Actual Cancel Culture: How Banning Books Became the Latest Republican War on Public Education

It was sophomore year English.

I remember next to nothing about my high school English exams but one stays with me to this day. It was the end-of-unit test on Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. I remember the last fifteen minutes of the period being asked to write a short answer on the character of Atticus Finch and about what his values said about him. Naturally, I started writing a typical boilerplate response, recalling incidents from the novel that showed Atticus to be a man of great character. I talked about his relationship with his daughter Scout and about how he had the difficult job of representing a Black man, accused of a crime against a White woman. I talked about how he was to be admired for overcoming prejudice and for taking on the difficult role that nobody else in the town was willing to accept. I praised Atticus for being a role model for Scout and for doing what was right at a time and place where it was not easy to do. 

By the end of my response, I had tears in my eyes.

That is the power of great literature. That is the power of controversial literature. To get students out of their comfort zone. To get them to think about a different time and place. To get them to empathize with the character and to put themselves in her or his shoes. As a sixteen-year-old boy in suburban New Hampshire, the literary world of To Kill A Mockingbird was foreign to me. But what wasn't foreign was knowing that there were good people out there, willing to do the right thing. Atticus Finch never existed in real life but for three weeks in the fall of 2000, he was very much alive for me and my classmates. His life mattered. His relationships mattered. His doing the right thing mattered. We were all invested in Atticus and his story. And by the end of the unit, we were all emotional in some way, shape, or form and we were genuinely saddened that we would no longer have the opportunity to hear more about Atticus, Scout, and Boo Radley from the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama during the Great Depression.

Despite being in what I would come to describe as a fairly conservative suburban town, there was no outcry over this book. There was no movement to alter the curriculum. There were no protests at monthly PTA meetings. The parents of my suburban community simply understood that To Kill A Mockingbird was part of the sophomore year curriculum along with Night by Elie Wiesel, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, and The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy among others. The mission was clear: to expose students to a variety of literature and to advance their critical thinking skills in a meaningful way. Parents understood this and deferred to the professional high school English department and the state-based curriculum to deliver on that mission. It was the teachers who had control and autonomy to teach the material in the way they saw most fit. 

Flash forward 21 years.

Currently, conservative school boards are censoring teachers from teaching the exact same type of literature my classmates and I were exposed to as high school students. Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, is being removed from the curriculum in Tennessee. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is being banned in Missouri. Andrea Nicole Livingstone's young adult novel Dear Martin is being banned in North Carolina. And yes, To Kill A Mockingbird itself is being withdrawn from the ninth-grade curriculum by a school district outside of Seattle.

This latest iteration of conservative backlash is a result of the August 2019 publication of The 1619 Project, a collection of essays, poems, and fiction assembled by Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project sought to reenvision American history by centralizing the first slaves on American shores and then tracing the legacy of slavery through the next 400 years up to the present day. It expanded upon issues of generational poverty, redlining, civil rights, and the legacy of Jim Crow. It made real-life connections to current-day inequalities by tracing back a history that simply cannot be separated from slavery and the need to maintain White supremacy. By going there and saying that we are a nation that thrived because of our original sin of exploiting the 4 million slaves and their descendants, Hannah-Jones gave zero fucks about how the work would be perceived in conservative circles. Her job, her mission, was to tell the uncomfortable truth about slavery's ongoing legacy in this country.

And conservatives lost their collective shit. 

Because they don't like when others acknowledge that they have been and always will be the party of White supremacy. Sure, the label has changed since Abraham Lincoln, but the conservative political party in this country has always benefited from policies that maintain power for the ruling class, which from our nation's founding, has always been land-owning White men. That uncomfortable truth has been an albatross hung around the conservative party's neck for the last 240 years. It behooves them to do everything in their power to make sure their members don't arrive at the conclusion that their party continues to benefit from the KKK, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters who willingly intimidate and who have historically murdered people of color to maintain power and control. Therefore, any literature that draws attention to this inconvenient truth must be immediately attacked as somehow illegitimate, unpatriotic, and disingenuous to the true history of this country.

