‘To Be Destroyed’ Exposes the Reality of School-District Book Banning

If the headlines about book-banning have you wondering “How’d we end up here?” To Be Destroyed has the answers.

This documentary on censorship, which premiered Aug. 11 on MSNBC, covers everything from parents’ attempts to brand books with LGBTQ content “pornography” to the importance of school board elections. It’s a concise and engaging introduction to the larger web of efforts that threaten students’ access to books.

The film’s title recalls the Rapid City, S.D., school board’s effort to censor five of the 43 books teachers included on a 12^th grade reading choice list. The board added the titles to the bottom of a surplus property list: To Be Destroyed. We see emptied classroom shelves at the film’s start, along with establishing shots of Rapid City’s small downtown, American flag halfheartedly waving in the wind.

The board’s gambit backfired. One of the books was Dave Eggers’ The Circle, and Eggers immediately mobilized a response. In addition to his multiple award-winning novels, Eggers founded McSweeney’s and co-founded 826 National, a nonprofit that provides writing lessons and tutoring to students in need.

Eggers and McSweeney’s publisher Amanda Uhle organized a giveaway of the targeted books at an area independent bookstore, chronicled onscreen. Fortunately, the film (and the organizing) doesn’t stop there.

The giveaway indeed got the books in students’ hands. In addition to The Circle, the board targeted Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were: A Novel.

But as the film shows, that was a one-time fix. Eggers and company had broader interests, and much of the documentary focuses on the broader motivations of those seeking to restrict books. We hear from teachers affected by censorship. Some connect the dots between parents angry about masking and distance learning during COVID and those now focused on books. It’s also clear that who sits on the school board matters in these cases.

The film doesn’t shy away from giving a few moments to the parents and assorted “community members” testifying about books ruining kids. “Schools have an immense amount of power – of coercion – over education and over people’s children,” one woman charges, echoing talking points from national far-right groups like Moms for Liberty and smaller ones like South Dakota’s Family Heritage Alliance. “It’s time to give that power back to the parents.”

“I don’t have time to indoctrinate kids,” one teacher ruefully responds. “If I were capable of doing that, every kid would turn in homework on time and they’d wear deodorant on a daily basis.” In another segment, a librarian shares how she got in trouble for displaying a news photograph from a Black Lives Matter demonstration as part of a discussion about Lisa Moore Ramee’s middle-grade novel A Good Kind of Trouble.

Director Arthur Bradford also turns the cameras on the people affected most – the students. We see them in class discussing The Great Gatsby with Eggers, confronting speakers outside school board meetings, and sharing their thoughts in the halls.

“It can expand you as a person to experience things outside of your comfort zone,” one student says. “But we need to learn and figure it out for ourselves.”

To Be Destroyed spotlights the blueprint that continues to wreak havoc in classrooms across America. Briskly paced, it’s both an overview of the fight for intellectual freedom and a cautionary tale about how quickly the government can remove access to it. Fittingly, it’s also a call to action.