edu/wordpress/theelm/2022/02/banning-books-in-schools-is-a-harmful-exclusionary-practice/. Accessed 27 November 2022.
• Rizzo, Emily. “Central Bucks passes book policy some view as a book ban.” WHYY, 27 July 2022, https://whyy.org/articles/central-bucks-schools-book-ban-policy/. Accessed 5 December 2022.
• “Nixa school board bans books amid contentious meeting.” Springfield News-Leader, 12 May 2022, https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/education/2022/05/12/nixa-school-board-bans-books-amid-contentious-meeting/9708200002/. Accessed 5 December 2022.

Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-and-woman-reading-a-book-4861355/

Policy Brief Authors

Lead Analyst, Social Policy

Gracie Adams is a junior at Park Hill High School. She is involved in the speech and debate team at her school, is a policy fellow for Encode Justice, and plans to study environmental science in college. In her free time, she enjoys writing and reading.

Social Policy Lead

Aneesh is a Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science senior and a social policy analyst at the Institute of Youth In Policy (YIP). As the former Policy Debate Lead for Grapevine High School, he is an avid, multi-format (TFA and UIL) state-qualified debater who seeks to leverage neuroscience and public policy for holistically addressing patients' needs.

Allison is a high school sophomore located in the suburbs of Chicago. She is an avid runner, reader, and student. She is an advocate for civil rights and aspires to be a lawyer for the ACLU.

Social Policy Intern

Sydney Rehm is a student at the University of Mississippi studying Arabic, International Studies, and Intelligence and Security Studies. Outside of school, she likes to dance, read, play clarinet, listen to international politics podcasts, and play with her cat, Ivy.

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Banned and Challenged: Restricting access to books in the U.S.

Perspective, ashley hope pérez: 'young people have a right' to stories that help them learn.

Ashley Hope Pérez

Author Ashley Hope Pérez wrote Out of Darkness, which is on the American Library Association's lists of most banned books. Kaz Fantone/NPR hide caption

Author Ashley Hope Pérez wrote Out of Darkness, which is on the American Library Association's lists of most banned books.

This essay by Ashley Hope Pérez is part of a series of interviews with — and essays by — authors who are finding their books being challenged and banned in the U.S.

For over a decade, I lived my professional dream. I spent my days teaching college literature courses and writing novels. I regularly visited schools as an author and got to meet teens who reminded me of the students I taught in Houston — the amazing humans who had first inspired me to write for young adults.

Then in 2021, my dream disintegrated into an author and educator's nightmare as my novel Out of Darkness became a target for politically motivated book bans across the country.

Book News & Features

Efforts to ban books jumped an 'unprecedented' four-fold in 2021, ala report says.

Author Interviews

Banned books: author ashley hope pérez on finding humanity in the 'darkness'.

Attacks unfolded, not just on my writing but also on young people's right to read it. Hate mail and threats overwhelmed the inboxes where I once had received invitations for author visits and appreciative notes from readers. At the beginning of 2021, Out of Darkness had been on library shelves for over five years without a single challenge or complaint. As we reach the end of 2022, it has been banned in at least 29 school districts across the country.

From the earliest stages of writing, I knew Out of Darkness would be difficult — for me, and for readers. I drew my inspiration for the novel from an actual school disaster: the 1937 New London school explosion that killed hundreds in an East Texas oil town just 20 minutes from my childhood home. This tragic but little-known historical event serves as the backdrop for a fictional star-crossed romance between a Black teenager and a young Latina who has just arrived in the area.

As I researched the novel, I imagined the explosion as its most devastating event. But to engage honestly with the realities of the time and of my characters' lives, I had to grapple with systemic racism, personal prejudice, sexual abuse and domestic violence. As I wrote, the teenagers' circumstances began to tighten, noose-like, around their lives and love, leading to still more tragedy. I sought to show the depths of harm inflicted on some in this country without sensationalizing that history. The book portrays friendship, loving family, community and healthy relationships because they, too, are part of the characters' world. Then, as now, young people struggle mightily for joy, love and dignity.