Republicans have done this and then some. They didn't stop with The 1619 Project, but instead continued on the offensive with their newfound war against critical race theory, a topic taught in law schools and nowhere else. Of course, Republicans know that there is zero evidence of critical race theory being taught in a single public school in America, but that doesn't matter. They had their boogeyman. They had their counter to The 1619 Project. By manifesting critical race theory into something nefarious, Republicans could present to their gullible base how "liberals" were taking over our schools. We saw it work with Glenn Youngkin running an anti-CRT platform for Virginia's governorship. We saw Texas Governor Greg Abbott officially ban CRT in his state in December. We're currently witnessing Florida Governor Ron Desantis' efforts to enact a bill that would allow parents to sue teachers accused of teaching CRT. Republicans don't care about CRT, they care about true history being taught. Because they know that true history depicts them as the party of White supremacy. 

This latest round of censorship of classroom literature is simply the newest iteration of the CRT laws in red states. Because they know CRT isn't a real thing and now they have to actually define what they think it is. Or, should we say, what they think their supporters believe it to be. The conclusion they've reached is that CRT is any book that makes (White) students feel uncomfortable. So, it's away with Maus for making students feel uncomfortable about the Holocaust. It's away with The Bluest Eye for making students feel uncomfortable about a young Black girl's experience with rape and incest during the Great Depression. It's away with Dear Martin for making students feel uncomfortable about a student who tries to put himself in Martin Luther King's shoes during the tumultuous civil rights era. And it's away with To Kill A Mockingbird for making students feel uncomfortable about racism. 

This is modern conservatism in a nutshell. It is a party whose sole reason for existing is to instill fear in its ever-diminishing base of supporters. That fear has to be the driving force in a person's everyday life. CRT and school censorship are simply the latest migrant caravan issues. Evil teachers are trying to teach our children classic literature. Shame! Shame on teachers! Shame on librarians! How dare they follow state standards (the party of states' rights, anyone?) and teach the curriculum exactly as has been done year after year? How dare they share fictional accounts of the horrors and struggles of the Holocaust and the Great Depression? How dare they share the works of award-winning authors when these works may just so happen to have examples of racism, sexism, and misogyny? How can we, in good faith, trust professionally trained educators and school administrations to know what is best for our children? Shame, shame, shame!

This is the battle we face. But we face it head-on. Because those of us who know history know what happens when an authoritarian political party begins the process of censorship. Fortunately, today's Republican Party still doesn't understand how interconnected we are. They don't understand that a video featuring Texas high schoolers speaking against a proposed book ban can go viral. They don't understand how Maus can now become a best-seller online. And they don't understand how a generation of educators, librarians, and community activists can band together, using whatever platform we may be fortunate enough to have, to call them out on their bullshit and to paint their efforts at censorship as unethical, unnecessary, and un-American. Like any good high school student knows, banning books only makes you want to read that book even more and we know that this latest round of censorship will only increase demand for the books in question. 

Together we must continue this fight. We must support teachers, librarians, and school administrators. We must push back at local PTA meetings, which have been overrun by brainwashed conservatives. And we must engage the next generation of students. We must talk to them about censorship and how and why it matters. We must tell them the truth; they're on the frontlines of an ideological battle for their own very future. A future where conservatives, if they win, get to select not only the books you read but the history you are taught. That world, that dystopian world, happens only if we sit on the sidelines and don't push back in 2022 and beyond. Our students need to be challenged emotionally and intellectually through the written word. That is the purpose of education. Our generation was challenged this way and we'll be damned if we won't have those same challenges thrust upon our own children. We want to be able to discuss the same books we read as students with our own kids around the dinner table and we want to ensure that our children's schools remain free of conservative censorship. 

And like Atticus Finch, it's a fight from which none of us can back down.