what is lost when we ban books?
Not having the access to material that allows us to not only grow in our understanding but also in some instances, cultivating empathy and understanding of those that are different from us.
What is lost when we ban books?
In recent years, the debate over book banning has taken center stage in American schools, sparking heated discussions about the role of education, free speech, and the preservation of intellectual freedom. From Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act to Florida’s aggressive restrictions on LGBTQ+ content, legislation designed to limit what students can access in their libraries and classrooms has become a flashpoint in the culture wars.
On the surface, the justifications for these bans often center around protecting children from "harmful" or "explicit" content. However, a deeper look reveals that many of the books targeted for removal explore crucial themes of race, identity, war, and social justice—topics that are far from inappropriate, but essential to understanding the world around us. These bans, often framed as efforts to safeguard innocence, inadvertently restrict young people's ability to confront difficult truths about history, culture, and their own identities. In doing so, they undermine the very values of intellectual freedom and empathy that education is meant to foster.
There are two sides to the coin when it comes to fallacies of political correctness, coercive language policing, and ideological repression. Like a pendulum, the pattern of behavior swings heavy both ways within the party establishments. Such ironies, for example, came into sharp relief during the 2024 election: Liberal support for a prosecutor, and Conservative support for a felon—the respective antithesis of the Defund the Police crooners of the “Left” and the Blue Lives Matter reactionaries that are aligned with the “Right.” Those that made outcry against the inhumanity of the justice department supported a woman who incarcerated many for marijuana charges and those that pledged lifelong support to law enforcement as our last defense for America supported a man that has escaped his rightful consequences of a prison sentence, flauting the system they laud.
A mainstay of neoconservative animosity against neoliberals is bound to the idea of political correctness: pronouns, gender identity, and offensive language, Oh My! For example, Jordan Peterson, the once-trendy mouthpiece for the Right, criticized the Canadian Bill C-16 that prohibited discrimination against gender identity and expression. Peterson argued that the bill was an agent of compelled speech—essentially, policing one’s tongue over pronoun slip-ups that could result in jail time. The veracity of his argument notwithstanding, Peterson’s initial rise to fame made waves in the neocon community, eventually settling as the rallying cry of the Right. Freedom of Speech this and Freedom of Speech that; the First Amendment protects one’s rights to offend—and potentially incite violence.
While current discourse points towards the Establishment Dems as fumbling the election due in part to this very subject, compelled speech and political correctness is not only characteristic of neolibs, but also Republican leadership. SB 2407, also known as the Age-Appropriate Materials Act signed into Tennessee law by Governor Bill Lee, prohibits public school libraries from having books with “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual content, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse.” As a result, Knox County Schools have pulled 48 books from their shelves in accordance with the law. Removed titles include: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; and the pop-culturally relevant Wicked by Gregory Maguire.
While there is a pivotal scene of sexual assault which “qualifies” it for dismissal from Tennessee school libraries, The Kite Runner is notable for its realistic depiction of the exodus of Afghan refugees to Pakistan and the United States. For Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, elements of internalized and externalized racism and its associated violence crescendo into a harrowing portrayal of the realities that young black women face in the United States. Slaughterhouse-Five parses the protagonist’s experience with PTSD into a narrative that is distinctly anti-war, with overt references to the Vietnam War and the civil rights protests in American cities during the 1960s.
In any case, this ban hides beneath the guise of protecting children from sexually inappropriate material, whilst targeting books that contain clear antiracism and antiwar themes.
According to PEN America, nearly 60% of these banned titles are written for young adult audiences, and depict topics young people confront in the real world, including grief and death, experiences with substance abuse, suicide, depression and mental health concerns, and sexual violence. One in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 in the U.S. will experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult or older minor (National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2020). 1 in 10 children will be sexually abused before their 18th birthday, with over 90% of those abused knowing the perpetrator (RAINN, 2020). 1 in 4 children have witnessed or been exposed to violence. This includes domestic violence, bullying, and community violence, all of which have lasting effects on their mental and emotional well-being (National Survey of Children’s Health, 2019). Books that explore these issues may serve as vital tools for children and teens to process their own feelings, feel less alone, and understand the injustice that has taken place.
Stacy Reese, a teacher in Knox County, also said one of her students' favorite books was set to be removed from shelves. It's named The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives. It tells the story of an agender teen who was set on fire by another teen while riding a bus in Oakland—a true occurrence that happened in November 2013. The book explores the factors behind hate crimes within the justice system, while also discussing LGBTQ+ identities. As such, the Age-Appropriate Materials Act aims to control the narrative about what has and has not happened by staunching information dissemination as if it were a gushing wound.
Just years ago, McMinn County banned a biographical memoir about the Holocaust on Holocaust remembrance day: Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Such a ban once again falls under a guise of narrative control, folding into a systemic historical revisionism. Historical revisionism—and, by proxy, literary revisionism—does not always reveal itself through operations of political theater such as book bans; rather, historical revisionism concerns itself with the historical interpretation of said events—generally, their causes and consequences. It is a natural evolution, to a certain extent. One should make good practice in challenging cultural orthodoxy, especially when it is in service of truth and veracity, towards a more accurate record; however, it becomes unsettling when it is plainly racist censorship and manipulative of truth.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a dystopian novel renowned for its chronicle of book censorship. Inspired by the book burnings in Nazi Germany—and during the era of rampant McCarthyism in the U.S.—Bradbury’s protagonist is armed with the destruction of knowledge that’s been recorded in literature, eventually committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings. In a 1994 interview, Bradbury cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, calling it “the real enemy these days” and labeling it as “thought control and freedom of speech control.”
