July 16, 2022

By Bill Berkowitz

Book banning in America has always been a thing, but over the past year, it has been spiking, with book banners targeting books on sexual orientation, gender identity, race and racism: However, a new and dangerous element has been added: attacks on educators standing up to conservative activists that are pushing book bans. Conservative book banners are targeting individual teachers social media accounts, looking for any evidence of what they call “grooming” by educators who support teaching sex education and discussing LGBTQ issues.

In mid-July, Tanya Basu, reporting for the MIT Technology Review, recounted the story of Nancy Vera, the president of the Corpus Christi, Texas, branch of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), who “had recently handed out books with LGBTQ characters at a pride event for local students, alongside a drag queen.”

On July 12, Vera “was awakened suddenly at midnight … by the sound of a single gunshot, the bullet ricocheting off her home.”  According to Basu, “Vera thought the event was a fun opportunity to connect with local parents and distribute books to kids. But conservatives, including her local sheriff, called the event an example of the ‘grooming and indoctrination of young people in our country.’ ‘Grooming’ is a slur commonly used by devotees of the conspiracy theory QAnon, which claims that powerful people and institutions are ensnaring children in sex trafficking rings.”

“This type of rhetoric is going to get people killed,” Vera said. Since the pride book event, she says, she has been bombarded with threatening Facebook messages and phone calls, and has installed home security cameras and carries Mace with her.

Basu reported that “On July 9, the conservative group County Citizens Defending Freedom (CCDF) held a public seminar in Corpus Christi about monitoring school curriculums and ‘researching social media of teachers, school board members, staff of school districts and elected officials,’ effectively teaching people how to stalk and harass educators online.”

“I have been tracking this current movement of book banning since last summer, and this is the first I have seen of a deliberate effort to track or monitor teachers and staff,” says Jonathan Friedman, the director of Free Expression and Education at PEN America, a nonprofit that defends free expression.

Book banning is “unprecedented in its scale, and in the proliferation of organized groups who are trying to remove whole lists of books at once in multiple school districts, across a growing number of states,” Friedman told The Washington Post.

According to a PEN America’s recent report titled “Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights,”   (https://pen.org/banned-in-the-usa/), “Today, state legislators are introducing — and in some cases passing — educational gag orders to censor teachers, proposals to track and monitor teachers, and mechanisms to facilitate book banning in school districts. At the same time, the scale and force of book banning in local communities is escalating dramatically. In recent years PEN America has typically encountered a handful of such cases each year. The findings in this report demonstrate a profound increase in both the number of books banned and the intense focus on books that relate to communities of color and LGBTQ+ subjects over the past nine months.

An April report from PEN America, there were 1,586 instances of individual books being banned during the nine-month period from July 1, 2021, to March 31, affecting 1,145 book titles. Texas had the most bans (713), followed by Pennsylvania (456), Florida (204) and Oklahoma (43). That’s an “alarming” spike, compared with previous years, the group notes.

When a book is successfully “banned,” that means a book has been removed from school curriculums and/or public libraries because a person or group has objected to its content. An attempt to get a book removed is called a challenge.

“Book bans are getting ugly and violent as conservative groups target educators online and harass them on their social media accounts. Over the past year, book ban and curricula challenges have mostly taken place at school board meetings. But things are taking a turn: In Corpus Christi last weekend, @ccdfusa held a seminar on how to ‘monitor’ and ‘research’ teacher social media,” Basu explained. 

“This is a movement that was formed online, so it’s not so much that these activists are moving online so much as they are moving the target from schools to teachers and librarians,” Friedman says. “And it’s not going to stop there.”

Viktorya Vilk, the director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, told Basu, that because of the ratcheted up harassment, “So many of these educators are quitting jobs, and those quitting jobs are disproportionately women and people of color — the exact people we don’t want to quit because that means our libraries and schools are less diverse and don’t reflect the full range of American experience. It’s really alarming.”