Language is power—there is no clearer evidence of that than the evolving censorship movement which has pervaded schools and board rooms in the United States. In the 2021-2022 school year, school boards around the nation banned more than 1,600 books in total. This trend, although far from new, is embroiled in discussions regarding parental rights, instruction on controversial issues, and students’ foundational liberties in educational institutions.

For her part, MLWGS Librarian Ms. Wendy DeGroat pushes back on the national wave of book banning in schools and emphasizes the importance of students’ freedom to read and research, regardless of their personal opinion. “Even if a book isn't one that I like or doesn't have a viewpoint I like, it doesn't mean that there isn't somebody who might need it here at the school,” she says of her role. “I try to take a very broad view of providing books that students can connect with and can see themselves in.” At Maggie Walker’s library, for DeGroat, that means providing access to books representing a variety of political, cultural, and racial identities, as well as acquiring new works each year representative of the school’s diversity.

In recent years, the books most frequently targeted across the nation have also overwhelmingly been those which address topics including racism or sexual and gender identity, a trend that DeGroat is wary of. Despite bearing witness to numerous waves of book-banning efforts during her time as a librarian, she notes that attempts in recent months are especially discriminatory and worrying. “What's new this time around is the sharp targeting of LGBTQ experiences and books that represent a pro-racial justice viewpoint,” DeGroat says. “I haven't seen those particular sub-themes and books challenged as much as I'm seeing them now.”

Although no parents have directly challenged books offered by Maggie Walker’s library in recent years on the basis of their content, the nationwide trend regarding parental concerns for instructional literary material still greatly affects the school. Such impacts are clearly visible in the passage of new school policies in line with state-wide educational guidelines recently instituted by Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration. For example, Policy No. 3003.7-Explicit Instructional Materials, a new standard adopted by Maggie Walker’s Regional School Board on January 19, was created in accordance with state policy changes in the Code of Virginia (section 22.1-16.8), which mandates that Virginia school boards adopt guidelines for parental notification of “sexually explicit content” in instructional material. 

Specifically, Maggie Walker’s new board policy requires that the school “identify instructional materials that include sexually explicit content as defined in [the Virginia code] and notify parents prior to use.” Furthermore, parents may inspect any instructional materials in students’ courses, and “non-explicit material” may be provided as an alternative for students whose parents believe the material is inappropriate for their child.

Beyond these changes in the state code, Virginia has also seen a variety of proposed legislation related to parental rights and library material, some of which has passed in Virginia House or Senate subcommittees but, on the whole, has been unsuccessful in being signed into law. For example, House Bill 1379, which passed the Virginia House by a 51-45 vote on January 26 (but which is unlikely to pass the Senate), would require the principals of public elementary and secondary schools to maintain an “electronic spreadsheet” of all materials in school libraries and permit any parent to restrict their child’s access to any items in the catalog identified as containing “graphic sexual content”.

While these new policies—both at the school and state levels—may initially appear to be practical, common-sense legislation, DeGroat and many other educators believe that they are largely unnecessary because of pre-existing structures within schools for parental notification and instruction of explicit content. “That's one of the frustrating things about a lot of the legislation that you're seeing,” she remarks on the new mechanisms supposedly being made available to parents to review their children’s educational materials. “These things already exist. There are already online catalogs where you can look and see what books are in the library. There's not really a need for a separate list. There are already mechanisms for parental notification for books that you’re going to have students read.” 

DeGroat also cites the Code of Ethics of the American Library Association (ALA) as a major personal philosophical guide which informs her role as a school librarian and her position on the accessibility of literature. The ALA Code, a set of nine national guidelines for librarians, emphasizes equitable service, community education, and the individual dignity and rights of readers. “I think what's necessary for democracy is the freedom to read and the freedom to be exposed to a variety of ideas,” she says. “When one group wants to impose their ideas of what young people should read on everybody else's children, I think that becomes an issue.” 

