While public schools expand racial and gender diversity in their curriculums, a growing movement of individuals and organizations feel that the government is taking away parents’ rights to decide what material their children should have access to in public schools.
This is coinciding with ongoing efforts to remove related books from school libraries. But for many, removal of these books means a removal of identities and representation.
Brielle Winslow-Majette, Deputy Director for Garden State Equality, a New Jersey LGBTQ+ advocacy group, spoke about these efforts at a Banned Books Week discussion panel in Princeton’s Labyrinth Books on Oct. 2.
Winslow-Majette says that, as a black woman in the LGBTQ community, she understands the need to have these books in school libraries because they provide representation to minority groups.
Winslow-Majette continues, “Being a person who looked different than everybody else, the ideals of my hair and loving myself and loving who I could be or who I would be came from books, magazines, representation.”
When discussing the recent “attack on libraries,” Winslow-Majette says, “I think the biggest thing that we’re missing is this is an attack on youth. I think that there’s a lot of policy that’s happening right now, and we’re forgetting that at the root of all this policy are kids that want to learn, or kids who want to see themselves or kids who just want to be.”
Winslow-Majette joined panelists Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read Program Director at PEN America, and Martha Hickson, North Hunterdon High School Librarian and New Jersey Library Association’s (NJLA) 2023 Librarian of the year, along with moderator Jeanne LoCicero, ACLU-NJ Legal Director for the discussion. Parental rights, representation, and censorship were among the many topics addressed as a way to bring awareness to the increasing challenges public schools are facing.
Despite efforts from activists like Winslow Majette, Meehan, Hickson, and LoCicero, 2023 has seen a rise in book bans throughout the country. With a growing number of states passing legislation restricting what public schools can teach, it becomes easier to remove books with racial and LGBTQ themes from libraries.
As the discussion of book challenges continued with approximately 70 attendees gathered in the bookstore meeting room, Meehan shared results from the 2022-2023 PEN America report on book bans stating, “[PEN America] counted over 3,000 instances of book bans across 33 states.” This is an increase of 33 percent according to the PEN America website.
Meehan also added that legislation is playing a role in “empowering book bans.” She says the bans are in “Democrat and Republican [states] alike, but certainly the scale and magnitude of book bans in Republican leaning states is much higher.”
Texas and Florida are among such states. On June 13, 2023, Texas passed a bill that prohibits librarians from buying books that are rated “sexually relevant” or “sexually explicit” – a rating system that is developed by the book vendors.
Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, which became effective July 1, 2022, prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in grades K through 3. Bills like these are used to determine what books are available to children in school libraries.
These new bills are raising questions about how much power the government should have over public schools and causing unease among librarians whose job it is to select material for their libraries.
Dr. Pamela Price, the Director of Library Services at MCCC says she is concerned with state legislators and elected Senate and Congress members who feel very strongly that there should be national restrictions on content.
Dr. Price says, “It has reached a fever pitch, that I could never have imagined when I was in library school, that information and content would be legislated.
Dr. Price continues, “I was of the mindset that if you objected to the content in a book, what you then did was you educated yourself. It never occurred to me to politicize it.”
Not all states are restricting sensitive material though. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law a bill mandating that schools highlight and promote “diversity of gender and sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, disabilities, and religious tolerance” to students in grades K-12.
Ewa Elliott, the past President of The New Jersey Association of School Librarians (NJASL), a statewide organization that makes sure schools around New Jersey are following state mandates, says that based on the First Amendment, students have rights to free education and access to information and knowledge.
Elliott further explains that, “the librarians, who are qualified specialists, are choosing supplementary materials to support state curriculum and state standards.”
However, there are a growing number of groups that feel the government is taking away their parental rights by passing mandates that include racial and gender diversity in the curriculum.
On Oct. 21, Bill Spadea, founder of the Common Sense Club and radio host on 101.5 FM along with Gays Against Groomers, a nonprofit organization whose website states the group “directly opposes the sexualization and indoctrination of children,” joined a group of approximately 30 attendees at a “Stop the War on Children Rally” in Trenton.
With signs that read “No child is born in the wrong body,” “Drag is not for kids,” and “Save the tomboys,” the crowd gathered in the Statehouse Annex as attendees gathered to protest the “sexualizing and grooming” of children in public schools.
Spadea was one of the speakers addressing his concerns that New Jersey’s new curriculum is stripping away parental rights from parents.
Spadea says, “[the curriculum] went from a political issue of tolerance into an issue of actually sexualizing kids and grooming kids into a very, very radical extremist political movement.”
Spadea continues, “The issue of parental rights transcends all parties. It transcends the different ideas that you have about how government should function. The idea of parental rights is fundamental. It cannot have a functioning republic.”
But when parents sign their children up to a public school, they sign up to allow the state, the public school, and the teachers to take the role of temporary guardians of the children while the children are at school.
Hickson discussed this argument at the panel discussion saying, “One of the phrases we hear a lot from [groups challenging books] is that ‘I do not co-parent with the government.’ But paradoxically, that’s exactly what they’re asking for.”
Hickson continues, “They’re asking an instrument of the government, the public school or their public library to do the parenting for them by removing access to the books.”
Another argument from groups protesting for parental rights is that the addition of racial and gender diversity in curriculums is replacing their children’s core education.
Victoria Surgent, Leader of Gays Against Groomers New Jersey Chapter, was one of the attendees for the “Stop the War on Children Rally” on Oct. 21 who shares these views.
Surgent says, “We want to make sure that [students] go in strong and educated, not focusing on gender ideology in school, but focusing on math scores and english scores”
Surgent stated that the new curriculum takes away from the students ability to learn and says that their group is, “fighting to get education back into schools.”
But New Jersey’s new diversity and inclusion curriculum never removed education. The bill promotes “economic diversity, equity, inclusion, tolerance, and belonging in connection with gender and sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, disabilities, and religious tolerance”
Brought to legislation in July 2020 and introduced into public schools during the 2021-22 school year the new curriculum coincides with the increase in book challenges and the rise in organizations like Gays Against Groomers who oppose the change in curriculum.
Meehan says that PEN America started tracking increased efforts to ban books around 2020. She explains, “We all reckoned with George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic and lots of other things that were happening on a much broader cultural scale.”
Meehan says, “In that moment we saw [school] districts look to increase diversity, look to increase representation and look to rethink their curricula to be more inclusive of their entire student body. And that’s where we see a really active campaign in those efforts.
Meehan continues, “Many school districts, many educators, many librarians, are really looking to bring books that are more representative of our pluralistic society into the classroom and it’s being met with a really vocal minority who’s pushing quite strongly and effectively, unfortunately, against that representation.”
As the push to remove books from public school libraries grows, librarians like Hickson remind parents they do have options. Parents have the right to object to material in certain books and can ask the librarians not to check out those selections to their children, but they do not have the right to remove books from the library simply because it makes them feel uncomfortable.
Similarly, advocacy groups like Garden State Equality and PEN America continue to raise awareness about the importance of representation in literature.
Winslow-Majette says, “What’s written on those pages is like a guideline and a pathway to love yourself. So find that book and if you can’t find it, create that book or use your advocacy to write that song or write that poem or create that art. But somebody else is going to look at your representation to be the same thing that those books are for you and you have the power to do that.”