When Out of Darkness was first published, I braced for objections. Would readers recoil from the harshness of my characters' realities? Or would they recognize how the novel invites connections between those realities and an ongoing reckoning with racialized violence and police brutality? To my relief, the novel received glowing reviews, earned multiple literary awards, and was named to "best of the year" lists by Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal . It appeared on reading lists across the country as a recommendation for ambitious young readers ready to face disquieting aspects of the American experience.

So it went until early 2021. In the wake of the 2020 presidential elections, right-wing groups pivoted from a national defeat to "local" issues. The latest wave of book banning exceeds anything ever documented by librarian or free-speech groups. The statistics for 2021, which represent only a fraction of actual removals, reflect a more than 600% increase in challenges and removals as compared to 2020. (See Everylibrary.org for a continually updated database of challenges and bans and PEN America's Banned in the USA reports for April 2022 and September 2022 for further context.)

These book bans do not reflect spontaneous parental concern. Instead, they are part of an orchestrated effort to sow suspicion of public schools as scarily "woke" and to signal opposition to certain identities and topics. Book banners often cite "sexually explicit content" as their reason for objecting to books in high schools. What distinguishes the targeted titles, though, is not their sexual content but that they overwhelmingly center the experiences of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people. If you were to stack up all the books with sexual content in any library, the tallest stack by far would be about white, straight characters. Tellingly, those are not the books under attack. Claims about "sexual content" are a pretext for erasing the stories that tell Black, Latinx, queer and other non-dominant kids that they matter and belong. Beyond telegraphing disapproval, book bans serve the interests of groups that have long sought to dismantle public education and shut down conversations about important issues.

Debates about the suitability of reading materials in school are nothing new. These include past efforts by progressives to reorient language arts instruction. Concerns about racist language and portrayals might well lead communities to seek alternatives to the teaching of works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . But de-emphasizing problematic classics does not generally entail removing the books from library collections. By contrast, in targeting high school libraries, conservative book banners seek to restrict what individual students may choose to read on their own , disregarding the judgment of school librarians who carefully select materials according to professional standards.

Rather than reading the books themselves, today's book banners rely instead on haphazard lists and talking points circulated online. Social media plays a central role in stoking the fires of censorship. Last year, a video of a woman ranting about a passage from Out of Darkness in a school board meeting went internationally viral. The woman's school board rant resulted in the removal of every copy of Out of Darkness from the district's libraries, triggered copycat performances, and fueled more efforts to ban my book.

Book banning poses a real professional and personal cost to authors and educators. For YA writers, losing access to school and library audiences can be career ending. And it is excruciating to watch people describe our life's work as "filth" or "garbage." We try to find creative ways to respond to the defamation, as I did in my own YouTube video . But there is no competing with the virality of outrage. Meanwhile, librarians and teachers face toxic work conditions that shift the focus from student learning to coping with harassment.

But book banning harms students, and their education, the most. Young people rely on school libraries for accurate information and for stories that broaden their understanding, offer hope and community, and speak honestly to challenges they face. As libraries become battlegrounds, teens notice which books, and which identities, are under attack. Those who share identities with targeted authors or characters receive a powerful message of exclusion: These books don't belong, and neither do you.

Back in 2004, my predominately Latinx high school students in Houston wanted — needed — books that reflected their lives and communities but few such books had been written. In the decades since, authors have worked hard to ensure greater inclusion and respect for the diversity of teen experiences. For students with fewer resources or difficult home situations, though, a book that isn't in the school library might as well not exist. Right-wing groups want to roll back the modest progress we've made, and they are winning.

These "wins" happen even without official bans. Formal censorship becomes unnecessary once bullying, threats and disruption shake educators' focus from students. The result is soft censorship . For example, a librarian reads an outstanding review of a book that would serve someone in their school, but they don't order it out of fear of controversy. This is the internalization of the banners' agenda. The effects of soft censorship are pervasive, pernicious and very difficult to document.

The needs of all students matter, not just those whose lives and identities line up with what book banners think is acceptable. Young people have a right to the resources and stories that help them mature, learn and understand their world in all its diversity. They need more opportunities, not fewer, to experience deep imaginative engagement and the empathy it inspires. We've had enough "banner" years. I hope 2023 returns the focus to young people and their right to read.

Ashley Hope Pérez, author of three novels for young adults, is a former high school English teacher and an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. Find her on Twitter and Instagram or LinkT .