Today, Explained - “To [REDACTED] a Mockingbird”

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Some conservative parents are trying to get books about race and sexuality banned from libraries and schools. Author Clint Smith says it’s dangerous to ban books to eliminate discomfort. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Victoria Dominguez with help from Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It seems like it would take a lot to make LeVar Burton angry. But last month, he was doing an appearance on The View, and Joy Behar asked him about the push to ban certain books in U.S. schools. Especially about race, sexuality, and basically American history. Give us your reaction to that. He replied with a barnyard expletive. We're not going to play that. And then he said,

I'll be absolutely candid and honest. It's embarrassing that we are banning books in this country, in this culture, in this day and age. We have this aversion in this country

to knowing about our past and anything that is unpleasant we don't want to deal with. This is not going away. And then he gave the kids some advice. Read the books they're banning. That's where the good stuff is. Coming up on Today Explained,

what is the story behind these book bans? Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Laura Jadid, freelance journalist covering conservative and far-right movements in the United States. Haven't we always had book bans?

Is this time really that different? So it's definitely true that America has a long and storied history of book bans. The Puritans were burning books back in the 17th century. However, according to the Penn Institute, which is an organization that tracks these things, this is a pretty unprecedented push towards book banning. This is another level. Divisive, uncomfortable, and un-American. These are the words being used to ban books and teachings about race, gender, and sexuality. Two million students in 86 school districts have been affected in some way or had their access restricted due to book bans. There are 50 million students in America, so it's about 4%. And more than that, there are these things right now that go beyond book bans. They're being called gag orders. It's stuff like the Don't Say Gay bill in Florida. There are 12 other bills like

it that have been passed, and there are 113 in the works. These bans go beyond just banning individual books. They ban entire subjects. Florida's Department of Education recently announced that it was banning 54 math books on the grounds that they teach critical race theory. These things are not allowed to be talked about with these bans, which doesn't just ban specific books. It bans whole swaths of books, and that is really concerning. And these bills, I mean, they're written very vaguely.

So in order to be safe, these schools will almost certainly be changing curriculum, possibly pulling books out of libraries just to try to stay on the right side of these laws. Where is this happening in the U.S.? Florida is a major hub for this. Tennessee has had several laws passed. Virginia, very infamously, in the governor race back when Youngkin had his surprise victory. These kinds of laws were central, and Governor Youngkin passed them almost immediately after getting elected. Governor Glenn Youngkin completed a campaign promise with his first executive order. In it, Youngkin claims inherently divisive concepts like critical race theory instruct

students to only view life through the lens of race and presume some students are consciously or unconsciously racist. So you're seeing it in just a few states right now, but there are 113 of these bills in almost every state that are trying to get pushed in. There's really nowhere that isn't potentially affected by this. What types of books are being banned? Is there a common denominator that you've been able to identify? Yes. A lot of these concerned parent groups will tell you that they're concerned with obscenity. And it is true that most of the books that they target have things like profanity or depictions of sexual content. But there's also a bit of a theme in the other aspects of these books.

41% of them feature protagonists of color. A third of them feature protagonists that are LGBTQ. And these groups are often fairly explicit about, at least with the LGBTQ side, that they want to basically prevent what they would characterize as pornographic or sexual material, which for them just means depictions of the fact that gay people exist often. And that is really scary, especially for kids who will more readily identify with these protagonists, kids who will be inspired to read by these protagonists, kids who want to see themselves represented. And it does kind of tip the hat on what the agenda here might be. What might the agenda here be? Well, this is definitely a front in the culture war. In fact, I would argue it's the front in

the culture war right now. This issue slates so neatly into just about every other Republican hobby horse right now. The idea of obscenity and even pedophilia, they're telling teachers they're grooming kids. I mean, that slates very neatly into some QAnon theories, which are still very much alive and well in the conservative movement. The Democrats are the party of teachers, elementary school teachers, trying to transition their elementary school-aged children and convince them they're a different gender. The idea of critical race theory, these books promoting critical race theory, which is often what they would say to ban these books with protagonists of color. It's not that their

protagonists are, you know, black or brown or another type of POC. It's that they promote critical race theory, which is their way of saying discussions of racial inequalities historically and currently in America. So it hits a lot of the hot button issues that conservatives are hammering home for the midterms. Do you happen to know what the most banned book is? I do. Yes. At the moment, the most commonly banned book is Maya Kababi's Gender Queer, a memoir. According to the PEN America Foundation, it's been removed from at least 30 school libraries or classrooms. This book is a depiction of the author's struggle with gender identity and eventual arrival at a place that works for air. My deepest emotional relationships

