Read here for asymmetry in the schools:

According to a Florida-based NPR-affiliate report, in academic year 2023-24 the County of Escambia, Florida, banned some 1500 unique titles from its public school library and classroom shelves. This single, rural, panhandle county accounted for approximately 35% of all unique-title-books banned in the State, and Florida and Iowa together removed 8,000 titles of the total of 10,050 titles banned that year nation-wide[1]. The nation-wide total in the previous year? – 3,362. The year before that? 2,532. More than a specter is casting a shadow in the sunshine state!

While some of those titles in Escambia County will make it back onto school library bookshelves through a process called “Reconsideration,” (Fig 1) a new study[2] out in September 2024 by education researchers at NYU and UC San Diego documents the chilling effect of state laws[3] (HB 7, put in place by Governor Ron DeSantis’ Department of Education in 2022 addressing race): teachers are nervous, are pulling texts from their classrooms, editing out classroom discussions, but are also retiring, or are simply leaving the state. The net result: the erosion of both quality of and confidence in Florida’s public education system as a consequence of what the researchers call the “limitation effect”: fear, coercion, actual and self-censorship and sheer distraction from learning outcomes. Further, considering Escambia County in particular, while the county demographics break down 62.9% White (non-Hispanic), 21.5% Black or African American (non-Hispanic), 5.95% Two+ (non-Hispanic), 2.89% Asian (non-Hispanic), and 2.4% White (Hispanic), the school district’s minority enrollment is 60%; in other words those needing the cultural affirmation that comes from knowing their history most are those being deprived.

Fig. 1 Flowchart provided by Linda Sweeting, Media Specialist, Escambia County Public Schools

Many of the titles banned in Escambia are jaw-dropping, and far more have been pulled in response to a subsequent 2023 law, HB 1069[4] focusing on sex, sexuality, gender identification, pronouns, pornography than HB 7. Having reviewed the complete list, here are 13 pulled titles I found particularly appalling:

• James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Stella A. Caldwell, 100 Women Who Made History: Remarkable Women Who Shaped Our World
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther, vols 1-4
• Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
• Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

… and multiple reference works have also been removed pending reconsideration including Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary, The Bible Book, The World Book Encyclopedia of People and Places, and Richard Walker’s Human Body: A Visual Encyclopedia.

“The limitations [in Florida] are the result of a series of state and local laws and policies since 2021 restricting instruction related to race, sexual orientation, and gender identity; targeting student supports, such as pronoun use; expanding review of materials for prohibited content; and actively inviting public challenges to limit educational material on broad bases, including for “age appropriateness” and inclusion of any “sexual conduct.” Thousands of books have been taken from students for vetting and in some cases, permanent removal, including classic works of literature.”[5]

It is worth noting that in his 2024 election campaign our president-elect called for cutting off federal funding to schools found to promote “critical race theory” and “other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.”[6]

To protect against the further decline of educational standards, many states and localities are enacting, especially in the Northeast and Pacific West, “Freedom to Read” laws. Pennsylvania is one of these states, and yet Pennsylvania also ranks in the top six states with book bans in place, sharing the dubious honor with Florida, Iowa, Texas, Missouri and Utah.[7]

The public school classroom is the battleground, the hearts and minds of our nation’s youth the locus. The rational for opposing candid representations in books and lessons of the history of slavery there? The feelings of guilt, anxiety, or self-loathing potentially visited upon white successor generations: the realization by these young white Americans that their ancestors created and perpetuated inequalities that persist to the present day and help explain, among many other things, the structural wealth disparities between middle class white and black families.

This summer as part of my masters in public history I’d like to launch a short-term blog by looking at just one race-related issue currently in the political cross-hairs: critical race theory; what it is, the forms it is taking, some of its major proponents and texts, the backlash it has engendered and the implications we face as a society, if we as a nation or even parts of a nation continue to banish its texts and pedagogical content from our schools.

At its base, critical race theory seeks to process this country’s “bloody heirloom”[8], the struggle required to overcome the legacy of slavery, to honestly face and set the historical record straight on 250 years of legalized slavery followed by an additional 160 years of extra-legal assaults on any measure of racial equity during Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, Red-lining, and other asymmetrical expressions of power and wealth right up to the present day. It asks us how we can tolerate, and vote to maintain, a caste system that finds top elected officials claiming slavery to have been benign in nature, a type of vocational training program;[9] a caste system that justified and sanctified rape, lynching, and disproportionate conviction, incarceration and murder straight into the third decade of our current century.

