I’m going to level with you: I haven’t written anything for this newsletter for the same reason I haven’t gotten any other writing done in recent months, or played much music or watched a lot of movies or read as many books as I usually do. I am, frankly, overwhelmed with work. Teaching high school online through Covid-19 was bad enough, but at least remote schooling cut out my commutes and let me work with the dog at my feet. Now I have to teach at school, without my dog, and I can’t even mute students anymore, no matter how much I try.
How bad has the return to school been? In the midst of a Great Resignation, with workers quitting everywhere, teachers are leading the charge, up there with nurses and childcare workers. The joke, in my school’s teachers’ lounge, is that the first quarter was the hardest school year anybody can remember. We were April-tired in November. Between covering up for missed lessons from the early pandemic and scouring away the encrusted bad habits of online schooling, moving forward with a new curriculum, navigating sudden rapid closures due to viral outbreaks, and the endless battles over masks, it’s all I can do most weeknights to keep my eyes open and watch TV. I don’t have the concentration to form decent sentences or follow a line of thought like I need to write something worth reading, hence the lack of writing here in recent weeks. I do my work at school gladly and with gratitude--but it’s been a tough year, and there’s a lot to do.
And all of that’s on top of my primary duty as an educator, which is of course indoctrinating America’s vulnerable youth with my racist, sexist, irreligious, anti-patriotic hatred, all done on the taxpayer’s dime.
I’m joking, obviously. Brainwashing teenagers is TikTok’s remit, not mine. But this non-story, memed into existence through right-wing media channels, has somehow turned into actual paper and ink legislation, with real consequences for our educators and our books.
But first, the details. You might remember the headlines, which started percolating last year after the murder of George Floyd and all the subsequent protests, riots, firings, online screaming matches, wailing cable news hosts, mandatory diversity-and-equity-trainings, and all the rest. In left-of-center spaces, there’s been a renewed push for racial justice and reexamining our society’s obligations towards racial minorities; and on the right, a strong reaction against this push and its underlying ideology, which holds that America is a foundationally racist (and sexist, and classist, etc.) country that can only be changed through radical reform and abandoning a great deal of our prior ideas about history and culture.
Arguments started turning into policy last September with President Trump’s Executive Order 13950, which called for an end to any government training programs that promoted racial or sexual stereotypes, and especially any that presented the United States as an “irredeemably racist and sexist country,” which in the White House’s broad interpretation included just about any kind of diversity training built on the assumption that women and racial minorities face particular challenges that white men don’t. Lurking behind these training seminars was the bogeyman of critical race theory (CRT), a niche field in legal studies now dragged out of obscurity and used by Republicans to describe any social theory to the left of integralism.
Executive Order 13950 was immediately repealed by President Biden in 2021, but the cat was already out of the bag: in right-wing media, the anti-CRT beat was enormously popular with older white conservatives, who have greatly enjoyed recasting themselves as a beleaguered minority fighting desperately for the honor of their ancestors and traditions. Sensing enthusiasm in the base, state legislators followed along, turning ideas into policy. Bills popped up in a score of states, mostly Republican-run, almost all of them copying language from Executive Order 13950 and a handful of papers published by Christopher Rufo, one of those chattering think-tank types who’s waged a one-man campaign against any social studies curriculum that insults the United States, European Americans, or men in general. You can read a detailed breakdown of the various bills here, if you’re somehow not sick yet of delving into anti-CRT meme politics.
The proposed laws are, when you look at them closely, incoherent. In my own state of Pennsylvania, we’ve got HB 1532, which would ban all public institutions from teaching or promoting ideas that offend on the basis of race or sex. The bill hasn’t been voted on yet, but if passed would have real implications for how I do my job as a teacher. Can I still teach “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” even if it excoriates white moderates? Am I promoting sexism against men and a victimhood mentality among Black women when I teach The Bluest Eye? I have actual, honest-to-God training in critical race theory, but if hauled to court under the auspices of HB 1532 would have a hard time saying when I’m doing it or not.
HB 1532 hasn’t received much coverage in Pennsylvania or abroad, and doesn’t seem likely to pass any time soon. But to get an idea of what Republicans are trying to accomplish with these anti-CRT bills, it helps to look at what they’re doing in places where these bills passed months ago with broad political and popular support. Take Texas’s HB 3979, for instance, one of the strongest of these bills and passed back in May. In an October letter to the Texas Education Agency, state representative Matt Krause attached a list of 850 books allegedly in violation of HB 3979 and charged the TEA with checking every public school library in Texas for these blacklisted books and tallying them up, the idea being that actually calling out loud for these books to be removed by state order would be unconscionable tyranny, but if the state simply points how many of these books the hardworking Texan taxpayer has paid for without realizing it, local leaders can be trusted to carry out the dirty work of removing books.
The list, compiled here by Danika Ellis, was curious.
All the selected books about race and racism are by African American authors, even though any fair reading of HB 3979 would suggest that the pro-slavery writings of Thomas Jefferson or John C. Calhoun should be removed for the considerable distress they might cause young Black Texans. But no: Jefferson airing his suspicions that Africans have the mental acuity of children is fine and historical, but Ruby Bridges recounting her experiences with racial integration after Brown v. Board of Education is, apparently, a threat to the psychic integrity of white Texans everywhere.
