THE BOOK ‘DE-EMPHASIZERS’ ARE HORRIFIED THAT BOOKS ARE BEING ‘DE-EMPHASIZED:’
While clumsily written in the pursuit of overbroad objectives outside the remit of constitutionally constrained government, Florida’s legislative command that the cultural tides recede isn’t the Reichstag fire its critics imagine it to be. Nor is this campaign something that conservative cultural revanchists imagined into existence on their own. Rather, the state is reacting to similar maneuvers by cultural forces aligned with the left.
In some Florida school districts, titles that cover themes involving race, sexuality, and LGBTQ identity are not banned—they are still accessible in libraries and online—but they have been labeled with an “advisory notice to parents.” Call it a “trigger warning.” Teachers have been drafted into auditing books for their identitarian content, but the “policy does not apply to textbooks or books in schoolwide libraries.” Indeed, the discretionary nature of this campaign has sincere advocates of literary censorship on the right up in arms. They don’t believe the state’s efforts to cordon off books with sexual and racial thematic elements have gone far enough.
Introducing parental oversight to what books students at various age levels check out of scholastic libraries may strike bibliophiles as obscene. Literary experiences, titillating or otherwise, are a discouragingly rare occurrence among younger adults these days. There is a movement afoot across red states to intervene in young people’s journeys of intellectual exploration, but it only mirrors what the cultural left has busied itself with for years.
“What to do with ‘classic’ books that are also racist and hurtful to students?” School Library Journal’s Marva Hinton asked in 2020. The question was occasioned by the decision from Caldwell-Stone’s organization, the American Library Association, to drop Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a literary award. Hinton cited the “dated cultural attitudes” in her Little House books. While being careful to avoid the appearance that that anyone sought to “censor, limit, or deter access” to Wilder’s books, the move and others like it nonetheless branded her books offensive to modern sensibilities.
The same could be said of classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn. It was said, in fact, in Hinton’s piece when the librarians with whom she spoke confessed that “deemphasizing” these books advances modern progressive social objectives. “We do harm if we don’t teach that text in ways that are antiracist,” said one Massachusetts-based Teacher Training Center director. Indeed, according to the “intellectual freedom chair” of the Oregon Association of School Libraries, Miranda Doyle, it is a teacher’s job to make sure “we are choosing books that are not problematic.”
Flashback: Atticus Finch: American literature’s most celebrated rape apologist.