So to my Pennsylvania friends and beyond: Would you care to be a silent or vocal part of the conversation? Are you in? If not, please unsubscribe or write me at [email protected] ask to be removed from this list. Want me to use a different email address to get the link out? Just say the word!

Otherwise, I will see you in early June – with that first post I’ll take a close look at Ta-Nahisi Coates’ Sept 2024 piece in Vanity Fair where he documents a 2020 trip to a School Board meeting in South Carolina, to learn more about the banning of his 2015 epistolary book to his son: Between the World and Me. Here’s the link. Whether as a silent reader or vocal respondent, I hope to have you along!

~ Martin Black

---

Endnotes:

---

[1] Guan, Nancy. “Florida Again Tops the Nation in School Book Removal According to a Report,” NPR-WUSFm Nov. 4, 2024. https://www.wusf.org/education/2024-11-04/florida-tops-the-nation-in-school-book-bans-again

[2] Pollack, Mica and Yoshikawa, Hirokazu et al. “The Limitation Effect: Experience of State Policy-Driven Education Restriction in Florida’s Public Schools – A White Paper.” NYU Institute of Human Development and Social Change, 2024, pg. 1-69. Chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/2024-09/NYULimitationEffect_A%20White%20Paper.pdf

[3] Florida House Bill H0007/Senate Bill 148, passed into law on 7/1/22. The bill bars K-12 schools and public colleges from subjecting students or employees to any training or instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” belief in certain ideas about race, sex, color, or national origin. Classroom instruction related to past racial injustice may not “indoctrinate or persuade” students to believe these ideas. Employers may not require, as a condition of “certification, licensing, credentialing, or passing an examination,” that individual be subjected to instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” individuals to believe in certain ideas about race, sex, color, or national origin.

[4] HB 1069, passed into law on July 1, 2023. The bill includes provisions designed to protect children in public schools. The bill includes requirements for age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate instruction for all students in prekindergarten through grade 12. The bill: • Includes requirements for specific terminology and instruction relative to health and reproductive education in schools and requires that all materials used for such instruction be approved by the Department of Education. • Extends the prohibition on classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity to prekindergarten through grade 8. The bill prohibits district school boards from imposing or enforcing requirements that personnel or students be referenced with pronouns that do not correspond with biological sex as defined in the bill, subject to specified exceptions. The bill enhances the process for transparency and review of library and classroom materials available to students in public schools and the process for parents to limit student access to materials and make objections to materials. The bill requires the suspension of materials alleged to contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct, as identified in current law, pending resolution of an objection to the material. A district school board must also discontinue the use of any material the board does not allow a parent to read aloud.

[5] “Educators and Parents Reveal Culture of Fear, Censorship and Loss of Learning Opportunities in the Wake of Florida Policies.” NYU News, Sept. 23, 2024. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/september/educators-and-parents-reveal-culture-of-fear–censorship–and-lo.html

[6] Arundel, Kara; Merod, Anna; Modan, Naaz; and Riddell, Roger. “Where the 2024 Presidential Candidates Stand on K-12 Issues,” K-12 Dive, Sept 11, 2024. https://www.k12dive.com/news/where-2024-presidential-candidates-stand-k-12-issues/726633/?topic=education-funding

[7] Modan, Naaz. “Democratic-leaning States Move to Curb Book Bans,” K-12 Dive, Apr 10, 2024. https://www.k12dive.com/news/freedom-to-read-divisive-concepts-anti-crt-book-bans/712805/

[8] For a K-12 contextualization of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ term “bloody heirloom” see Adams, Liz. “Struggle and Hope,” AFYA Baltimore, Sept 11, 2017. https://www.afyabaltimore.org/blog/1612597/struggle-and-hope

[9] Sullivan, Kevin and Rozsa, Lori. “DeSantis Doubles Down on Claim that Some Blacks Benefited from Slavery,” Washington Post, July 22, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/22/desantis-slavery-curriculum/