Virginia librarians are pushing back against book bans
By hola | Published | No Comments
In recent years, there have been increasing battles in several parts of the country over what books children are permitted to read in schools. Over the past two years alone, thousands of books across the U.S. have been targeted by censorship movements. According to a report published by PEN America’s Free Expression Advocacy Institute, there were 3,362 “instances of book bans” during the 2022–2023 school year, a 33% increase from the previous year.
But such challenges are nothing new.
“Book bans in public schools have occurred throughout American history, with notable flare-ups in the McCarthy era and the early 1980s. But while long-present, the scope of such censorship has expanded drastically and in unprecedented fashion since the beginning of the 2021–2022 school year,” says PEN America.
Fueling the recent spike in book challenges around the country are parents, conservative groups and school board officials who claim the books in question are inappropriate for children and that parents should have a say in how their child is educated. Numerous institutions, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Library Association (ALA), have pushed back, speaking out against censorship and criticizing book bans for violating the First Amendment and silencing marginalized voices.
Just beyond the District of Columbia border in Virginia, 356 titles faced censorship challenges between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 in 2023, according to preliminary statistics from the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin ran a campaign that promised more parental involvement in their children’s educations. He made good on those promises in 2022 when he signed Virginia Code § 22.1-16.8, a law that aimed to address sexually explicit content in instructional material. However, in last fall’s mid-term elections, his conservative agenda took a hit, and Democrats regained control of Virginia’s General Assembly.
Even before last November’s elections, in June 2023, the Virginia Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee issued a statement condemning the censorship trend that swept through some parts of the country in recent years. This Virginia association rejected applying legal definitions to literary works, as public officials have done in places like Spotsylvania County and Hanover County.
To learn more about efforts to contest book bans and similar challenges in Virginia, Hola Cultura interviewed Nan Carmack, president of the Virginia Library Association (VLA), and Keith Weimer, current chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee (IFC) and a research librarian at the University of Virginia. In our interview below, the two discuss the growing challenges facing Virginia officials regarding the future of education and their search for consensus.
When categorizing a book as suitable for certain ages, is it possible for librarians to differentiate between genuine concerns about content and censorship?
Carmack: Parents need to be involved in their children’s reading journey. Every child is different, and their parents can know that. A good librarian knows how to guide a parent and a child into making those sorts of selections. This is part of what we learned in graduate school. There’s a reason [why] librarians go to graduate school. It’s called reader’s advisory, helping a child and their parent understand what is and is not appropriate for that child. But ultimately, it’s up to the parent.
What adults view as sexualized, often flies over the heads of young people. They don’t necessarily take it that way. So a lot of the folks who would censor these books are reading them from a mature adult’s lens. There are things in literature that adults read into that kids would never place. Adults are misconstruing some of the messages of these books through their mature adult lenses and not through the eyes of a young adult, a 15-year-old or a 14-year-old.
What kind of support can institutions like library associations and committees like yours provide in response to local librarians?
Carmack: One of our primary supports is education for librarians and public library staff on how to navigate an angry patron, how to keep civility and positivity in a conversation with someone who is trying to argue with you, how to reflect both sides of the issue and [how to go about] disagreeing with someone in a way that’s not combative.
We’ve spent a lot of time coaching librarians on how to have those interactions, and we’ve also worked with the library board on the same thing but with more of an emphasis on the legal matter. Most book-banning efforts violate current laws surrounding the First Amendment, and that would come from viewpoint discrimination. Most of the current books that are being banned are related to the LGBTQIA+ community. That’s viewpoint discrimination as determined by the Supreme Court.
Other efforts say, “Well you should just put that book behind the desk. People who [want to] read it have to ask for it.” That’s a barrier to access. For example, if there is a book about me questioning my gender identity, and I have to ask for that book, that’s a violation of my privacy. All of these things are currently constitutionally illegal. We don’t want a library board to get into trouble because they have broken the law and opened themselves to a lawsuit, which is very expensive, regardless of the outcome. Most of the library boards that we talk to are appreciative of the information about the law.
I think some of the people engaging in this censorship behavior are hoping that someone will sue them, and this will end up back in the Supreme Court for different judgments on the issue. They’re baiting the legal system to gain a different legislative outcome than what currently exists. From my seat in the house, it’s really about coaching support, allowing people to vent to one another in a safe space while also educating people about the law.