have always been with women. Did that mean I was a lesbian? But my sexual fantasies involved two male partners. Was I a gay boy trapped in a girl's body? The knowledge of a third option slept like a seed under the soil. A lot of parents, obviously, when they hear about this are understandably concerned, and this is definitely sexual content. It's also something that kids are struggling with, especially, you know, kids who are questioning gender identity. It's not intended to titillate. It's far less pornographic than anything you might find with a mouse click on the internet today. But you can understand why, you know, when parents hear that, they're very concerned. And so I think that's why this book especially is being targeted right now. I know that you did some deep dive reporting into a group called Moms for Liberty.

Why do we keep hearing this group's name mentioned in stories about book bands? Who are they? And what are they doing? Moms for Liberty was found by three women, Tiffany Justice, Tina Deskovich, and Bridget Ziegler, wife of Christian Ziegler, the vice chair of the Florida Republican Party. They incorporated in January 1st, 2021, so immediately after Trump's election loss. This group is a 501c4, which means their money, it's dark money. We don't really know where they're getting their funding. What we do know is that they were almost immediately featured on basically every conservative heavy hitter talk show right out of the gate. They were featured on Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck. And what we're focused in on right now is the

sexualization of our children. What is happening there is despicable. They got a shout out on Tucker Carlson all within the first six months of their founding. Their goal is to have a chapter in every county in America. And last time I checked, they had 185 chapters across 35 states. So they're a heavy hitter. And this group, what they do is they go into school board meetings and agitate for a variety of things. At first, it was mask mandates and vaccine mandates. We see forced masking as a direct attack on parental rights. And we believe that parents are the best expert for their own child. We trust parents to make the choice as to whether or not to mask their children in school.

And we're thankful that Ron DeSantis had our backs. They go in, they basically make a big stink, and they want changes. And do you know how these three women know each other? Are they from the same town? Is this sort of a grassroots, a couple moms got together and said, we don't like what's happening in the schools? That's definitely how they'd like to portray it. Descovich and Justice were both members of a school board or elected to a school board.

Descovich lost her school board seat in Brevard County, and Justice says she chose not to run for her board again a neighboring county away. Not really sure where Richard Ziegler would fit in except for, of course, the connection to conservative politics. I think that grassroots is a very strong word for this organization. This definitely feels like a top-down effort by the Republican Party because of how quickly they appeared on conservative talk radio and TV shows. And Christian Ziegler, husband of one of the founders of Moms for Liberty, directly shouted them out as the reason why Florida has, for the first time since they've been recording

statistics, had more Republicans registered to vote than Democrats. There's natural synergy between the two groups, and I think that come election time, it's gonna pay dividends and it's gonna really deliver for a lot of our Republican and conservative candidates. This feels to me like a little bit more than a couple moms with a dream. Its founders also quick to balk

at any mention the group is GOP funded or politically motivated at all. We are an issue-based organization. Our number one goal is to help parents to speak up for their parental rights. And if there's an elected official that wants to get behind that, all the better. I remember being 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old. And if it had come to my attention that there was a book in the school library that some parents thought was dirty and that it needed to be removed, do you know what my first instinct would have been? I suspect it would have been to and with librarians and with students. Do book bans actually work, or do they just drive curious children, which is most children, to seek out information that has been pulled off of library shelves? What did you see in the real

world? Yeah. So I definitely saw some indication of what you're talking about. Actually, while I was interviewing this librarian, Senator Ted Cruz was interrogating Ketanji Brown Jackson during the Supreme Court hearing, and he brought up anti-racist baby. Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist? This librarian got a text about it, and then five minutes later got a call from a student asking where he could find anti-racist babies. So there's definitely something to this. However, the school that I was visiting, Tyner Academy, which sounds fancy,

but is actually a collection of literally falling down buildings in the middle of Chattanooga, the population of that school, 97% non-white. The nearest public library is a 10-minute drive away. And a lot of these students don't have access to transportation to get there. If a book disappears from a school library, that can limit access to some of the most vulnerable children, some of the children who need those books the most. And these books mean a lot to these kids.

