10 of the Most Banned Books (and What We Can Learn From Them)

The most frequently banned or challenged category of books in 2021 is overwhelmingly LGBTQ+ books aimed at teenagers, and the most challenged of these is Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, according to the the American Library Association. At issue are the book’s LGBTQ+ themes and “explicit images.” Gender Queer was banned in dozens of school libraries across the country, and denounced as “likely illegal” by Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina (who knows full well it isn’t illegal).

It’s an easy book for people to challenge because A) there are drawings, so you don’t have to read a bunch of dang words to get angry, and you can share it easily on your Facebook; B) Kobabe uses gender neutral “Spivak” pronouns (e/em/eir), and which pronouns people prefer is a very important issue to our nation’s conservatives; and C) It’s about a trans person, the current most-hated-target of the Right.

What we can learn: The faux-panic over Gender Queer is part of an organized effort. According to the ALA, calls to ban books generally aren’t cases of a local parent becoming alarmed at something their kid is reading, but is instead part of a larger political movement. “The moral panic isn’t about kids: it’s about politics. Organizations with a political agenda are spreading lists of books they don’t like,” ALA President Lessa Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada said.

Since its publication in 2014, This Book Is Gay has been targeted for removal and/or banned in school districts across the country. A Wyoming county prosecutors office even said it was considering criminal charges for library employees stocking the title. A library director in Wasilla, Ala. (maybe the most thankless job on the planet) was publicly smeared as a pedophile for defending it. So what kind of content is engendering the ire? No-nonsense advice and basic sex education aimed at gay and non-binary teenagers. So it’s not just novels or graphic novels—non-fiction about queer issues is bad too.

What we can learn from this book being banned: As this DailyKos review puts it: “It’s not the books. It’s never the books. It’s the kids who are different they’re after.”

When your book is still pissing off censorship fans more than 50 years after it was published, you know you’ve struck a nerve, so congrats to Toni Morrison. According to the American Library Association, in 2021, The Bluest Eye was the fourth most challenged book in the country. Critics point to “sexually explicit material,” “lots of graphic descriptions and lots of disturbing language,” “an underlying socialist-communist agenda,” and that it is a “bad book.”

What we can learn from this book being banned: These people do not know anything about anything and will target anyone. Morrison, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is nearly universally viewed as among the best literary writers in American history. No one will remember the names of the people who wanted to ban her work.

Children’s book And Tango Makes Three has been among the top 10 of “most banned” books just about every year since it was published in 2015, and people are still trying to get it taken off library shelves. What could possibly be bannable/challengable about a picture book telling the true story of a couple of penguins at the Bronx Zoo who hatch an egg and raise a little penguin? Well, both of the penguins are males, and we can’t have gay penguins in our picture-book zoo—despite the fact that these gay birds are based on actual birds in an actual zoo.

What we can learn: I don’t want to belittle the concerns of parents who feel The State is overstepping their authority, but a book that acknowledges that same-sex penguin couples exist on planet Earth, and are as adorable as any other penguins, seems pretty benign. But, as always, conspiracy-minded folks see a hidden agenda, and are afraid their children might find out that gay people exist as well as gay penguins. The horror!

In a May Facebook (of course) post, republican Tim Anderson, who serves in the Virginia House of Delegates, announced a “major legal victory” in a lawsuit he’d filed over the fantasy novel A Court of Mist and Fury. “The Virginia Beach Circuit Court has found probable cause that the books Gender Queer and a Court of Mist and Fury are obscene to unrestricted viewing by minors,” he wrote.

It’s a head-scratcher. First, because while Mist and Fury has some steamy scenes, so do thousands of other novels for adults (this is not a children’s book or a young adult novel), and secondly because an actual court sided with Anderson’s obviously unconstitutional request. Saner heads eventually prevailed, and the obscenity case was thrown out. But that it even got as far as it did is troubling.

What we can learn: The people we elect to office sometimes don’t care about the law at all. Tim Anderson is a lawyer, so he must understand the constitutional problems with his lawsuit; I do, and I’m a damn idiot.

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is the “for kids” remix of 2016’s Stamped from the Beginning, one of the books at the center of the controversy over “critical race theory.” It’s the book Ted Cruz held up at the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in April 2022 as he questioned her about her view of “critical race theory.”

Viewing racism as a systemic issue as opposed to the result of individual bigotry presents some people (mainly racists) with an ideological problem. If it’s accepted, there is no other course but to correct the system itself. Because the arguments in favor of the existence of systemic racism are all but undeniable, what’s left is ending the discussion itself, so fewer people “find out.” It’s easiest to start with kids, of course, hence the ban.

What we can learn: One of the reasons this book is singled out is because it’s very effective and kids like it. As author Reynolds has said, his goal was to “figure out how to make this really complex thing and “make it feel like a fresh pair of Jordans.” In a way, someone trying to censor your book is the highest praise; it means you got to them.

Speak received entirely critical acclaim on its release in 2011 for its hard-nosed examination of the hypocrisy of high school (and by extension, post-high-school) and the difficulty and importance of speaking your truth loud and clear, so it’s particularly ironic that they keep trying to ban this book. It was the fourth most-banned book in the United States in 2020, with haters calling Speak “soft pornography” that “glorifies drinking, cursing, and pre-marital sex,” and “teaches principles contrary to the Bible.”

What we can learn: Book banners are not the sharpest arrows in the quiver. Drinking is all over the Bible—Jesus didn’t turn water into Kool Aid after all—and whether the Bible says premarital sex is a sin is an open question, so using these arguments to silence a book about hypocrisy and speaking out just strengthens the author’s arguments.

Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian science fiction novel in which a patriarchal religious sect takes over the United States and subjugates women. You’d think it would be a conservative favorite. But it was challenged or banned in at least nine classrooms and school libraries between 2021 and 2022 over its profanity, overly sexual tones, and for featuring LGBTQ+ protagonists, but I think the main issue is that people see it as anti-Christian.

What we can learn: You can use controversy over censorship to fight censorship: In June 2022, an “unburnable” edition of The Handmaid’s Tale raised $130,000 at auction for literary speech advocacy group PEN America. See video above.

According to the author, the main reason people want to prevent kids from reading Lauren Myracle’s l8r, g8r isn’t because of its profanity or its portrayal of adolescent sexuality. It’s because it’s written in instant messaging.

“The knee-jerk reaction is that it’s different than adult language. Grown-ups see it as a kid version of, ‘Don’t look over my shoulder,’” Myracle told The Daily Beast. “A lot of people of book-banning mentality think we should be very proper about grammar,” she added.

What we can learn: Even us tolerant, educated parents have to be careful not to take issue with less “elevated” YA books like l8r, g8r, or those Captain Underpants books. As Myracle puts it, “As a mom, I want my kids to read any fucking book they want! I want them to read.”

I’m going to end this on upbeat note (if such a thing is possible in a list of banned books). This year, a group of parents in March North Allegheny High School announced plans to protest the inclusion of The Hate U Give, a critically acclaimed novel that touches on themes of police brutality, racism, and classism, in the local high school curriculum.

Local parents and kids who were opposed to the protest came out in force to defend the book. In the school’s online student newspaper, Sam Pondar summed up their arguments this way: “I know that the complaints were officially about drug use and language, but I think that it is the underlying discomfort with the ideas of police brutality and racism discussed in the book.”

At the school board meeting that was to be the site of the protest, many parents and kids spoke up to defend the book eloquently and passionately. No one spoke against it. No parents showed up to actually protest either.

What we can learn: These people are cowards, and there are way fewer of them than there are of us.