I’m With The Bans

The Trump Administration axed one legal avenue for fighting censorship, announcing Jan. 24 that it dismissed 11 federal complaints arguing that book removals violated students’ civil rights.

Intellectual freedom advocates condemned the decision and the discourse, particularly the U.S. Department of Education terming such complaints a “book ban hoax.”

Elevating fights to the department’s Office of Civil Rights gained steam after 2023. That’s when the Forsyth County, Ga., school district agreed with the OCR to resolve allegations that the district’s book removals fostered a racially and sexually hostile environment. Some of the 15 books at issue featured LGBTQ themes, and some were titles by and about people of color. The list included Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ashley Hope Perez’s Out of Darkness, Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes and George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.

The civil-rights office found that the Georgia district violated federal Title IX and Title VI law, citing students’ comments in board meetings that the removals fostered a harsh environment by silencing perspectives from their communities. As part of the agreement, the district promised to issue public statements clarifying its book challenge process and acknowledging the negative impact of the removals, as well as launching a climate survey.

The Jan. 24 announcement terminated that agreement and its prescriptions. It also eliminated a Biden-era department position that coordinated training on book bans, including advice about when book removals might constitute a federal civil rights violation. The announcement also noted officials had dismissed another six pending allegations, and stated that the legal argument forwarded in the Forsyth County case was invalid.

The changes “begin the process of restoring the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children’s education,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement, adding that the OCR would no longer “second guess” local decisions of parents and school boards.

Unmentioned was the proliferation of state legislation dictating book removals to those local school boards and parents. Utah, for example, recently added Elana K. Arnold’s Damsel to its list of books prohibited in all of the state’s schools. Utah’s Department of Education also recently updated its guidance to schools to say that students should not bring their own copies of the prohibited books to campus for any reason, even for personal reading.

Anti-censorship groups cited the “book ban hoax” phrase in vilifying the announcement. The American Library Association slapped a giant red Book Bans Are Real banner across its statement: “Ask students who cannot access literary classics required for college or parents whose children can’t check out a book about gay penguins at their school library.”

“For over three years we have countered rhetoric that book bans occurring in public schools are a ‘hoax.’ They are absolutely not,” said Kasey Meehan, director of Freedom to Read at PEN America. “This kind of language from the U.S. Department of Education is alarming and dismissive of the students, educators, librarians, and authors who have firsthand experiences of censorship happening within school libraries and classrooms.”

Since 2021, PEN America has documented more than 16,000 bans, or “instances where access to books is revoked from their intended readers,” she said.

Nicki Neily, founder and president of a group named Parents Defending Education, called the department’s decision a “win for parental rights and common sense.” She characterized the Biden administration’s anti-censorship actions as a “smear campaign against parents concerned about age-inappropriate content and lack of transparency in schools.”

Neily’s conservative-backed group, which has filed its own complaints with the Department of Education, charges that inappropriate books are damaging teen mental health. It curates an “IndoctriNation” map of offenses, such as organizing a conference for teens about queer identity and having a diversity and equity policy.

“Books are not being banned. I reject that frame completely,” the group’s outreach director Erika Sanzi said in an October podcast. Sanzi retweeted a clip of the podcast in response to the Jan. 24 announcement.

“You are always going to have people who think The Bluest Eye is inappropriate for a high school library,” she went on, adding that Morrison’s classic has literary value. She characterized the current slate of challenged books as an “avalanche of poorly written, very vulgar, ideologically driven books that have exploded on the scene because the American Library Association and other organizations have found ways to get them on awards lists.”

Advocacy groups beg to differ.

 “We believe that every parent has the right to guide their own child’s learning, but no one has the right to dictate what other children should or shouldn’t read,” the National Coalition Against Censorship said. “Removing books that reflect the reality of our diverse society only serves to isolate students from the complex world they will encounter as adults.”

 “Book bans do not protect children,” Authors Against Book Bans said in a statement. “History teaches us that they are a terrifying step towards tyranny.”