Hit 50 banned books read in a year and it changed how I see my own country

I started tracking after a librarian friend told me about the challenges in her district. When I hit 50 books on the list last week, I realized most were by women or people of color. Has anyone else counted up what themes keep getting targeted?

2 comments

2 Comments

sarah19826d ago

Hit 50 banned books in a year and now I can't stop noticing how many of them are by women or people of color. It kind of blew my mind when I looked at my list and saw that same pattern. My librarian friend told me about a parent group that tried to pull a book from the elementary school reading list because it had a character with two moms, and the book was just about a kid who liked baking. That made me start digging into the lists and see what else was getting challenged.

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the_joel26d ago

The thing that gets me is how much of this is happening at the elementary school level. A book about a kid who likes baking with two moms sounds harmless, but that's exactly the point. The people pushing these bans know they can't win on content so they focus on anything that scares parents into thinking their kids will be exposed to something bad. It's almost like they're testing the waters with each challenge to see how far they can push. Once you see that pattern, it's hard not to notice how the targets are always the same kinds of stories.