GOP's Secret Culture War

A Kansas school district is pulling 29 books out of its school libraries based on a single parent complaint, and to the surprise of no one, the books are overwhelmingly by authors of color and women authors and LGBTQ authors. At least it’s not as many books as appeared on one Texas state legislator's 16-page list.

In the Goddard, Kansas school district, after a parent complained about language in Angie Thomas’ critically acclaimed young adult novel, The Hate U Give, he went on to submit a list of other books he was concerned about, and the district pulled them all from circulation while it debates whether to get rid of them permanently.  “At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” Julie Cannizzo, Goddard’s assistant superintendent for academic affairs, wrote in an email to principals and librarians. “Additionally, we need to gain a better understanding of the processes utilized to select books for our school libraries.”

The Hate U Give is a novel about the aftermath of the police killing of a Black teenager. It was a well-reviewed, massive young adult bestseller and it made the National Book Awards long list for young adult literature. Other entries being singled out for exclusion are the following:

• Fences, the August Wilson play that won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 
• Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was included among the 2008 American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults, among other honors.
• All Boys Aren't Blue, an essay collection by journalist and LGBTQIA activist George Johnson that was included on best books of 2020 list by the New York Public Library
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a classic that makes frequent appearances on Advanced Placement exams.
• The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, which the College Board actually uses as an example for AP exam preparation.

Many of the books are also on the American Library Association’s list of most-challenged books. Because this kind of objection is all too common from parents who want their kids to live in a white, straight, male-dominated world in which none of those things are questioned and no one has to confront, even through reading fiction, the horrors that this country has visited on people who do not fit that mold.  

This story is very similar to the theme of Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign ad featuring a parent upset that her high school-age son had been assigned a book containing “the most explicit material you can imagine,” a book that the commercial failed to reveal was Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved.  This assault on open-mindedness is the core of the entire Republican campaign against “critical race theory” in schools, by which they mean not critical race theory but the teaching of things like children’s books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ruby Bridges. 

The media is failing to call out what this really is-- a viciously racist, homophobic, transphobic, and sexist campaign.  Republicans are waging an ideological war against public education and against any nuanced non-white view of history.   This is a defensive, reactionary fight against having their kids see people who are not like them as fully human, against having their kids learn that the history of the U.S. includes some very bad stuff (and not just in the distant past, either) and maybe possibly coming out with higher expectations or aspirations.