Such turns-of-phrase are quotidian of neocon dogma; however, censorship laws are increasingly attributed to Republican leadership. Beyond Tennessee’s recent bans, Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida has banned 4,561 books over the 2023–2024 school year. Meanwhile, Iowa’s SF 496 bill, which took effect in July 2023, contains “Don’t Say Gay” copycat provisions that prohibit discussions of LGBTQ+ identities in the classroom. This is a blatant infringement upon Freedom of Speech and exemplary of thought control.
Tennessee is closing in quick on Florida and Iowa’s mind-boggling numbers, leading the nation with legislation that limits public and private K-12 LGBTQ+ students’ access to books and materials in libraries and classrooms, clubs and athletics, and healthcare—yet trails 41st out of 50 states in education. Censorship is a significant threat to Tennessee’s rural youth, where 93% of all 95 counties are rural. On Knoxville’s subreddit, u/gHostHaXor writes, “Imagine how ignorant you have to be to waste the time of banning books in an area that already has falling literacy levels.”
Conservative organization Moms for Liberty has been an active advocate for the removal of materials from Knox County Schools since the bill was first introduced. Sherri Garrett of Knox County's Moms for Liberty chapter believes that parents need to be more involved in what their kids are reading at school. According to their Universal Book Content (UBC) rating system, if someone is reading a book with explicit references to “aberrant sexual activities,” then that person “might be arrested for reading at school board meetings.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies Moms for Liberty as a "far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities" that opposes LGBTQ+ and racially-inclusive curricula. Indeed, on their book ban advocate list, they add Ibram Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for “controversial gender ideologies.” It’s as if Moms for Liberty can’t comprehend that that is precisely what Atwood warns against. But, if a group of women primarily defines themselves by their motherhood, then perhaps they are in favor of patriarchal societies and the suppression of women’s reproductive rights. And thus, trying to thwart any exposure that their child may have to narratives that challenge Christian morales. In a religion where people are afraid their children will be brainwashed and indoctrinated by their education, there is an awful lot of cult-like control over what their children are allowed to learn.
If this is all about exposure to sexually explicit material—as both Moms for Liberty and the Age-Appropriate Materials Act claim to do—then the Bible should unanimously be included on every list. Ezekiel 23:20, from the New International Version: “There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.” And, of course, the story of Lot in which daughters sleep with their father: “So they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.” They claim to want to protect the children, but books that depict realistic sexual abuse of children and teens as trauma apparently are too graphic.
And, so I ask: What is lost when we ban books? Undoubtedly access. The odds that a child—specifically one of elementary or early middle school age—will discover these titles on their own while still of dubious agency are slim. However, as one teacher pointed out, some of the books are only limited to libraries: “It’s still an absolutely deplorable move, but as an educator this means I’m literally just moving some novels from one side of my shelves to the other or to a closet until I use them for instruction. I’m actually hoping teaching some of these “banned” titles increases engagement for some of my AP Lit students next year.”
In July, in an event hosted by East Tennessee Freedom Schools, students protested the bill in Market Square. "We've marched, we've chanted, we are reading sections from different banned books," said one student named Dean. “Then explaining why they were banned and why it doesn't make sense to us. And talk about what's lost when we ban books. They're criminalizing the reading of certain books, especially what's painful is when they criminalize us reading books about our culture or our history, Black, Latino, Asian, low [socioeconomic standing], whatever. So not having the access to material that allows us to not only grow in our understanding but also in some instances, cultivating empathy and understanding of those that are different from us.”
In the end, what is lost when we ban books is far more than just access to information—it's the very essence of intellectual freedom, empathy, and historical truth.
Banning books in schools, cloaked under the pretext of protecting children, is an act of silencing voices that challenge dominant ideologies, suppressing narratives that promote understanding and empathy for marginalized communities. The books that are banned are not just "too graphic" or "inappropriate"; they are windows into complex realities that students are likely to face in their own lives. They engage with grief, trauma, identity, and resistance in ways that teach invaluable lessons about the human experience.
As we've seen with the widespread legislative efforts to restrict access to books, from Tennessee to Florida and beyond, these actions aren't just about shielding young people from discomfort—they're about controlling the narrative and reshaping culture in a way that serves particular political interests. The consequences of this censorship go far beyond individual titles being removed from library shelves; it is a concerted effort to deny future generations the opportunity to confront and learn from the full spectrum of human history, struggles, and nuanced perspectives.
The vicious fight against intellectual freedom has become a feature, not a bug, of manufactured culture wars. The will to protect intellectual freedom is not merely a defense of free speech.
As students and teachers continue to challenge these book bans, as protests rise and voices speak out, they are not just defending their right to read—they are defending the very idea that knowledge, understanding, and the freedom to question are fundamental to a just society. What is truly lost when we ban books is the opportunity to grow, to learn, and to understand the world in all its complexity.
