“It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA – the last 20 years. We’ve never had a time when we’ve gotten four or five reports a day for days on end, sometimes as many as eight in a day,” says ALA director Deborah Caldwell-Stone. “Social media is amplifying local challenges and they’re going viral, but we’ve also been observing a number of organisations activating local members to go to school board meetings and challenge books. We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books dealing with LGBTQIA themes and books dealing with racism.”
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye has been removed from school libraries in Utah
over its “explicit” content; in Virginia, the Nobel laureate’s Beloved
has been challenged for similar reasons.
Bechdel’s Fun Home, the acclaimed graphic memoir about her father’s sexuality and her own, was pulled from shelves in North Kansas
over its LGBTQ themes, while a southern Pennsylvania district banned a lengthy list of titles almost entirely by or about people of colour, by acclaimed authors including
Jacqueline Woodson,
Ijeoma Oluo and
Ibram X Kendi. (The all-white school board said it was coincidence that almost all the material banned was by or about people of colour.)
