The war on woke shrinks school libraries in Florida
By Noah Vinsky
Original Air Date: October 4, 2024
Host: A recent survey by PEN America, the New York-based non-profit raising awareness for the protection of free expression, found that the number of book bans in school libraries has been rising dramatically during the 2023-24 school year. By far most of them happened in Florida. Noah Vinsky talked to a PEN America program manager who was a New College student when book bans began to escalate here.
Noah Vinsky: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin. If you go to your nearest high school’s library, these are three books you may not be able to find.
Book bans have been a hot-button issue in the state of Florida and across the United States in recent months. Madison Markham said she was in her senior year at the New College of Florida studying sociology and gender studies when book bans began to escalate.
Madison Markham: The idea that people are making these attacks directed towards young people’s education, like K–12 students, as well as their teachers and librarians, is equally heartbreaking; especially because, I think about, for me, how important books were growing up, and I was an avid reader growing up, and I think that really prepared me for college, and doing … New College is an honors college, we have to write a thesis, I don’t think I would have been as prepared if my library wasn’t full of books growing up that were interesting, that were really engaging. Obviously when I was in high school and middle school, we didn’t have a lot of LGBTQ books. I think that’s really expanded in the last five-ish years. But the few books that were there were really important to me, too, as a queer person.
NV: Now, Markham works as a program assistant for the Freedom to Read Program at PEN America, a nonprofit advocating for free expression through literature. It released its preliminary national findings from the 2023-2024 school year, which showed a rise in book bans across the nation. It found over 10,000 instances of book bans last school year alone, more than double the previous school year. 8,000 of these bans were seen in Florida and Iowa alone.
Florida House Bill 1069 — which went into effect in July 2023 — required any book challenged for “sexual conduct” to be removed during the review process. States like Tennessee, Iowa, Utah, and South Carolina have adopted similar legislation. During a four-month period, 80 individual titles deemed “not age-appropriate” were removed from Sarasota County Schools, according to a report by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Markham says these bans have been ushered in by a wave of “anti-woke” legislation nationwide and a rise in parental rights advocacy groups.
Madison Markham
MM: One of the biggest reasons is legislation. We’ve seen the role of laws in states like Iowa and Texas, even when they aren’t in place, lead to people taking tons of books off the shelf, Florida as well with HB 1069, which in particular fall of 2023 had a huge impact this year. And then we also have seen there are a few laws that went into place this summer that people this spring were already removing books, even though that weren’t in place. And those occurred in Tennessee, in Utah, in South Carolina, where there are now statewide ban policies, but a lot of these have really intimidating language, really vague language. So a lot of times people districts sometimes take it into their own hands.
And also we’re seeing continuation of the advocacy groups targeting different districts and a really coordinated campaign to pull books off shelves. And a lot of these laws are not … some of them are requiring certain content be removed and also some of them are really … the impact of them really depends on what kind of challenges schools are getting.
NV: Markham says books dealing with violent or sexual topics are being particularly targeted by bans. Florida based advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty, co-founded by Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler, have been specifically pushing for the removal of books featuring overtly sexual topics, or mentions of Critical Race Theory.
MM: And there’s a lot of overlaps, so sex related content is really big as well as what is being called “critical race theory”, or the anti-CRT scare that came up through the parental rights movement as a backlash to the 2020 racial justice protest. People are trying to ban picture books about the Civil Rights Movement, because they’re saying there’s CRT in it. I went to college. I studied sociology. I studied CRT. I know for sure that there are not elementary books with CRT in them.
NV: This has been Noah Vinsky reporting for WSLR News.
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