As for sex, it seems that the good students of Texas are shrinking violets, their psychological equilibrium utterly threatened by such works as 1972’s The Reproduction System: How Living Creatures Multiply and Seventeen Magazine’s 1996 Guide to Sex and your Body, and a bevy of other sex-ed books that are just too hot for Texans to handle. And that’s just the straight stuff: more than half the books on this blacklist are specifically by or about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people--some of them are directly related to LGBTQ sexuality and politics, while others are, uh, lesbian erotic pulp thrillers. Krause’s letter even singles out AIDS and HIV as specific topics for schools to remove from their shelves, and that’s just too infuriating to joke about because AIDS denialism kills people. There is no other way to say it.
When empowered by state law to protect the dignity of white guys, the most severe threats are, apparently, Civil Rights Era memoirs, books about AIDS, James Patterson medical thrillers, no books about bulldogs defying gender norms--this is, apparently, the future that book-banning conservatives want. By all accounts, these bills will be around in conservative states for a while and become part of our intellectual map.
This is disappointing, but hardly surprising. We’ve been here before, as a country, facing conservative censorship against gender equality, sex education, and abstruse leftist political theories. In fact, there’s an entire chapter of Fernando Baez’s excellent A Universal History of the Destruction of Books about the censorship of art and literature in the the United States. Then, as now, book-banning is a matter of sex and politics, and trying to make sure certain people can’t practice or discuss either of them in their preferred ways.
Whether by formal law or at the discretion of scolding librarians, book censorship has been a periodic problem going back into the colonial era, but in this regard the United States was pretty much like everywhere else in the world. Our particularly American style of censorship, in Baez’s view, comes from Anthony Comstock (1844 - 1915), the anti-vice crusader whose name survives today as an adjective for high-minded, invasive prudishness. Obsessed with weeding out vice, immorality, and profanity after his exposure to it serving alongside his Union comrades in the Civil War, Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Knowing a top-down, dictatorial approach would fail, Comstock was a master of working through bureaucracy and local offices, directing his energy towards targeted campaigns and installing his followers in agencies, libraries, post offices, and customs houses where they could work without much oversight or attention. By his own count, Comstock destroyed some fifteen tons of books, drove a dozen writers and artists to suicide, and had thousands of dedicated followers who remained active for decades after his death. Comstock’s followers are best known today for their fanatical opposition to James Joyce and everything he was writing: U.S. Postal Service workers burned copies of Joyce’s Dubliners, and in 1920 a Comstockist federal judge prohibited The Little Review from publishing any further chapters of Ulysses after the first section (wherein Stephen Dedalus picks his nose and masturbates) was ruled obscene. As late as 1959, post offices were still confiscating copies of Lady Chatterly’s Lover on Comstockist anti-smut grounds.
And when it’s not sex, it was then, as now, about the radical left. Comstock participated fully in the anti-anarchism craze of the 1890s and 1900s, opposed organized labor, and despised suffragettes. There is a direct line from Comstock and his disciples to the later Red Scare of the early Cold War and its resultant censorship. The Hollywood Blacklist gets all the attention here, but this is hardly all of it: in 1940, Oklahoma City police raided a communist bookstore and burned hundreds of copies of Capital and the Communist Manifesto on the street; over the next two years, according to Baez, the federal government intercepted and pulped several tons of imported books on communism and anarchism.
I don’t know how much direct influence Comstockery can be said to have over today’s morality police, but it’s remarkable how little their focus and tactics have shifted in the century since Comstock’s death: ban all books on sex and leftist politics, but do it quietly through local channels.
The real difference in censorship between now and then, of course, is that we have the Internet. Anybody with a smartphone or a tablet computer and a network connection can queue up the complete works of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence in seconds, or more to the point, reliable information about sexually-transmitted diseases, pregnancy, queer sex-ed, and all the other things that are not spoken of in Texas. Many more people, of course, skip right past all that to the cornucopia of pornography and niche political ideologies (and, one assumes, unfathomable combinations of both) which make the stuff Texas is banning look like Sesame Street.
The problem, though, is that the Internet is only as reliable and informative as the person using it, and teenagers, as I can tell you from professional experience, aren’t always the best navigators of the information superhighway. The reason why we have trusted, certified adults in the room to guide kids through lessons on health, biology, civics, and reasoning in the first place is that they’re best done with skill, care, and supervision. Any stroll through the world of conspiracy theorizing, from the bookseller at my local park with his self-published pamphlets about spacefaring ancient Africans to the spiritual oubliette of QAnon are proof enough that we can’t always trust people to “do their own research,” even though censoring the teaching of controversial subjects inevitably drives more people to do exactly that.
What these bills are trying to suppress, then, is not so much the information itself–that’s a losing battle in the smartphone age. But in depriving teachers and students of their ability to safely and openly discuss controversial topics–race, sexuality, history, power–and to do so with the appropriate materials, we drive them out of the light and into the dark, further convincing our most disenfranchised students that schools aren’t the right places to learn about what really matters, and that all education should be smooth and easy. In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James wrote: “The lessons of history don’t suit our wishes: if they did, they would not be lessons, and history would be a fairy story.” Too many of our legislators, it seems, are choosing the fairy tale over the truth.