It turns out nobody wants to be known as a book banner.
So when news broke last month that Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” was being restricted to middle school shelves in a Miami-Dade County school, the Florida district was quick to insist that the book had not been banned. Some conservative voices rallied to the school’s defense, as did Florida’s commissioner of education and Gov. Ron DeSantis. He has dismissed reporting on book bans by the news media as a “hoax.”
Was the media mistaken?
The Gorman affair is the latest in a string of stories about book bans, in which the use of the term “ban” is being contested. To avoid charges of censorship, school administrators, government officials and groups like Moms for Liberty have taken to calling the results of their efforts “quarantine” or “curation” – anything but “ban.”
This debate is not new. Advocates for free speech and intellectual freedom have long used the term “book ban” to refer to efforts by authorities to remove access to books based on objections to their content, ideas or themes. As such, they have recognized that efforts to ban books are not always totally successful, nor are they always permanent or absolute.
Writing about book banning for The First Amendment Encyclopedia in 2009, Susan Webb explained, “Opponents of publications sometimes use the tactic of restricting access rather than calling for the physical removal of books.”
Controlling access to information should be of concern
In this sense, it is not only the most blatant prohibitions on books that are of concern to those who believe in protecting the freedom to read, but also the full range of ways in which authorities may exert control over access to information.
This was the crux of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan’s 1982 opinion in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico, when he emphasized that school libraries were owed constitutional protection from efforts by school boards to impose political or ideological constraints on books available to young people.
And that was affirmed by a U.S. federal district court in a 2003 case, Counts v. Cedarville School District, which held that requiring parental permission for students to access “Harry Potter” books in the school library was an infringement on their rights.
We need not face something as absoluteas an eight-year prohibition − as happened recently to three books by Rupi Kaur in Brevard (Florida) Public Schools − to be alarmed about the growing efforts to vilify, mischaracterize and constrain access to books about racism or with LGBTQ content in other ways.
What happened with “The Hill We Climb” is no small thing. A parent filed an objection with the district noting that the book “is not educational and have indirectly hate messages,” [sic] and saying that she believed the function of the material was to “cause confusion and indoctrinate” students.
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Despite the absence of further substance, school leaders took this challenge seriously and decided to move the book from general availability for elementary school students to the middle school shelves.
While district officials later told parents that the book was still accessible to all students, they also clarified that to access the book, elementary students will have to ask a media specialist for permission to see it and prove that they read at a fifth grade level.
Gorman’s book was not shifted from one shelf to another only to better guide student readers (something that librarians do routinely), but rather to impose a new restriction on it. Given that this began with this one parent’s objection, it can hardly be argued that it was solely a pedagogical decision or separate from efforts to suppress books and censor teaching in Florida and nationwide.
School restricts students’ access to books written for their age group
The distinction between guiding students to books and restricting students from books is instructive. Consider that “The Hill We Climb” was not the only book challenged or moved off the elementary school shelves. Three other titles were relocated and restricted to middle school students at the same time: “The ABCs of Black History” by Rio Cortez, “Love to Langston”by Tony Medina and “Cuban Kids”by George Ancona.
The idea that students would need to demonstrate reading proficiency at a fifth grade level before accessing these books, which are written for elementary level readers, is alarming. Not to mention the subsequent mismatch, given that middle school students are not likely to be interested in an A-to-Z picture book.
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Ultimately, what’s at stake when we talk about book bans is student learning and well-being. Semantic gymnastics about what is or isn’t a ban is an effort to deny and distract from the problem. When school districts reduce or prohibit access to books in response to the bogus demands of a single individual, they put the needs and interests of all on a back burner. When they determine that books representing historically marginalized identities are inappropriate, they send students and families a disturbing message about whose stories matter. When state legislators enable and support these actions, they are complicit.
Some may not like the potency of the phrase “book ban” and its negative connotations with authoritarian tactics − particularly if books end up only temporarily restricted and are then returned to shelves. But the force of new laws and political pressure from the state is clearly creating a chilled climate for public education.
And alarm over threats to free speech is, rightly, sounded not only at the most severe prohibitions, but also at infringements that might have a broader chilling effect on open inquiry and democratic culture: such as the cancellation of a campus speaker or the circulation of a list of prohibited words.
The point is not whether one can get a book that has been prohibited in a school at the local library or purchase it on Amazon; it’s about whether someone’s ready access to ideas has been denied or diminished in a public institution and why. As the court noted in Counts v. Cedarville, “The loss of First Amendment rights, even minimally, is injurious.”
In a democracy, liberty and free speech require robust protection in the face of cultural and political censors. Protecting students’ freedom to read must be no different. In the face of a growing movement to censor public education, it’s essential that we sound the alarm over book banning in its most insidious forms, especially those propelled by hate and ignorance.
If people don’t want to be known as book banners, there’s a simple solution: Stop trying to ban books.
Jonathan Friedman is director of free expression and education programs at PEN America.