Furthermore, DeGroat also notes the importance of community context and discussion for controversial books, something reflected in the school’s system for the reconsideration of instructional material. Individuals requesting the removal of certain works from Maggie Walker’s library must fill out a designated form—a policy adopted in 2020—which encourages the requester to discuss the material with a school staff member and requires them to cite specific page numbers and information in support of their concerns. 

“It’s one thing for someone who is part of a community to challenge material and say it shouldn’t be available to that community,” DeGroat says. “But for someone from somewhere else to make the challenge and say what should and shouldn’t be available to Maggie Walker students when they have no association with Maggie Walker is a whole different thing.”

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Book banning and the limitation of students’ freedom to read is clearly a pertinent issue for school districts across the country, raising concerns not only about the content of certain works, but also larger implications about the role that education and student access to certain topics ought to play in the American public school system. For me, however, the discourse surrounding parental rights and the so-called “explicit content” in literature is not just relevant on a policymaking or institutional level—it is also deeply personal.

This year, I and other AP English Literature students were asked to read three novels by an author of our choice and write a corresponding series of analytical papers discussing the books’ literary style and themes in a broader context. For my author study this year, I chose to read Toni Morrison, whose works primarily address the consequences of racism and intergenerational trauma through fictional narratives set throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Her novels have also continuously been some of the most challenged across the nation. Most recently, in January, a school board in Madison County, Virginia banned four of her novels—Tar Baby, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Love—along with a slew of other works parents and activists alleged contain sexually explicit content. 

I knew who Toni Morrison was before I chose her work to study. I knew what she wrote about and the difficult, uncompromising topics she tackled, and I also knew about the institutions that had attempted to take her words away from readers. I picked Morrison precisely because of that knowledge—because of her refusal to sugarcoat the truth or offer an obvious resolution or resort to easy moralizing.

I will be the first to admit that Morrison’s books are complex and, at times, difficult to read and swallow. But they are truthful. And to reduce such gorgeous, expansive, heart-wrenching, genre-defying novels down to solely one-dimensional stories of violence or sex or vague definitions of “explicit content” is a disservice to the young students that need them and to the classrooms that benefit from the sophisticated, challenging discussions they spark. To reduce these novels down in that way is to fundamentally disregard their literary beauty and complexity; their winding, haunting poetry and their fearless, unwavering challenges of who gets to love, who gets to suffer, and who gets to have an easeful death. To simplify these multifaceted works so bluntly is to ignore the difficult, painfully relevant questions they scream about history and prejudice and memory, such as who deserves pain and what it means to find radical joy and how to create love in an absurd world. 

It is the difficult books that challenge us to think differently, that challenge us to look at who we are and where we are. That’s why I continue to read authors like Morrison, why I continue to seek out difficult and uncompromising and beautiful works like Beloved and The Bluest Eye. It’s 2023—book banning is not a new phenomenon. To hide it under the guise of parental rights and to think it will succeed in preventing the spread of knowledge is a delusion. And to believe that I—and students like me—are fundamentally incapable of understanding such challenging topics or of reading explicit content is a contradiction and undermining of everything a public education has sought to teach me about independence and autonomy throughout the past twelve years. Students deserve to have access to diverse and multifaceted stories and perspectives; they deserve to see themselves represented on bookshelves.

For my part, I know that my own understanding of the world, the truth, and my own identity has been exponentially expanded and changed by powerful works like Morrison’s. Her writing has taught me about the ghosts and secrets in the shadows, about joining the past to the present with story, and about how, sometimes, you have to reach far back into the depths of history to move into a different, more luminous future. Her writing has given me agency and understanding and power, and I refuse to let anyone take that away from me.

Information retrieved from the Code of Virginia, the American Library Association, and the Maggie L. Walker Regional School Board website. The title of this article originally ran in a September 2022 column in TheCharlotte Observer by Lindsay Smith.