Book bans are a Jim Crow-like silencing of Black and LGBTQ writers

I can’t imagine living in a world without Shug Avery teaching me that God is “Everything that is or ever was or ever will be.” Or, without Paul D assuring me I’m my own best thing, while Sethe insists “love is or it ain’t.”

I can’t imagine living in a world where Maya Angelou isn’t revealing how caged birds sing and Janie Crawford fails to show me why we must keep our eyes on God.

Yet, here I am almost through the first quarter of the 21st century and still writing about Banned Books Week — in a democratic nation governed by too many politicians threatened by a critically conscious populace.

Banned Books Week is supposed to “celebrate the freedom to read” and to “draw attention to writers, editors, librarians, publishers and readers who suffer human rights violations because of their work.” This year, it comes amid an abrupt flood of book censorship initiatives.

I am most interested in the “drawing attention to writers...who suffer human rights violations.” Inarguably, Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking Bird” are among the most popularly banned books. But more students than not have read these texts.

As a matter of fact, during my high school teaching career, my English Language Arts students read the often-banned “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding, Twain’s “Huck Finn,” and Kate Chopin’s “Awakening.” So, while such books have been historically banned from some of America’s schools, libraries and prisons, there hasn’t been a deliberate curtailing of students’ acquisition of them.

Conservative politicians pushed forth the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education in 2007, the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and are fervently fighting to abolish critical race theory and censor classroom discussions on race, gender and sexuality. With that in mind, what’s the probability of Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer,” the most frequently contested book in the nation, remaining in circulation?

Undoubtedly, America’s book banning practice is a fishing expedition on works authored by Black and LGBTQ folks. As such, book banning is a covert Jim Crow-ing practice.

Therefore, under this year’s banner: “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.” I propose a queer reading of Banned Books Week that invites students, librarians, teachers and politicians to reimagine the banned book as the banned person who wrote it and learn from such marginalized voices.

According to Michael Apple in his 1999 essay “Cultural Politics and the Text,” written 17 years after the first Banned Books Week celebration, the (text)book is an artifact that contributes to defining whose culture is taught.

In other words, if we dare to queerly read banned books such as “Forged By Fire,” “Darkness Before Dawn,” “Dear Martin,” and many others, we will prompt self-reflection, challenge our understanding of the world, and enlarge our humanity towards Black, Brown and LGBTQ voices. Thus, ensuring all of our experiences and voices are valued and validated rather than erased.