Consider This from NPR - The Political Benefit Of Book Bans

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

The movement to ban books from public school reading lists is not new, but lately it's been gaining momentum throughout the country. In part, because fights over children and schools is a tried and true political tool.Revida Rahman, with One WillCo, discusses efforts to ban books in her children's school district in Williamson County, Tennessee and how this just the newest iteration of parental outrage on display. And Elizabeth Bruenig, staff writer for The Atlantic, explains the political benefit of arguments over masks, critical race theory and book bans at schools. Especially as the U.S. nears midterm elections. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Back in the 1970s, Alice Moore noticed new titles were being added to the reading lists of local schools in Kanawha County, West Virginia, where she lived. When Alice found out about this new curriculum, she demanded that she would read every single book. The journalist John Ronson spoke to Alice Moore for his podcast, Things Fell Apart. I had all 325 books delivered to my house and I started reading them. Moore, the wife of a minister, did not like what she found. So she started a movement to get a number of these books banned from the list. She and the other parents would read passages from selected books out of context as a way to shock school officials into action. Ronson told NPR about one piece of literature that Moore found particularly offensive.

One of the passages that she would cite a lot back then was this poem, which she said was unambiguously terrible. The poem is called At Lunchtime, and it's about people on a bus who, fearing the end of the world was coming at lunchtime, abandoned all social decorum. Every day, people started making love on the bus, and the world has still not come to an end, but in a way, it has. But as she was reading the poem to me, I started to think, I've got a feeling this poet feels the same way she does about spontaneous orgies breaking out on buses.

And I said that to her. She said, of course not. You know, that's not true. And I tracked down the poet, Roger McGough. The end of the poem is saying, well, you can't really just give way to your feelings without consequences, really. So it was a moral tale, really, for me. So that last line really is you and Alice agreeing?

Well, yeah, yeah, very much so. In other words, one of the passages that Alice Moore had used to lead a whole movement against the books being read at school was not actually advocating for casual sex with strangers. In fact, the author's intent was the opposite. But when John Ronson brought this to Alice Moore's attention... Well, she was very charming about it and said, I must thank Roger McGuff 50 years later for helping me bring the message

of how terrible licentious behavior is to the people of West Virginia. But of course, what's really interesting is that Alice didn't really care about the intention. Consider this. The movement to ban books from public school reading lists is nothing new. But lately, it's been gaining momentum, in part because fights over children in schools is a tried and true political tool. We don't have many other opportunities to just quite publicly fight about these things. And I think people relish it.

From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Friday, March 11th. It's Consider This from NPR. Ravida Rahman knows what it's like to be concerned about what her kids are reading at school. He was in middle school, so it was a book that they were going to have, you know, I think they had like five books. This was a few years back. Her oldest son is now in high school. But at the time, she was worried because the book he was reading as a sixth grader dealt with some pretty heavy stuff, like the main character's parents dying in a car crash. I think it might have been Outsiders. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, a coming-of-age story involving two rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Well, Rockmon wasn't familiar with it, so she reached out to the school. She wanted to talk with someone about why it was included on the book list. And her son's librarian called her back. She explained the process to me, you know, what the book was about. And at the end of that conversation, I said, okay, no problem. I don't have a problem with my child reading this book. You know, I'll be asking him questions. We will talk about it and discuss it. And it ended up not being a problem. Had she still been uncomfortable with the choice? She was told there was a process to send a request to the district to remove it from the reading list. Well, that was that.

Rockmon didn't think much more about the whole experience until November of last year, when book lists became the number one topic at Williamson County School District board meetings. That's her children's district in Tennessee, just south of Nashville. This is from Tricks, another book found in multiple Williamson County school libraries. People lined up during the public comment section to read excerpts from some books on school reading lists. And just a heads up, they do include sexual language and references to abuse. Quote, I met more than one pervert,

but I never let them do me. Nope. The board would cut their mics before they got far. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is on the Savas recommended reading list. It's also one of the three books a teacher can trade out to teach in the classroom. How about this? Mom, Uncle Stanley's behaving inappropriately, I said. Oh, you're probably imagining it, she said. He groped me and he's wanking off. Continuing in that vein, Traffic is the sequel to Tricks, another book by Alan Hopkins, seems to be a favorite author in our high schools. This is in multiple high school libraries. They were really upset. And don't get me wrong, I mean, I understand the material, but you know. Ravita Rahman was there listening, and she gets why those passages

bothered the parents. But the lists of, quote, inappropriate books that were being sent to district officials also included titles like Martin Luther King Jr. and The March to Washington, Ruby Bridges Goes to School, and a number of others by Black authors that dealt with the history of slavery and racism, which, as a Black parent, really concerned Rachman. That's what's so frustrating. It's frustrating when people are trying to take these things out and say that it doesn't, you know, my kid doesn't need to hear that. The timing also felt strange. In the past year, she had seen parents show up to protest alleged critical race

theory curriculum and then COVID precautions. These were the same faces, same people who were upset about the masking guidelines of the school. Rock Mom belongs to a group called One Wilco that has been pushing back against these requests. And while the board has not banned all of these books, these complaints have kept them really busy. It's remained a primary topic of debate and conversation for months, which Rockmont says takes the focus away from more pressing issues, like reports her group has received about students being called the N-word at school, Black boys receiving a disproportionate rate of discipline, and other curriculum concerns about how Southern racial

history is being taught. As a person of color, I think my perspective on the difficulty of this thing that we're going through is I'm not going anywhere. These things happen. Unfortunately, you know, it's not always a win for us, but I can't quit. I'm not cut from the quitting cloth. I have to persist. I have to still be there. I have a ninth grader and a sixth grader. I'm vested in this community, and I will be actively making sure that they are doing things to help students of color and to make them feel equal, just as every other student here. Of course, what's happening in Williamson County, Tennessee, is not an isolated incident.