The librarian told me the story of a girl with dyslexia who's really struggled to read. But when she was able to read The Hate U Give, which is one of the books that Chattanooga is especially concerned with, it's a story about a young Black girl who witnesses a police killing and then has to deal with it. And the book was engaging enough to her that she was coming into the library every couple days to talk to this librarian about how much she loved it. I mean, this got her reading. And after she was done, she came back for more books. You know, I talked to students who had their love of reading awakened by books like this, books they could relate to. If we shut off access to this, we're shutting the door on the students who really need support the most. Coming up on Today Explained, what happens when Americans ban books and leave out some parts of our history?

Spoiler alert, it does not lead to anything good. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com. Ramp.com. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC.

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with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns

about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He wrote a book called How the Word is Past, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. That book is about this road trip that Clint took across the country to report very vividly on the ways in which Americans remember things and how, thanks to some deliberate efforts, we misremember some parts of our history, too, by leaving out the terrible parts and the terrible people.

In 2017, I was watching several Confederate statues come down in my hometown of New Orleans, statues of PGT Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. And as I was watching those statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. And to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard. To get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. My middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy. My parents still live on a street named after someone who owned over 115 slave people. Because the thing is, we know that symbols and names and iconography aren't just

symbols. They're reflective of the stories that people tell. I tried to find some evidence of your book having been banned or pulled from school shelves, and I couldn't. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about why this bestselling book that addresses history and memory and the ways in which we have misinterpreted it, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, wasn't the subject of any bans? I've been wondering that as well, especially as I've seen so many friends and peers and contemporaries who write about similar subject matters having their work banned, often at really unsettling rates across the country.

You know, I think for me, part of what was important about this book is that it was not didactic. It is not a polemic. It's really a sort of inquiry-based exploration, right? It is me going to these different places, having conversations with people at maximum security prisons that used to be plantations, having conversations with people at Confederate cemeteries,

having conversations with the descendants of people whose ancestors were freed after Juneteenth. It really is a set of conversations. And maybe that is part of the reason it hasn't invited as much controversy, because it's tempting to invite people in on a journey rather than call people out in some way. I want to ask you about a part of our country's history that you go straight at the heart of, the Confederacy and the Confederate Army and the reenactments of Confederate battles and people who are incredibly proud that their ancestors fought in those battles. What was going through your head as you heard a version of history that by this point you understood to simply not be true? I ended up spending some time at the Blanford Cemetery, which is one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country. It's in Petersburg,

Virginia. It is where the remains of 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried. And I went and spent the day with members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy for their Memorial Day. So as you can imagine, you know, as a black man, I was a sort of conspicuous presence, to say the least at such an event. It was strange, and it was unsettling, and it was jarring. But it was also incredibly clarifying, because it just gave me a better sense of how for so many people, history is not about primary source documents or empirical evidence. It's a story that they're told. And it's a story that they tell. It's an heirloom that's passed down across generations.

It's something where loyalty takes precedence over truth. I always think about this conversation I had with a guy named Jeff. And Jeff had this salt and pepper handlebar mustache, this long ponytail that ran down his back, this round belly, this biker vest with Confederate paraphernalia and badges all over it. And he was telling me this story about how when he was a boy, his grandfather used to bring him to the cemetery. And there was this beautiful white gazebo that sits at the center of the cemetery. And he and his grandfather would go sit there and his grandfather would sing the old Dixie anthem and tell Jeff stories about how the men buried here, they weren't people who fought a war for slavery. They weren't people who were racist. They weren't people who were interested in anything other than protecting their culture,

protecting their tradition, protecting their families from the war of Northern aggression, Northern invasion, as they called it. And, you know, as he was telling him these stories, they would watch the sun set beyond the trees and watch the sky turn from blue to orange to yellow to purple, to watch the dragonflies sort of emerge from the forest and hop from one tombstone to the next, how deer would graze around the cemetery. These really sentimental memories that are deeply embedded within Jeff's memory. And now Jeff talks about how he brings his granddaughters to that same cemetery. And he was saying he sings the same songs to his granddaughters that his grandfather sang to him and tells them the same stories that his grandfather told him. The thing is, I could go to Jeff.

