Book Censorship News, December 8, 2023

admin December 8, 2023

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Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.

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As we race toward the end of 2023 and book bans continue to be a major reality across the country, it seems worth pausing to think about some of the trends across the landscape this year. We have seen shifts in the kinds of books being targeted, thanks to the work of PEN America, and we have seen a shift in the targets of censors more broadly from individual titles (those still happen!) to book distributors with the Texas READER Act and book fairs. While bigotry and power are two key themes of why censors are targeting books, one thing we should be looking at and addressing by name is this: there is a lot of money to be made with book bans.

I’ve talked at length for years about how book banners have found this a prime opportunity to point to wasteful spending of tax money. If they can complain about books in the schools, they can complain their tax money was wasted on the books, then that their tax money was wasted on the review process, and then they can take these claims to sympathetic politicians in their state to demand voucher programs, which then further defund and hard public institutions. They own the entire cycle. We haven’t touched on how many tens of thousands of dollars have been wasted on policies and how they’ve been translated at the public library level (see Hamilton East Public Library’s review of all their YA books, followed by the abrupt ending of that policy).

But a new and frankly unsurprising trend in 2023 is that private entities have stepped in to offer solutions to banned books. These are not solutions to end book bans, but rather ways to continue living in a system that permits books to be banned for lies perpetrated by right-wing parental right groups (no matter how many times book banners push the same handful of images from Gender Queer on social media or in school board meetings, those don’t meet the legal definition of obscenity; they just make you look incredibly ignorant about how books, literacy, and the law work). In 2023, book banners have started to cash in on their own lies, once again owning the entire outrage cycle and its money from start to finish.

Who has been behind this? I’ve already covered two of the biggest, most marketed to date here: BookmarkED, an app designed to “help schools and parents with book bans,” and the Brave Books-now-SkyTree book fairs designed to offer an alternative to Scholastic. The first was created by an individual who was advocating for a book ban bill at the Texas Senate this year. Convenient that he would be able to really push his new app as a solution to the bill. The second, of course, has put Kirk Cameron and a cadre of right-wing “children’s books” at the center of discourse over naughty books available in school and public libraries (and hey, even if the storytime events that Brave Books coordinated in August at public libraries across the U.S. were free, they were certainly getting plenty of press and attention for the publisher and their books, both during the event and in the coverage leading up to it — the tone of that coverage didn’t matter, since they got their goals into people’s mouths).

These are the two that are known now, but certainly, other business ventures are starting up in hopes of making bank off the restriction of First Amendment rights of students and citizens across the country. It’s the American way: capitalism.

Of course, it goes without saying it’s not just private business cashing in. So, too, are the “parental rights” groups who have gotten endless and breathless mainstream attention. Moms For Liberty claimed to have raked in over $2.1 million in their 2022 taxes (it’s likely a lot more), while school board elections and library-focused local ballot measures have become places where unprecedented amounts of money are being spent.

The truth is that every single censorship-themed post can end the same way, but it bears really highlighting here. These book bans are not about the books. They’re about the people behind the books and the institutions that permit access to these books. While we spend precious time making funny memes about Moms For Liberty and giving them cute social media nicknames, other people are racing to create the next billion-dollar solution to “solve” the entirely manufactured “problem.” I don’t know how many more ways this can be said.

People need to stop being surprised when they learn about another bad thing happening — none of this is happening in the dark; it’s been exposed again and again, and we’re ramping up for yet another year of it. Perhaps the problem is it isn’t sexy to talk about the systems allowing “inventions” like an app to help “navigate” book bans being created by someone who helped push a book ban bill in Texas. Perhaps it’s not as clicky to read and digest a piece with evidence and documents outlining the insidious plans to shove right-wing book fairs into public, taxpayer-funded schools as it is to post a quick “lol Kirk Cameron, he’s not even relevant” style meme or story (he very much is relevant and that’s an issue being ignored here). We’re all tired and stretched to our limits.

That’s precisely what censors bank on.

Book bans are about the money, and organizations are cashing in on the backs of the most vulnerable in this country.