And the debates happening in school boards throughout the country have had real political consequences, like during last year's gubernatorial election in Virginia. As a parent, it's tough to catch everything. So when my son showed me his reading assignment, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit material you can imagine. That is an ad from then-candidate Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who was attacking his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe. He doesn't think parents should have a say. He said that. He shut us out. And there was one soundbite from Terry McAuliffe that Youngkin's campaign really ran with.

The topic was education, and Terry went on the attack against parents. I'm not going to let parents come into schools. I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. These school issues were front and center for that election, and Youngkin came out on top. He's now governor of Virginia. And now, with midterms coming up in the fall, we might be seeing more and more of this. The Atlantic writer Elizabeth Brunig half-jokingly called this moment the Kinder Referenda. And she's written about why these arguments surrounding the classroom have been such a lightning rod for political debate. She spoke with my co-host Ari Shapiro about that.

Why do you think we see this fervor, whether it is over masks and homeschooling or over critical race theory or over books that are in libraries on reading lists? Why are we constantly seeing these battles in schools and school board meetings and PTA meetings? I think in the United States, because we're a liberal democracy, we've more or less decided that there are, you know, quite a few subjects, and these are the most important subjects to people in a lot of cases. But they regard religion, they regard sort of matters of ultimate concern, the most important private personal beliefs. We're going to leave those out of politics and leave them up for the individual to decide what to do in those cases. But with children and what to teach children in public schools, which are run by the state, they are state run and organized, it becomes impossible not to give

them information or in some sense, give them direction. Right? I mean, it's just impossible not to do that. It's impossible to leave children to their own devices because of the kinds of people they are. They need direction. They need information. And so schools become places where adults fight about these questions that otherwise we would be, I think, very happy to leave up to individual discretion. And on some level, I think these arguments are so inflammatory because we don't have many other opportunities to just quite publicly fight about these things. And I think people relish it to some degree. I mean, obviously, the people going to these town halls or, you know, getting into punditry over this are making quite a bit of hay out of it. There's obviously a strong political element to this.

These debates helped a Republican win the governor's office in Virginia. How much do you think these controversies are connected to the upcoming midterm elections? And which one is the cause and which one is the effect? I think that they are likely to have an effect on the upcoming midterms. You mentioned Youngkin's win in Virginia, that surprise gubernatorial win in 21. I would expect that these debates would have a very similar effect on the midterms. I think that they are highly emotive. They involve children, everyone's children, most important thing in their lives. Do you think that's why these debates are happening? I mean, are politicians and their interests ginning up these debates in order to get a leg up for the

election? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that they find it, I think these are ready-made pre-existing debates that, you know, sort of exist due to these, you know, the structural landscape of American politics, this sort of way that liberal democracy works. And then I think politicians find it helpful to provoke them, especially when you have a midterm election like this, where you have, you know, sort of Democrats with unified control, the federal government, Republicans are up very strong against them. They look like they're going to have a pretty good go of things in the midterms, and they want to make that as strong of a sweep as they can. And so I think they are doing

everything they can to kind of provoke these pre-existing tensions. Yeah, absolutely. There are certain parallels here with debates that adults have over things like whether Donald Trump should be allowed on Twitter or Joe Rogan's platform on Spotify. How do you compare those controversies to these debates about what children are exposed to in schools? Yeah, I mean, we have lots of arguments in liberal democracies about speech. And I think in each case, you know, what we basically end up uneasily settling along the lines of, well, with Joe Rogan, adults can do what they want, right? I mean, so that's basically the situation that we've had to accept. No one really loves it. It means that Neil Young and Joni Mitchell can get off of Spotify if they want, and listeners

can stop listening to Spotify if they want. But it also means the executives of Spotify can keep Joe Rogan on and his listeners can continue listening if they want. That's how we have set up our laws in this country. That's how the First Amendment suggests we should adjudicate these disagreements over what people say. library shelf, and the children who want to read about sexuality and violence can read about it, and the kids who don't want to read about it don't have to. You know, generally, we recognize that there are limitations that need to be set around the material kids are exposed to. So we can't just settle it the way we do with adults. And that's what makes these situations with children in schools 10 times more acrimonious, I think, even than very intense situations like the Joe Rogan situation, which was big and public and protracted. This may be an impossible question to answer. But do you think that most of these arguments

are in good faith? A lot of these, a lot of people who get into these arguments, genuinely believe their grievances, and they have come to genuinely feel that the emotional pitch at which these arguments are had is the appropriate emotional pitch. But I think that they have been convinced of this by forces that are external to the situation itself, that have nothing to do with the school. It's not like their kid came home and said something that was extremely alarming and made them feel the kid had been convinced to undertake some sexual act based on a book in a library at school. It's that they were convinced of this by, you know, something they read online

or an advocacy organization. Well, we know this is happening across the country, not because coincidentally parents in all 50 states got angry about it at the same time, but there are national organizations. I mean, does that mean these people, you know, still really strongly emotionally believe this? Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure they, I'm sure, I'm certain people have very, very, very strong feelings to this degree. Do I still feel, you know, do I still disagree with them in many cases?

Yeah, absolutely. And do I feel that they, you know, are perhaps participating in something that's a bit more organized than, you know, and inorganic than they might suggest? Yes. That was Elizabeth Brunig. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.