As far as we know, neither a new addition to a beloved series on famous Americans titled “Who is Barack Obama?” nor “Muffin Wars,” a book about a kid detective, has harmed any children.
Bullets, however, do measurable harm to kids. And while the pace of gun violence in and around schools is on the rise, one of the most aggressive and effective efforts, led largely by White conservatives, in shaping the American classroom right now is the banning of books. Our nation looks totally insane.
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“One of my friends was shot!” a rattled teen told my son Friday afternoon, after a sniper opened fire near a school in Northwest Washington. This was, as measured in the grim arithmetic of our national gun violence epidemic, a minor incident. No one was killed.
Three adults and one child, the classmate of my son’s friend, were injured by bullets a sniper fired from an apartment filled with guns and ammunition across the street from Edmund Burke School.
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But the scarring toll that something like this takes does more tangible damage than any book about a kid wondering if he is gay. The books that address sexual orientation, in a nation where same-sex marriage is the law of the land, are among the most targeted in this movement, which tried to link sexual and gender identity to pedophilia.
American schools issued at least 1,310 book bans in the last five months of 2021, including “Who is Barack Obama?” and “Muffin Wars,” according to the Pen America index of school book bans.
During that same period from August to December, roughly 28,170 children were inside a school when bullets were fired, according to The Washington Post database on school shootings.
“The effects of gun violence ripple far beyond the child who was struck by a bullet,” Sarah Burd-Sharps, senior director of research at the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, told WebMD last week. “Children might grieve their friends who are now lost or worry that they will be next.”
She spoke about this as the New England Journal of Medicine declared last week that gun violence is the top killer of kids in our nation. The homicides of children by firearm rose more than 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, according to the journal.
Survival is the issue that should be foremost on the agenda of anyone who says they lobby or legislate on behalf of children.
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How many of us felt more normal about puberty after reading Judy Blume? The same goes for kids who can see themselves in books that address viewpoints beyond the predominantly White and male dominance of library shelves.
Instead, parents manipulated by politicians inflaming fears for their own gain are targeting books that address race, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation.
Children are watching as parents scream at school board meetings and issue death threats against board members and librarians, and as adults call for books featuring stories about people who look or love like them to be burned. In Idaho, there is a proposal before the state legislature to fine and jail librarians who lend books that are deemed “harmful” to kids under 18.
This is not positive role modeling. Surely the shooting of four people at Timberview High School in Texas left lasting psychological trauma on the more than 1,750 other students who were at the school that day.
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But never fear! Parents in that state have saved their youth from books more than 700 times. Among the banned books is “A Home for Goddesses and Dogs,” a story about an 8th-grade girl who recently lost her mother.
These stories about life are supposed to give you nightmares
In Florida, home to one of the deadliest school shootings in American history, a school district recently silenced “Everywhere Babies,” a charming book celebrating infancy.
Some of the most impactful book bans happened in the greater Washington region, where Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin harnessed parental fears about literature and rode them all the way to the Virginia governor’s mansion.
“Virginia’s parents have had enough with the government dictating how they should raise their children,” Youngkin wrote earlier this year in an opinion piece in The Washington Post after a victory fueled by an illusion of parental empowerment.
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If parents want a say over what their kids read, they need to build relationships with their children that include discussions about what they are reading. Parental involvement is hard work. It is not done by censoring and limiting what everyone has access to.
Youngkin ran a campaign ad using Virginia mom Laura Murphy, who dabbled in book bans a decade ago when “Beloved,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Toni Morrison, gave her high school senior night terrors.
If reading about a historically accurate account of the horrors of slavery gave that Virginia boy nightmares, imagine what is going on with the kids who had to curl up under their desks while gunfire shattered windows and people screamed on Van Ness Street last week.
The politicians wrongly focused on culture wars are right about one thing: America does need to wake up, but to the trauma its children are undergoing daily, and not just when journalists show up to document it.
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That shooting last week got attention because of where it was. But the numbers show us that shootings in and around schools in less affluent areas are frequent. And children who live with gunfire carry that trauma throughout their lives.
The alarming rise in book bans, allegedly in the name of protecting kids, is misplaced energy that ignores real trauma that is a daily part of life for American kids, whether they are hurt by a bullet, scarred by witnessing gun violence, or hiding in a supply closet with a teacher in a lockdown drill, preparing for something that our nation has allowed to become a regular part of life.