Weimer: Other important things include uniting through something like the Intellectual Freedom Committee to monitor [progress], issuing statements that speak for the association as a whole and maintaining contact PACs (Public Awareness Committees) with the Association of School Librarians. Academic libraries can end up being a resource for public libraries. We can collect things due to the wider scope of our collections, potentially serving as a resource when school and public librarians run into these challenges. By researching the legal aspects, identifying experts that can talk about these things and trying to research the history, there are a lot of different things that the organization can do through strength in numbers.
Carmack: One of the interesting things that grew from within our membership is the idea of book resumes. [In] this group — that has now gone national — librarians read the books in question and then do a deep analysis of them to talk about things like “A Court of Mist and Fury,” “Lawn Boy” and “Gender Queer” in an educated way.
Librarians can’t possibly sit and read every single book that gets published. But if we can divide and conquer some of the more controversial books and rely on each other’s education and reasoning to give us detailed book reports on the actual content and its totality, we can then prepare ourselves. I think that’s been a cool grassroots movement among librarians to help each other out.
Do you think Virginia state law 22.1-16.8 (on instructional material, sexually explicit content and parental notification) opens the door for censorship?
Carmack: I certainly do believe that those restrictions will lead to further attempts of censorship. The one thing we all agree on is that parents should be involved in their children’s education and readership, not anybody else’s child.
For the government to say, ‘‘Everybody has to do these things,’’ or ‘‘You can’t read this because I think you shouldn’t read this,’’ [it] flies in the face of the Constitution and particularly the First Amendment, which allows people to decide for themselves what is appropriate. I think it is a little harder for schools because schools operate under the concept of in loco parentis, where when the child is in that school, the school serves as a guardian.
However, I believe it still has to come within the parameters of parental choice. I would rather see things that allow students to opt in or opt out instead of not having them at all.
Weimer: One reason the VLA opposed various earlier versions of this bill was because it feared that it would cause a chilling effect. Teachers would be reluctant to choose books if they thought that parents would be going over their lists [and] challenging what they’d picked.
Before the bill was signed into law, an earlier version of it said this would not be construed as requiring the censorship of any library books, [but] library books end up being used in class assignments anyway. So if a teacher assigns a book report, and my child picks, “Beloved,” that becomes a classroom assignment, arguably. So I think it already opened the door.
The law also became used as a justification for going after school library books. You started to see books being challenged in Spotsylvania County from the moment Governor [Glenn] Younkin was elected in 2021, and then you started to see more and more of these kinds of things.
The argument is, “Well, the Virginia code spells out all these things that are potentially sexually explicit. Here’s a book with a sexually explicit scene, therefore this book falls afoul of this law.” Then you start to have people like the Moms for Liberty coming in and saying it’s pornography. We’re moving further and further away from the intention of this law and going beyond the Virginia Code’s definition of obscenity, which requires the work to be taken as a whole. And these works have rarely been taken as a whole.
Carmack: They’re looking at three pages, they’re looking at a paragraph, they’re looking at one illustration. They’re not considering the whole work and its artistic, educational or scientific value.
What guidance can you provide to educators, librarians and concerned citizens who want to protect the freedom to read?
Carmack: My favorite out-of-the-gate piece of advice is to remember that we have more in common than we have in difference. We all want our children to be happy, healthy and well equipped to move into adulthood. What differs is our approach to that, so thinking about the commonalities you have with someone with whom you disagree gives you a better footing to then have a better conversation. It’s a critical piece in keeping our community together and less polarized.
But to have those kinds of empathetic conversations, concerned citizens, librarians, school librarians and library staff need to seek support from one another. It’s hard to keep that equanimity and balanced viewpoint when we are being called names and have spent our entire professional careers working for the betterment of the community. To be so diminished is heartbreaking and hurtful.
My best advice is to make sure you have a support network. Maybe it’s your peers, maybe it’s your state association, maybe it’s your book club. Talk about it with people who care before you talk about it with the people with whom you disagree.
For citizens, [it is paramount to] talk to your elected [representatives] about this issue. Tell them that you value the First Amendment, you value personal choice, you don’t want the government in your library life and you don’t want the government on your bookshelf. That’s not the role of government. That’s government overreach.
If you can do these three things to take care of yourself, come to conversations with an empathetic but reasoned point of view and make sure you’re talking to your elected officials, I think [we] can bring our society back to a more civil place where we are more interested in our personal choices than legislating morals.
This story has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
– Story by Talía Alemán
– Copy edited by Alesandro Medrano and Michelle Benitez
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