I could say, Jeff, well, I know your grandfather told you that racism and slavery had nothing to do with secession and the Civil War, but all you have to do is look at something like the Declaration of the Confederate Secession in 1861, where a state like Mississippi, for example, says, quote, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world, right? So like they're not vague about why they're seceding from the union. They're quite clear about it. And all of these Confederate states have these various declarations in which they say quite explicitly that the reason they are leaving the union and the reason the war is about to commence is because they want to preserve the institution of slavery. But if Jeff is to accept that information, he would also have to accept that his grandfather was lying to him. And if he has to accept that his grandfather was lying to him, it threatens to sort of crumble and disintegrate the foundation upon which his relationship with this man is built. And if that relationship begins to disintegrate, it's suddenly not only a need for Jeff to sort of reassess his conception of American history, it becomes like a crisis of identity. It becomes an existential crisis for Jeff because now it's calling into question the stories and narratives and what are revealed to be the mythologies of people he loves, people who are his family, people who are part of his lineage, people who are in his community. It's a threat to his very sense of self. And so I think it's really important for us to understand the sort of emotional complexity that is the foundation upon which these beliefs and a reluctance to move away from those beliefs is built.

Do you think at all about how policy would look different or about how the country would look different if the United States were to accept and if people like Jeff were to accept what actually happened? You know, I think all the time about this James Baldwin quote from an essay he wrote called A Talk to Teachers, based on a speech he gave to a group of New York City educators. And then he says the role of the teacher, and he's saying teacher here literally, but also as a sort of metonym for a larger society. So the role of the teacher is to help the black child understand that even though the world tells them that they are criminal. The role of the teacher is to help that child understand that it is the society and the history that created the conditions in those communities that the Black child is forced to grow up in that is, in fact, the real criminal. And for many of us, that's intuitive. But I think we can, you know, as a former high school teacher, as someone who

works with and talks to young people all the time, I think we can forget how that's not necessarily intuitive for so many people. What do you think is behind the impulse to ban books? Individuals like Jeff or something perhaps more malicious? I think it's a sort of both and, right? I don't think it's necessarily one or the other. I think part of what's happened is that, you know, over the last 10 years, if we think about the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 as the sort of informal beginning of the Black Lives Matter

movement. Part of what's happened over the last 10 years is that millions of people now understand racism, for example, not just as an interpersonal phenomenon, but a systemic one, a structural one, a historical one, a sociological one. And what that means is that you have people who are beginning to tell a more complex, nuanced rendering of American history, which calls into question the previous story of America, the two-dimensional caricature of America of like our founders were just great men and we should never criticize them or America is a place of opportunity and nothing less. That's a hard thing for a lot of people to let go of. It's a hard thing for people to untether themselves from. Clint, you have a Ph.D. in education. Can I ask you to do an educational thought experiment with me? Let's do it.

All right. So conservative book publishers are now publishing their own history books with their own narratives. Progressive school districts are going hard on their set of values. They want to keep these books that have been banned on the shelves. It seems to me that this is bound to lead to Americans having vastly different understandings of what the history of this country is, who is welcome, who is an American, who is part of society. In 20 or 30 years, if we have kids learning vastly different stories about the United States, where does this get us? What does the country look like? Yeah, it's an unsettling prospect to think that the sort of chasm will continue toans and despite the efforts of state legislatures in some states to prevent certain conversations from happening in classrooms, there are so many teachers who are doing remarkable work and who are doing it in community,

who, you know, through the pandemic have established these virtual communities where they support one another and provide one another with resources and provide one another with pedagogical ideas and share lesson plans and syllabi. And so that energy still very much exists. And I have no doubt that it will continue to grow. But it is important to recognize that there are many teachers also who are going to, you know, because this is their job. And if they're told by the state that if they teach certain parts of American history, that their job will be under threat, I think it does create a chilling effect that we have to take seriously.

It's going to exacerbate what already exists, which is the sense that so much of what your understanding of American history is will depend on your individual teacher in your individual classroom, in a specific school, in a specific school district, within a specific state. So I think part of what needs to happen is a more thoughtful, standardized set of professional development opportunities for teachers themselves to go in and think about and wrestle with a lot of these questions so that you can get more educators on

the same page and also give them the tools with which to more effectively do their jobs. I can tell you there's never been more energy and never been more desire and never been a greater sense of communal commitment from so many teachers to teach an honest, nuanced, thoughtful version of American history. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Amina El-Sadi. It was fact-checked by Tori Dominguez with a little help from Laura Bullard, and it was engineered by Afim Shapiro. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.