Typical “grassroots” campaign.
Greg Abbott in the 80s
The wave of book reviews and removals that swept across Texas in the last year was driven more by politicians than parents, a Houston Chronicle analysis found, contradicting claims that recent book bans were the result of a nationwide parental rights movement to have more control over learning materials.
The findings, drawn from public information act requests sent to nearly 600 Texas school districts that teach more than 90 percent of the state’s 5.4 million public school students, show there were at least 2,080 book reviews of more than 880 unique titles since the 2018-19 school year. Of those, at least 1,740 reviews occurred during the 2021-22 school year.
Nearly two thirds of those reviews — 1,057 — occurred after state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, asked districts last fall to check their shelves for books on a list he circulated. The books on Krause’s list of roughly 850 titles, predominantly feature LGBTQ+ characters and people of color in main character roles, as well as mentions of racism, the Holocaust, sexual violence, sexuality and abortion.
About a dozen districts account for more than 1,500 of the book reviews, the Chronicle found. Most of the reviewed works remained on shelves, with 269 books removed entirely and 174 instances in which access to titles was made available only to older students. In some cases, districts removed books they deemed out of date but replaced them with more recent titles on similar subjects.
Most districts in the Houston region largely ignored the Krause list or did not conduct reviews because of it.
Krause did not respond to emails requesting an interview, and has refused to reveal whether he and his office created the list or if it came from a third party. In an interview with the Dallas Morning News last November, he called his letter and the list “an inquiry used for fact gathering to see if anything needs to be done,” and said he did not anticipate they would be leaked to the news media.
“We could decide there’s nothing here, let’s move on. And nobody even knows about it. Or it could be we’ve got a pervasive problem,” he said. “It certainly raised the consciousness of parents needing to be involved in their schools. We’ve had some school districts thank us and say, ‘We don’t want inappropriate materials for our kids.’ We wanted to give schools an idea of what books they had in their library so they don’t get caught off guard.”
The Chronicle’s findings, likely an under-count of book reviews because 292 districts did not respond, represent one of the clearest assessments to date of the extent of an escalating, national assault — mostly led by politicians, elected officials and conservative activists — on literature that explores race, LGBTQ+ issues and sexuality.
“It’s a malign campaign to create a moral panic around information young people want and need,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “It’s resulted in really tragic consequences, not only for young people being denied access to information, but also for people who are made to understand they don’t belong in their communities, at least in the eyes of the individuals who raise these claims.”
The library association registered challenges or removals of 1,597 individuals books across the country in 2021, a record number since the nonprofit began keeping a tally 20 years ago.
See here, here, and here for some background. I would bet that Krause had help from one or more under-the-radar billionaire-funded right wing groups. Why do the work when it’s so easily outsourced? To be fair, some of the book-banning energy does come from deeply committed bigots from the private sector. There’s never an escape from those people. Sadly, it’s the school librarians who are on the sharp end of the stick here. I don’t know what we can do about that. Read the rest of the story and get involved with your neighborhood schools to help them deal with this crap.